Dear Artist, In a roaring heat-wave, I’m walking down Queen St. in Toronto, Canada. It’s a run down, low-rent area full of decaying storefronts, pizza joints, print shops, art stores, alfalfa bars. Every few doors there’s an art gallery. “Alternate,”…
Dear Artist, Have you ever noticed how a silhouette can tell you a great deal by saying less? That’s because the human mind is capable of filling in needed information in order to complete a picture or to recognize a…
Dear Artist, Renoir declared, “I’ve been forty years discovering that the queen of all colours is black!” What he meant was that black works as a darkener because its near chromal neutrality does not sully the colour it grays. While…
Dear Artist, Yesterday, the painter and musician Guttorn Otto visited my studio. Born in Poland in 1919, Guttorn was conscripted into the German army for the duration of the Second World War. Severely wounded three times, he was always patched…
Dear Artist, It’s pretty hard to describe something when you can’t put your finger exactly on it. Some people just seem to be blessed with the ability to paint, others are not so blessed. Some never try, others work diligently…
Dear Artist, Stephan Stephansson was born in Iceland in 1853 where his formal education lasted one month. His family immigrated to Wisconsin, USA, where in 1878 he married his cousin Helga Jonsdottir. Repeated crop failures, debt and drought brought the…
Dear Artist, In 1862 James McNeill Whistler painted Symphony in White, No.1: The White Girl. It demonstrates the nuances of a pigment that is basic to our palettes. Unlike the Sargent painting that we looked at before, it has none…
Dear Artist, There’s a marvelous painting by John Singer Sargent called The Artist in his Studio. It shows a balding man in obviously reduced circumstances, his canvas half onto his mussed bed. He’s attempting to match colours from what appears…
Dear Artist, Cochineal is a red dyestuff extracted from the blood of a beetle parasite on prickly pear cacti. Formerly used to make carmine and scarlet lakes, it was first imported from Mexico into Europe in 1560. British army uniforms…
