Category Archives: Art

Art

Duet

I think I’ve finally beat this one into submission.

Duet--Watercolor on paper--30x22 inches
Duet--Watercolor on paper--30x22 inches

The color’s a little off in this pic, I ‘ll try to get a better one, when the light’s better.

Art

Electronic Swatchbook

Need a pattern idea for something, a background for a scrapbook page or collage, or a webpage? Right here there’s thousands of them. All copyright free (in Australia–your mileage may vary, but it looks like most of them are old enough to be public domain, in the US, anyways). Here’s a couple of samples:

Via Susan Lomuto’s Daily Art Muse.

Art

Advice for Emerging Artists

From Art Review – ‘How Soon Is Now?’ Exhibition at the Bronx Museum of the Arts – Review – NYTimes.com by Roberta Smith

“How Soon Is Now?” suggests that there is no point in spending time on “professional development” or learning how to advance one’s work in the marketplace if artistic development is not well under way. That requires lots of long, hard looking at all kinds of art, in all mediums, from all periods and cultures. Aspiring artists need to expose themselves to the sheer intensity and variety of art, to learn what they love, what they hate and if they are actually artists at all. New York’s galleries and especially its great museums offer ample opportunity for this kind of self-education, which leads to self-knowledge. Anything is possible when artists set to work knowing they have something they urgently need to say, in a way it hasn’t quite been said before

Art, Life

John Cage’s “Rules for Students and Teachers”

1. Find a place you trust, and then try trusting it for awhile.
2. General duties of a student–pull everything out of your teacher; pull everything out of your fellow students.
3. General duties of a teacher–pull everything out of your students.
4. Consider everything an experiment.
5. Be self-disciplined–this means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.
6. Nothing is a mistake. There’s no win and no fail, there’s only make.
7. The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all of the time who eventually catch on to things.
8. Don’t try to create and analyze at the same time. They’re different processes.
9. Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It’s lighter than you think.
10. Break rules. Even your own rules. Leave plenty of room for X quantities.

(Via Robert Genn)

101 in 1001, Art, books, Life

Chuck Close: Self Portrait/Scribble/Etching Portfolio, 2000


I went to see This show at Colby College yesterday. Really nice show, nominally based around the etching of the title, whch you can see the whole process here.
Description of the show from the Colby site (since I don’t know how long it’ll stay there)

Chuck Close has been making self-portraits since the late 1960s. These efforts are invariably based on photographs that he makes of himself and famously translates into paintings, drawings, prints, and other media—typically a methodical, labor-intensive process. His investment in such processes forms the subject of his Self-Portrait/Scribble/Etching Portfolio, 2000, a set of twenty-five prints that illustrates the steps required to produce a single, twelve-color etching. It is also the focus of this exhibition, which uses that portfolio as a lens through which to examine the intersections and parallels that structure Close’s artistic ideas. Accompanied by a full-color catalogue featuring a new interview with the artist. Organized in conjunction with the Picker Art Gallery, Colgate University and The Mead Art Museum, Amherst College

It closes at Colby in a couple of weeks,, and I’m not sure if it’s headed anywhere else (it looks like Colby was the last stop on the tour).
This tapestry was also in the show, and is from Colby’s permanent collection:

This is also the 2nd thing on my 101 in 1001 I get to cross off. Yippee!