Dear Artist, I’m laptopping you from the second row of a downtown movie theatre, where the Tribeca Film Festival is premiering one of its 100 feature selections. To my right slumps a solo, bespectacled cinephile, fine legs crossed in corduroy.…
Dear Artist, Stephen Vizinczey’s seventh commandment is, “Thou shalt not let a day pass without rereading something great.” I’m kind of converted. For a while I kept Bartlett’s at my elbow as I painted, flipping randomly while paint was drying,…
Dear Artist, Rosemary Parkinson of Christ Church, Barbados wrote, “A few days ago, I painted a particularly sweet painting that was immediately ‘picked up’ once I posted it online. Instead of putting my usual Sargent Art Acrylic Gloss to cover…
Dear Artist, Today, in this studio, I’m reminding myself of the power of three. Apart from foreground, middle-ground and background, there are three trees, three color-grounds, three motifs. Four has a tendency to be static, two suggests coupling or perhaps…
Dear Artist, I’m laptopping you from the Museum of the City of New York, where on view are 150 examples of the work of ’50s ad man Paul Rand. Rand was alreadya Madison Avenue superstar in 1941 when at the…
Dear Artist, There’s an interesting paragraph in The Legacy of Mark Rothko, by Lee Seldes: “Rothko had nowhere to go. If he had been able to complicate his image rather than simplify it to the extreme, his art could have…
Dear Artist, Children’s novelist Katherine Paterson wrote, “I love revision. Where else can spilled milk be turned into ice cream?” In painting, our magic strokes are made to look as though they were always there, the torture of revision but…
Dear Artist, After a recent letter, several artists asked what I meant by “relaxed pressure scheduling.” When I’m wandering around in my studio, bumping into things, talking to myself, I call it “RPS.” RPS is less of a system than…