Dear Artist, American abstractionist Richard Diebenkorn said, “I don’t go into the studio with the idea of ‘saying’ something. What I do is face the blank canvas and put a few arbitrary marks on it that start me on some…
Dear Artist, I’m writing this letter from the location of the old railway station at Lake O’Hara in Canada’s Rocky Mountains. This is where John Singer Sargent got off the train in 1916. There is a lot of curiosity about…
Dear Artist, Last night I lay by the fireplace in my parents’ living room. I tossed a log on the cedar coals and turned toward some images of favourite paintings cycling through a digital picture frame on the hearth. J.E.H.…
Dear Artist, Here in Canada we a have national icon. His name is Tom Thomson. For a brief period of six years he painted brilliant paintings of Canada’s north. His images are etched into the fabric of Canada’s culture. Thousands…
Dear Artist, I read once that we all have a “happiness set-point,” and that it usually returns about six months after a trauma or extreme life event. In other words, a miserable person who wins the lottery is soon a…
Dear Artist, From the cosmic consciousness of our artist-subscribers came three letters in the same day, all asking about style. How important is style? How do I find my style? How do I avoid getting locked into a style? This…
Dear Artist, Subscriber Jack Monk writes, “Is visual art on its way out? Or is it just landscape painting that is the most dead of all art forms? Should it just be allowed to die or to reconstruct itself in…
Dear Artist, I crawled back into my space. After the hyper energy of the outer world, the East, pushing and shoving, sights seen, gifts collected, philosophies touched. This room, this untidy room, now tidy from my absence, the home of…
Dear Artist, A subscriber who wishes to remain anonymous writes, “I have often been dissatisfied with the juror of shows. I am bringing the idea of doing one show a year that would be peer reviewed to my local artist’s association.…
Dear Artist, An anonymous email came in from a subscriber: “The Painter’s Keys is not a website — it’s a vision. It’s a vision of a universal brotherhood and sisterhood, timeless and for all time. It’s a vision of solitary strugglers…