Search Results: g (2707)

Letters francis-bacon_in-his-studio-2
29

One of my earliest memories is of seeing a small, domino-shaped tile amongst hundreds of items leaning on a long shelf above the workbench that stretched the length of my dad’s studio. On it was written, “Creative hands are rarely tidy.” It was the cherry on the sundae of permission — the sundae being a life in art and a messy space devoted to it.

By the time I’d left home at 18 and art school at 22, I’d already destroyed a few linoleum floors and filled a converted boatshed with fits and starts.

Letters david-hockney_iphone-painting
24

He says he likes to do it in his car, or in bed, at dawn. He works at it by practicing writing very big and very small, by zooming in on still life subjects and sending flower doodles to his friends before they’re awake. For his efforts, he’s hailed as an early adopter, an agent of the new or inspirer of complaints about a medium incapable of authenticity, though the Brushes app has handily lived in the toolkit of designers and commercial artists since inception.

Overview_Hanlon_2021_8x24_Oil (1)
0

Her painting is inspired by the Old Masters, especially their use of chiaroscuro and geometry,…

Letters sidney-nolan_ned-kelly-series
12

By 1880, the crimes of twenty-five year-old Australian outlaw Ned Kelly had escalated from bank robbing and distributing funds to the poor to gunfights and police killings. He and his gang of bushrangers — escaped convicts with the survival skills to hide in the outback — roamed rural Victoria, both terrorizing and inspiring settlers. At the climax of their rampage, Kelly’s myth went supernova when he made a suit of armour out of iron plough parts and wore it to what would be his last siege. Still, Ned was shot by police, captured and eventually hanged.

Letters
9

On a recent balmy evening in Melbourne, the St. Petersburg Ballet performed in a sprawling theatre affectionately known to locals as “The Shed.” We settled in for the journey to a far-off, midnight, moon-kissed lake and soon surrendered to twenty-three floating, glowing tutus in cool, white tulle. The painted set poured moonlight so convincingly — the stage shining as black as an icy pond — I could almost taste the snowflakes on my tongue. It was a winter dream.

Letters jame-mcneill-whistler_nocturne-grey-and-silver
14

Let there be music. It could be any music. High brow, low brow. Music gives a key to what art is, to what art can do. For my desert island I’ll include the Sibelius Violin Concerto (D major, Opus 64). I’ll choose Pinchas Zukerman to play it. I’ll have to say it’s not the notes. It’s the spirit of the thing. As Zukerman says, “It has this incredible stuff happening everywhere.” Up and down, back and forth, the wonderful arbitrary quality of it all. Music, almost fully abstract, need not engage in realistically copying bird songs, wind, the sounds of traffic or falling coconuts.

Letters dave-genn-guitar
21

Leading up to 2013, Dad had been working on a passion project called, “The Audio Letters.” Inspired by the knowledge that easel work goes well with listening to things, he decided to have some fun and join the ear waves. The first attempts involved my big brother Dave, a musician, composer and record producer, who set up a fancy rig with a mic and headphones in Dad’s studio, near the easel, in an area informally known as the “contemplation zone.” This would allow Dad to take passes at recording without needing to put his brush down.

Letters anders-zorn_omnibus
19

A friend who will remain nameless is a big collector. He knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. We were feet-up, scotching ourselves when I started foaming about the watercolours of John Singer Sargent. “Didn’t know he did them,” my friend announced. “He was a society painter, wasn’t he?” There was no point in continuing. Then I mentioned Anders Zorn. “Never heard of him,” he said. I tried to fill him in.

Letters allen-sapp_esquois
9

Marcao Pozza-Mendes wrote from the Colorado Rockies, “Do you have a letter that deals with canned criticism? By canned criticism I mean remarking that a painting with an element like a road or river leading to a corner of the canvas always leads the eye out of the picture; there is never a way to make that work; there is never a way to break the ‘rules’ and end with a successful painting. Sometimes the canned criticism is proffered unsolicited, which makes it additionally annoying. We artists are trained not to do certain things in a painting, but there are cases where we CAN break the rules.

Letters rebecca_belmore_1
29

We all work in some sort of genre. We paint abstracts, landscapes, florals, or still lifes, for example. Generally speaking, we try to be innovative and give our work a unique spin or style. Perhaps pathetically, many of us venture into the world looking for things to inflict our style on.

We artists need to realize we’re taking part in something much more automatic, something much more anthropological. We’re repeating the artifacts of our cultures.

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