Dear Artist, Social scientist and Professor of Ethics at Columbia Business School Adam Galinsky has discovered that people who are close to someone from another culture score higher on routine creativity tests. In his study, Going Out of the Box:…
Dear Artist, When the invention of photography transformed portraiture from luxury art item to affordable record-keeping, portrait painters found themselves slightly freed from the vanities of their sitters. Once used solely as an instrument of power, portrait painting was quickly…
Dear Artist, On Monday, I was a member of a jury. All of the entries, 777 of them, had been previously juried by slide by a single outsider juror. The selected show of 55 paintings was now hung and five…
Dear Artist, In 1962, Neo-Dada collagist Ray Johnson, along with some of his Fluxus friends, started sending small works of art to other artists through the United States Postal Service. Dubbed the “New York Correspondence School,” Johnson included instructions to…
Dear Artist, Yesterday, Marjorie Ewell of Cape Coral, FL and Galloway, NJ wrote, “How do you get yourself into a right brain mode? How does a right-brained person translate that into painting? I’ve experienced it in working with oils. Time…
Dear Artist, Three Mondays in a row, an email appeared with an invitation to submit to an online gallery for exposure to an international audience. The middle of the first email was padded with generic compliments and a mission statement…
Dear Artist, A lot of stuff has been written about writer’s block, mainly because writers write. At the same time, there’s been a surprising lack of guidance in the parallel condition of painter’s block, mainly because painters paint. While many…
Dear Artist, Rumour has it that when J.D. Salinger died in 2010 at the age of 91, his heirs found an elaborate filing system in his Cornish, New Hampshire writing shed. Though he’d stopped publishing in 1965, Salinger continued quietly…
Dear Artist, These days no self-respecting workshop instructor goes half an hour without mentioning negative space. So prevalent has this stylistic concept become that it’s currently central to practically all types of pictorial composition. In my own work, the “backwardosis”…