Postscripts

Make your Marks. Does a treetop have the texture of a roof? No. Artists use mark-making to communicate this difference. In van Gogh’s drawing the artist varied the types of marks to convey the unique Continue Reading →

What do you see when you look at the cover of Studio Seeing? Most people report that they see the faces first. Then they discover the vase. To see the vase, viewers shift their attention, making the Continue Reading →

In my Postscript THINK AHEAD, posted May 20, 2023. I discussed the NO PARIKG sign on a large industrial garage door. The sign painter painted the same sized red block letters clearly and spaced them Continue Reading →

I first visited the Barnes Foundation in its original site in Marion, Pennsylvania, in the 1960s. I was an art student joined by several colleagues as anxious as I was to see the collection. I recall Continue Reading →

James Reed, printer of Milestone Graphics said to me one day, “It’s not about the picture, it’s about the picture plane.” Reed was my printer for many years and as we worked, we often talked about Continue Reading →

At 9 am, one warm summer day, my friend, Mark Howard, and I met at the dock to board a Lobsterman’s boat, on Little Cranberry Island, Maine. We headed for Baker Island to paint the Dancing Rocks. The Continue Reading →

The artist, John Torreano, wrote to me about painting’s paradox, “Paintings are essentially two-dimensional. But they are also three-dimensional. They are made from physical "material." By degree they Continue Reading →

Organized perception is what art is all about. ---Roy Lichtenstein Our visual perception systems provide all human beings with a profound commonality and continuity. Just as we are hard-wired to Continue Reading →

When you look at the photograph of the stack of pipes do you believe what you see? The pipes look like tubes with one end much larger than the other. This is the perspective phenomenon. You do not Continue Reading →

If you’re not making a mistake, it’s a mistake. ---Miles Davis I was working with Master Printer James Reed in his printmaking shop, Milestone Graphics in Bridgeport CT, making monoprints when I Continue Reading →

As human beings move through the three-dimensional world, the objects we see and name appear to constantly change, before our very eyes, but we do not notice that they are changing, unless the objects Continue Reading →

The artist, John Torreano, and I were talking one day about the difficulty of learning to draw and paint from observation. We agreed that the task challenges most beginning students. John observed Continue Reading →