Growing up, my Dad used to casually throw out an idiom that went, “There’s no such thing as undiscovered genius.” Over time, as my brothers and I embarked on slow-burning careers in the arts, we internalized his words as a call to work as hard as possible. We fleshed out this ethic with another favourite family strap-line: “Keep busy while waiting for something to happen.”
Dear Artist, The American architect and author Anthony Lawlor looks at rooms as containers for the elevation of the human spirit. The kitchen, for example, is a sacred place where raw foods are transformed by the alchemy of heat into…
Along the Alabama River just south of Selma, there’s a horseshoe-shaped turn resembling an inland island, where a cotton plantation once stood. In 1816, 18 slaves were brought to this bend by a man named Gee from North Carolina. A generation later, his cousin, Pettway, took over the plantation and brought more slaves — one of them, Dinah Miller, brought to the United States on a slave ship in 1859, has descendants living there today. When the last remaining African American slaves were emancipated on June 19th, 1865, many from the Pettway plantation, who now also went by the name of Pettway, continued to work there as sharecroppers.
Dear Artist, A traditional art form has been greatly facilitated by the advent of the digital camera. The art of Miksang was begun as a meditational tool by Shambhala Buddhists, but it has implications for painters and other creative people.…
Different from an artist statement, which is a written description in support of your work for the purpose of a deeper understanding of it, a mission statement can be one sentence that summarizes your purpose, values or goals. You may feel this kind of thing is obvious or that art is simply a form of breathing, but it can also be fun to try to encapsulate a raison d’être — even if just as an exercise for clarity, in this moment, for your work and life.
Dear Artist, I’ve always been suspect of historical painter’s palettes. One reason is that a lot of my old ones are around and none are typical, nor are they dated. They were put aside because they were an irredeemable mess.…
Dear Artist, This week, 500 women, mostly artists, teachers and art professionals, met online to discuss working together to understand their role in a racist society. In an effort to unburden people of colour from educating everyone else on a…
Dear Artist, Yesterday, Diana Miller-Pierce of Fort Wayne, Indiana wrote, “As a professional artist and practicing psychotherapist I’m particularly interested in the healing aspects of art. I hear from my clients a yearning to create in some manner. I’m wondering…
“You are an idea-driven artist,” my Dad told me. “I am a subject-driven one.” Each year, with the support of my Mum, he took a trip for “material gathering.” Over the course of his life, he amassed innumerable drawings, studies and plein air work, as well as a collection of over 20,000 slides, catalogued by subject and housed in flat sheets above a large light table in the corner of his studio. Like a rainy day bank, the slide library offered a million possibilities for painting subjects, with notations for reference, location, names and dates, if needed. Like a diary of experience, my Dad believed that reference should be personally felt and collected — upholding the authenticity of his authorship and honouring a beloved process and tradition.
Dear Artist, My friend Jack Hambleton and I were in the town of Sao Bras de Alportel in southern Portugal. Stepping out onto the spacious flat roof of our three-story hotel one evening, we saw potential. Before sun-up the next…