Dear Artist, All my life I’ve been trying to figure out ways to improve my painting. That includes study of the work of those I consider masters, trying to get the hang of their ideas, techniques and processes, and, on…
Dear Artist, Recently, Alan Soffer of Wallingford, PA wrote, “I’m currently reading Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth. He speaks of understanding and observing the ego as a way of finding truth in one’s life. As an artist who seems to…
Dear Artist, At one point in his career (1620), Antwerp’s Peter Paul Rubens had 80 apprentices sketching figures in charcoal and making pounce patterns. In the 1920s every American art school held figure drawing classes. The Roaring ’20s may have…
Dear Artist, Experiments published in 1999 by Cornell University researchers David Dunning and Justin Kruger showed that unskilled individuals tended to rate their competence higher than average. The researchers figured the ignorance of standards of performance was behind a great…
Dear Artist, I’ve always been keen on “don’t rest — run.” Often a quick jog after lunch seemed to perk me up and send me back to the studio with a new sense of adventure. Now I’m not so sure.…
Dear Artist, Yesterday I was reading Solemate by Lauren Mackler. It’s about being alone and what to do about it. In the U.S. there are currently 95.7 million singles, some by choice, others by default. The main reason is a…
Dear Artist, I’m talking about those automatic mannerisms that interfere with our creativity while at the same time contributing to our uniqueness and style. Either way, they’re worth knowing about. With a bit of scraping around in your history, you…
Dear Artist, Workshoppers seem to want critiques, and some instructors insist on them. I’ve always wondered about the value of crits. There are several kinds. One is where the instructor crits every work one at a time, either one-on-one or…
Dear Artist, After making my way through the “Dick and Jane” readers (“See Spot run!”) in Grade One, I moved, in Grade Two, to the subtle advance of “Think and Do.” These new books introduced the concepts of free will…