Dear Artist, When Mark Landis was a boy, his well-to-do parents would take him travelling in Europe and leave him alone in their hotel room while dining out in the evenings. Young Mark passed the time by watching old movies…
Dear Artist, The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam has an unfinished work by Lawrence Alma-Tadema: Three Sleeping Myenads after the dance, 1899. This one is particularly useful because it shows process. Three semi-draped nudes are in varying degrees of finish.…
Dear Artist, Mark Twain wrote, “Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.” While likening studio time to frogocide could be considered extreme, fear of difficulty, fear…
Dear Artist, The reality is that many creative people do not have the freedom to follow their nose. What’s to be done where someone holds a nine-to-five job or even manages a home and family? Here are a couple of…
Dear Artist, “Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend,” said John Singer Sargent. He may have been joking — his portraits combined a reasonable likeness with an elegance which often made sitters more aristocratic looking than they…
Dear Artist, In 1726, at the age of 20, Benjamin Franklin outlined in detail a thirteen-week plan to achieve what he called “moral perfection.” Each week the schedule tackled a specific virtue — cleanliness, moderation, industry, tranquility, temperance, etc. Franklin…
Dear Artist, My friend Joe Blodgett said, “There’s two ways to walk this path — one for the path and one for the spirit.” In a cathedral of Douglas fir and alder, blown twigs from the night’s storm over a…
Dear Artist, Today would have been my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. They married in a friend’s garden in 1964, then flew to Amsterdam, bought a Volkswagen van and drove to Southern Spain to live on love and olives. My dad…
Dear Artist, Artists of the past often suffered poor physical and mental health due to the materials they worked with: lead, powdered pigment, turpentine, carcinogens, etc. It’s difficult to know if Vincent van Gogh put paint in his mouth, but…