Dear Artist, Yesterday, friend and fellow painter Melissa Jean wrote to tell me that Chinese websites JwArtSale.com and Obestpaintings.com are offering to hand-produce forgeries of our paintings — along with the works of thousands of other artists, alive and dead. If…
Dear Artist, A Florida subscriber wrote about a problem common to landscape painters: “I paint in the impressionist style and the painting is breathtaking (my ego talking) — then I work on the foreground. If I give it too much detail…
Dear Artist, A subscriber who wishes to remain anonymous wrote, “Making art is something I do for me — I can’t see my creations being very interesting to anyone else — nevertheless people tell me I should make a book…
Dear Artist, Morphic fields, a little understood phenomenon, suggests a Jungian collective consciousness. I have often wondered about the presence of this condition in artists. On speedy trips to galleries as far afield as London, New York and Pont-Aven, Brittany, I’ve…
Dear Artist, I took an evening ride up a canyon ridge — to where the stars hang bright like pinholes and Santa Monica winks in the bowl. The new moon’s crescent cups a smile. We’re in the main part of…
Dear Artist, Art is a confabulation. Perhaps only with the addition of confabulation can art deliver its wizardry and magic. Scientifically defined, confabulation is the confusion of imagination with memory, and/or the confusion of true memories with false memories. In the…
Dear Artist, “I am good at only two things,” said Claude Monet, “and those are gardening and painting.” The son of a grocer, Monet knew he wanted to be an artist at age five. At forty-three he relocated to Giverny…
Dear Artist, Ted Harrison is well known for his colourful and childlike paintings of the Yukon. Coming from a background in teaching and academic painting, he started painting afresh in mid life. Purple skies, red dogs, yellow snow and blue…
Dear Artist, I’m laptopping you from the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, at the top of a snowy track descending 4,380 feet to the Colorado River. Papery flakes float down from an infinite, domed sky into a bottomless pink…
