Lately, I've been experimenting with the use of daylight in my still life paintings. Normally I have a spotlight attached to the ceiling in my studio and all of the windows blacked out. I had placed a modeling stand next to the window in order to possibly paint a portrait using a softer light. I haven't had too much luck getting models so I ended up placing a large wooden table on the stand with the idea that I could get a couple of setups going at the same time. After putting together an arrangement it suddenly occurred to me that maybe I should try uncovering the window and see what the light looks like. The window doesn't get north light so I left the shade on so that the light that does come in would stay pretty much the same for the entire session.
        The diffused daylight that washes over the still life is a much softer light than I'm used to. It's a little harder to find the core shadow edges and there is very little, if any, reflected light. It's taking some getting used to. The temperatures of the colors are different as well. The shadows tend to be cooler and the lights warmer. I'm not one to spend a lot of time thinking about warm and cool colors; generally I try to match what I see and the temperature takes care of itself. I try to avoid formulas that say when a shadow should be warm or cool because there are just too many exceptions to the rule. Usually I do best to trust my instincts, but the daylight paintings are forcing me to give these ideas a bit more thought. The paint handling has to be necessarily different because the transitions between tones are much more subtle and the forms tend to dissolve into the shadows.
      Usually you can tell which type of lighting a painter prefers. Artists who like to show a lot of detail in their work generally tend to use artificial lighting because it gives them more control and more time to work on an individual painting. Artists who work with daylight tend to be looser and more concerned with painterly qualities; working in a sense like an outdoor landscape painter. I guess it has a lot to do with your background and training. Most of the painters coming out of the Florence Academy of art use daylight for their still life paintings. I imagine that the FAA atelier has elaborate shading systems set up next to tall windows, something like that famous painting of the neo-classical artist David's atelier. The Grand Central Academy of art has an elaborate network of spot lamps with baffles and partial curtains designed to give each location a primary undiluted light source.
      Although I'm not a particularly tight realistic painter, I do enjoy working with spotlights. I like the drama of it. Each arrangement becomes a scene on a stage with leading and supporting players. Highlights become little comets flashing across the surface of objects. Shadows link up in unexpected ways, moving the eye in and out of the composition. When I was a kid growing up in the Bronx I loved to explore the network of alleyways and basement tunnels that all seemed to be one long maze. Daylight painting is more like a walk in the country on a late summer afternoon. Forms gently push forward from shadows that are like deep pools of water, seemingly endless and color filled.
      This is also the time of year when I try my hand at plein-aire painting. The idea being to go out and find a scene and paint it on the spot, in about three hours, on a small canvas. In this case I'm not letting the daylight into my studio, I'm in it. My canvas, pallete, colors are all bathed with the force of natures light unadulterated. It's both humbling and inspiring. You have to work quickly and trust your instincts because the light is guaranteed to change by the hour. You tend to have more "happy" accidents when working this way which is a good way to extend your learning  curve. It's easy in the studio to get bogged down into certain work habits and patterns and plein-aire painting is a good way to shake off some of the cobwebs.
   For me, painting is all about the light. I like to challenge myself to find the secrets inherent within each unique lighting situation. It's only when I start to make marks with my brush that I slowly begin to get that "aha" moment; "so that's what's going on!" One of the most enjoyable painting experiences that I've had was in the atelier where I used to study.There was a still life set up directly beneath a huge skylight. The light fell vertically down onto each object like a scene bathed in snow flakes and beneath object was a perfectly ringed eliptical shadow. I'm at the point where the memory of it has me considering putting a skylight in my studio. Anyways, I plan to continue working with daylight on a few more paintings, at least until I have to go back to work in September, and I've already got a vision in my head of a day lit still life where the light barely makes it over the edge of each surface (rim lighting), kind of like the grand canyon at sunrise. We'll see.

                Since January of this year I've been studying cast drawing at the Grand Central Academy of art. It took me a while to get my mind around some of the concepts but I'm starting to get the hang of it. I had always thought that cast drawing would involve some kind of idealization of the form being drawn; you know, measuring out golden sections and isoscles triangles etc; But the goal seems to be to draw the form pretty much exactly as you see it, at least in the linear stage. Maybe the assumption is that whatever statue or cast you're drawing from already has a canon of proportion built into it. Not all cast drawing at GCA is done from classical casts; some are renaissance artists, baroque even medieval.
               The idealization part of cast drawing comes into play when you begin to turn the form. This is the part that after the block-in (which I'll discuss next) is probably the most challenging, because you cannot rely on what you see. One has to imagine a light source that reveals itself the way water might reveal the striations found in a river bed. You have to be wary of false contrasts where an area might appear lighter because of it's proximity to a core shadow line or cast shadow. This is not sight size drawing but more of a conceptualization of the light. Does this mean that other ways of drawing which are more value based are wrong? Not at all, clearly it is a technicque that it is useful to train the artist to be constantly on the form, to engage the eye, the hand and the mind equally, to be more than just a recorder of appearances, and once understood, is a hell of a lot of fun. It's not for everybody. My instructor keeps me under sharp surveillance and not one single dot is allowed to be out of place. I've learned to shut off that part of my brain that's always saying "that's good enough" and to push myself even harder.
         The block-in is one of the most useful drawing tools associated with cast and eventually figure drawing. Again, it seems primarily geared towards helping an artists tendency towards rationalizations and drawings that look cut and pasted. The idea is that once you've made your basic sketch, a kind of rough envelope of the overall shape, you then begin to work from the inside out, measuring the larger shapes one against the other until the drawing begins to take on a solidity that has nothing to do with extraneous detail. You are taught to proceed with caution, that every change made has an affect on the structure and harmony of the whole. The light dark separation is established right from the beginning and is an important part of checking proportion. It sounds harrowing and it can be but the good news is that if you take the time to get that internal structure right, the rest of the drawing that includes all the secondary appendages, practically draws itself.
       I have found that cast drawing has been tremendously helpful with my paintings. I have been using the block in as a compositional tool with my still lifes so that I am taking more time to get the overall composition and placement right. I have also recently been using drawing cartoons to transfer to the canvas rather than working directly with charcoal. This came about accidentally because I switched to a different type of oil ground that takes longer to cure, and while I was waiting I figured I might as well make a drawing. I was very pleased with the results and so I'm sticking with it for a few more paintings.
      Does this mean that I'm going to end up making hyper-realistic paintings? Probably not. My heroes are still going to be Chardin, Carlsen and Sargent. The other day I was working on a painting with one of my usual stumpy little bristle brushes and I realized that I was " on the form". That being "on the form" had nothing to do with the size of the mark that you were making but more to do with the intent of the brush stroke. So to those of you who have been reluctant to try cast drawing for fear that it might cause you to suddenly "tighten up" I would say that you have nothing to worry about. It didn't seem to hurt Sargent or Rubens for that matter and it will definitely help to improve your draughtsmanship, and painting and drawing are intrinsically related. I highly recommend it.

       Imagine that at the turn of the twentieth century there was an artistic parallel universe. A world where artists didn't feel the need to trash the traditions handed down from the Renaissance but instead used those practices to fuel new creative endeavors. Such a world is the one depicted in the art tome IN  ANOTHER LIGHT- Danish Painting In The Nineteenth Century by Patricia C. Berman. You can see the progression of one young master after another taking up the challenge laid down by their instructors and joyfully pursuing their ideals with vigor and good humor. I was aware of the work of Christian Kobke but not of his teacher C.W. Eckersberg. It's interesting to see how Eckersberg influences the young artist and also how Kobke manages to find his own voice. Another eye opener for me is the work of Vilhelm Hammershoi whom I had previously never heard of. His interiors are mesmerizing and I hope one day to see the actual works. I've always maintained that the art of Degas proved that modern works of art don't have to be poorly drawn and I would add the work of the Danish painters to that list.
      Well the long wait is finally over and Juliette Aristides follow up to her book CLASSICAL DRAWING ATELIER is finally out. CLASSICAL PAINTING ATELIER continues the great presentation of artworks where the reproductions alone justify the cost of the book. Ultimately not as satisfying as the first book, I'm not sure the author feels as firmly on the ground when discussing painting as she did with drawing, I would still recommend it. It does have some obvious gaps in linking up the various traditions; the influence of Sargent has been vastly underplayed and Daniel Graves should be given as much credit for keeping this whole Classical revival thing going as some of the other artists that are credited in the book. The painting demos could be better and might have been better served by using more master artists like John Angel rather than the work of her own students whose efforts, though well intentioned aren't always successful. I really enjoyed the fact that with almost every artwork reproduced there is a little caption with some insight or factoid. I'm sure with such a huge task and also trying to keep the book to a manageable size and priced where a novice could find it affordable there would inevitably be some things that would be left out, but all in all a commendable effort.
       I am a life drawing group junkie. I have been attending them on and off since I was in college and I still attend a little group that meets twice a month for a long pose three hour session. I can't imagine going for a very long period of time without drawing from the figure. It's rejuvenating for my soul and it's the ultimate testing ground for my thoughts, ideas and art strategies. Peter Steinharts book THE UNDRESSED ART- Why We Draw is a compilation of anecdotes, theories, philosophies all pertaining to the sub-culture of life drawing groups. Some of the stories made me laugh out loud and many of his thoughts nailed down exactly what makes the experience so great and enjoyable. Featured at the beginning of each chapter is a figure drawing usually made by one of the people mentioned in the following chapter. I've known people like this all my life; great artists who draw with a quiet and hard won ability that's not about grandstanding but about a slow acumulation of truths that reverberate in quietly beautiful ways. If you are attending life drawing groups get this book!, it was written for you.
      Reading Steinharts book reminded me of some funny situations that have happened to me in the world of "life drawing". When I first started to teach art in High School I ended up being in charge of running a life drawing class for students that met one day a week after school. The teacher who had been running it previously gave me a list of models to call. The first model I called had a young sounding voice and seemed very sweet and sincere. When she showed up she looked like she was about ninety years old and she reeked of alcohol. She disrobed, to the astonishment of my students, and then walked up to the modeling stand where she placed a tall stool. She then proceeded to crawl underneath the stool where she stood on her head and splayed her legs out spread eagle from underneath the top of the stool. My students audibly gasped but I carried on very business like as if this was perfectly normal and encouraged them to draw rapidly. Another incident that comes to mind was when I was in graduate school. I happened to be in a drawing class where most of the students were women and quite a few lookers in the bunch. A male model was hired to pose and he was set up in a room that was quite small without a modeling stand. He took a reclining pose and we proceeded to draw. He must have been fantasizing about one or two of the women because he became visibly excited. Not only that but his flag pole, so to speak, kept raising and lowering. No one said a word and I just assumed he would get up and excuse himself. He didn't and there was still quite a bit of time left to the pose. I didn't say anything I was waiting for my staid old proffesor to act but she decided the best strategy was to pretend it wasn't happening. After several minutes of watching him twitch I caught a case of the suppressed giggles and nearly choked. Afterwards noone said a word about it and the whole thing was very Twilight Zone-ish. Anyways , these are a few of the good reads that I've come across and I hope you have a chance to enjoy them.

        At one point in my life I was a flyfisherman who painted. I guess I had my priorities screwed up which might explain why I wasn't getting anywhere with my painting. Now I'm a painter who occasionally flyfishes. The spring fever that I feel these days, are no longer the whispering voices of trout and bass, but the urge to set up my outdoor easel alongside a bluff and paint with abandon.
        There are quite a few artists/fisherman out there, Neil Welliver is one of the name that comes to mind.(recently deceased) Most of my closest friends are fisherman, a few of them artists, but no artists/fisherman as far as I know. You would think there would be more of us out there because there are some things that flyfishing and painting have in common; that contemplative in the moment feeling that you get when everything seems to be going right. The brushstrokes materialize before your eyes but you're not exactly sure how they got there. Fish are rising to casts laid down with an instinctive perfection that you didn't know you were capable of. Rare moments that tease us into coming back for more.
      For me the connection has to do with attitude. There are people that I've fished with that will wade right into a body of water, chest deep, and start flailing away at some unseen target across the river. They are standing where they should be fishing. When I go out to fish I usually don't string up my rod or tie on a fly until I get to the river or lake. I stand away from the shore line and spend a good deal of time reading the water while I string up my line. I'm formulating a plan of attack and looking for the most likely places to find fish. I will even make casts from behind a tree or rock carefully working the area closest to me before I even step into the water.
     When I paint I use a similar approach.(sounds crazy, I know, but hear me out!) Rather than jump right into painting, using my brush as a palette knife, and making up the colors and tones as I go along, I will pre-mix my colors for an object or area before I paint. While I'm mixing those colors (strings), I'm looking at my subject, and formulating a strategy. Now there's something to be said for spontaneity, but I'd rather be spontaneous with preparation. Theres a big difference between improvisation and slapdash bravado. Once I start to paint I'm off and running, and when I fish, as my friends will head-shakingly attest to, I will cover several miles of water.
      When I approach a large river, lake or estuary, I find it helpful to break it down into smaller sections. It's a little bit of a mindgame. I concentrate on one little strip as if that's all there is. If I'm thinking about other sections of the river besides where I'm fishing than I'm not in the moment and I will be off my game. Sometimes I will walk out about fifteen feet from the shore line and turn my back on the big river and fish that fifteen feet of shoreline as if I was standing on the other side of a small stream.More often than not, this has worked pretty well. The fish don't have any preference for one side of the river or the other. They're looking for food, safety from predators(structure), and comfort (deflected water) "aren't we all?"
     When I'm working on a still life I will pick an object, or objects, and I will concentrate on that area of the painting as if that was the entire painting. I will mix the string for the object and after blocking in the basic colors I will proceed to paint part of the background around it, even parts of adjacent objects. Then I will go back into the object and proceed to stitch all the various tones and colors together, being careful to harmonize with the small area of background that I've painted around it. I will paint that area up to completion as if I was never going to paint it again.( although I will often go back into an area, if necessary, after the entire painting is completed)
     You might expect this approach to have a hob-nailed, jig-sawed puzzle look to it, but it doesn't. How do I know that the various parts of the painting will work together when I'm done? I just know. The tightrope walker doesn't have to continously look down to know where the ground is. I trust my instincts. I've worked hard to have them. In painting and flyfishing,  if you've taken the time to prepare, rather than blunder in, you'll be able to work with confidence, and you'll be in the zone.

               Stop whatever it is you're doing, right now, and run and see the Poussin landscape paintings exhibit at the Met. It is off the hook. I had seen quite a bit of Poussins paintings  the last time there was a show in N.Y., maybe twenty years ago, so I thought I knew what to expect. I was wrong. These paintings are sublime. They have a real feel for light and atmosphere, clearly painted by someone who's worked hard to unlock some of natures secrets. The fact that they are mostly imagined spaces, worked up harmoniously from a variety of sources, makes them that much more amazing. Poussin's work has to be the least reproducable out of any artist I've encountered. Reproductions simply cannot convey what takes place in his paintings. Generally there is a shaded foreground area where the action takes place and the sunlight breaks through in the middle distance or the background. It sounds formulaic, but it is not. He invariably finds a different way to riff on this theme in each painting. If you've ever wondered what can be done with ochres, umbers and siennas, this will be the last word. One painting that struck me dumb before it, shows a building with the sunlight creeping gradually up it's wall until it is cut off by the shadow of a cloud. Awesome!
        Contrary to the dour self portrait that greets you as you enter the exhibit Poussin apparently had a pretty good sense of humor. One painting shows a man hysterically fleeing from a snake and then in the large painting next to it we see a shadowy figure in the foreground completely engulfed by a snake. Who couldn't outrun a snake? In another we see blind Orestes giving a piggyback ride and this Goddess in the clouds giving them the same look you might expect to get from your wife while watching the superbowl. His Adam and Eve made me smile. They reminded me of a scene from "The Planet of the Apes". Unlike the classically inspired figures usually found in his work, these two seem intentionally unidealized; and this while they're still in Eden,. mind you. Then off in the distance you spot a glimpse of this sunny warm summer landscape, Poussin is saying here that man was pretty much lost until the art of the Greeks and maybe getting kicked out of Eden wasn't so bad. Too funny! Only a true Classicist could come up with that slant.
     During my lunch break from cast drawing last week I decided to hike over to 57th street to check out the Steven Assael drawing show.(only twelve blocks away). I stroll eagerly into the Forum gallerys fifth floor space and bam! I am accosted with a show of hideous nut and bolt paintings by Robert Cottingham. Hideous awful stuff. I'm thinking " where the hell are the Assael drawings?". I go back down to the first floor, look at the ledger and see that the Forum gallery has two floors. Whew! I go up to the fourth floor, the door is closed, with a note saying to ask receptionist on fifth floor if you want to see the exhibit. I've just walked twelve blocks in the freezing wind, somebody is letting me in to that exhibit. So I go up and ask the receptionist and with a big smile she graciously lets me in. She seems pleased that I'm so eager to see the drawings and we both rave on about Assaels work as she leads me in. Well worth the hassel. Assael uses a pencil the way that a painters painter might. Polishing up an area here, leaving an area suggested there, a tool for exploring light on form. He has a knack for rendering the intensity of his model's gaze and seems to bring out the best in the people that he gets to pose for him He hits the dark accents just right and uses an interesting trick of scraping out the highlights in the hair. Although not, as far as I know, classically trained, you can see in his drawings a classical approach to form and a truthfulness to the roundness of the structure. In other words, these are not impressionistic renderings of flat values, but truly light carved forms. Theres a little bit of Delacroix and Gericault in them, two of my favorite artists.
   Next weeks lunch break I'm hoping to stroll on over to check out the Michelangel drawing show at the Morgan library. You gotta love studying in N.Y.C.. Theres almost always something to see.

      Recently I've been taking a cast drawing class at the Grand Central Academy of Art and one of the new students who is working next to me was asking me a few questions about the whole process. I explained to her that I was no expert since this is only the second cast drawing that I've been working on since studying there (but that never stopped me from answering before). She wanted to know how the artist could exert his or her own personality into a drawing where there were so many rules concerning how to approach the act of making a Classical drawing. That got me to thinking about the process that I use, which goes along with the classical techniques that I've learned but isn't usually mentioned in any of the demonstrations that I've seen or in any of the books that I've read.
      In the summer workshop that I took at the GCA, Jacob Collins did a demo of the preliminary block in for a cast drawing. He was drawing from a cast of a gigantic head of a horse. He scribbled down a few basic shapes, basically separating the shape of the head from the neck and proceeded to manipulate the two shapes and there relationship for the better part of an hour. He talked quite a bit about preserving that initial response to the cast and how the finished drawing would stay relatively true to the parameters laid out in the initial sketch. The main reason for this being that it was important not to chop and stretch whole parts of the drawing but to cautiously measure and think about what changing one part might do to the structure and harmony of the rest of the drawing. Too often students end up with a Frankenstein drawing where individual parts of the drawing are well drawn but the drawing is lacking as a whole.
     What he didn't talk about, and maybe took as a given because he was after all lecturing to a room filled with experienced artists was the excitement that one must feel when making those first initial marks on the paper. Collins is a big proponent of the block-in method that one can find elaborated on in books by Anthony Ryder and Juliette Aristides. One difference that I've noticed about his block-ins is that he will often use a sweeping arc of a line somewhere in the drawing as opposed to the straight line envelope used by Ryder. It may not seem like much of a difference but to me it connotes a response to what is being seen with the use of a line that is more energized than the passive quality of a straight line. Getting back to the excitement factor, what wasn't mentioned was that if you don't feel something, some kind of electrical charge, call it motivation, all the measuring in the world will not prevent you from ending up with a drawing that is dull and lifeless. It is in that initial gesture that the artist will find the spark to ignite the flame and without it there can be no flame. Even though in a cast drawing the hand of the artist will be suppressed to better enable the artist to depict the turning of form, it is in that first response, those first fifteen seconds that will determine whether or not the drawing will succeed. Many artists lose sight of this to the detriment of their art. If you walk around a cast drawing studio you will see many completed cast drawings hanging on the wall, all looking pretty much exactly like the cast but there are some that stand out. They have an undefinable something that separates them from the pack. They have a "compelling reason to be".
       If we look at the drawings of Rembrandt we can see how he always sought to convey the excitement and joy of depicting the world around him. In his small thumbnails for elaborate paintings we can already see what is to be the heart and soul of the work.Even in the more finished paintings of his younger days there is something retained from those first marks. It is a kind of energy, what the Japanese call "ki", that flows through the artists hand, unbidden, into the work. This is not something that can be taught; either you have it or you don't. But you may have it and not know how to use it. Doing a lot of gesture drawings, from the model or from observed situations in a sketchbook is one way to unlock it. It is a way to draw without thinking. One draws rapidly so as to get something down before all that other stuff (doubts,remembrances, symbols etc;) creeps in. It is a kind of "pure" drawing wherein the artist will find the key to unlocking his or her own voice. It is usually mentioned in art books as a way of capturing movement and it can be used for that but it can really be used for drawing anything. All objects are moving on some level. Molecules are not at rest, the earth is turning, our gaze is constantly shifting, gesture capturers the animus inherent to all things.
    This does not mean that I advocate a kind of sketchy, free for all, loose style of rendering, although I do love to sketch. What I'm advocating for is a stimulated response to what you're seeing. In my own work, a still life painting, for example, I will put down the most elaborate of compositions in about twenty to thirty seconds. Now I will spend hours refining and tuning that drawing but I will not proceed past the first quick sketch if I can't see the whole painting in my minds eye from those first few lines. If that first gesture drawing fails to ignite, from where would I draw the flame necessary to keep the level of energy that I require to sucessfully complete a drawing or a painting? So going back to the question that the young lady in the cast drawing class had, I would tell her that she needn't worry about suppressing her artistic personality from the rigors of classical drawing but that she should never make a single line without feeling wonder or joy or frustration or awe; an indifferent line is the difference between a medical book illustration and a drawing by Michelangelo.

   Well, another year has come and gone. Time to assess and evaluate and maybe reflect a little as well. This time of year I can sometimes get a little blue. I blame it on that damn Joni Mitchell song. "It's coming on Christmas and they're cutting down trees.....I wish I had a river I could skate away on." Then I went to see the Dutch masters show at the Met and I immediately felt a lot better. There weren't as many still life paintings as I had hoped but the ones they had were very good. Nice to see them drag some of the more obscure paintings out of the basement. There was one painting by either Steen or Ter Borch , I can't remember, which was pretty interesting. It seemed to combine a range of Dutch themes into one painting. It featured a Gentleman caller standing just outside of an exposed interior, at half light (early evening?). with a procuress. There was a mother holding a child, a landscape visible through a doorway, and all kinds of stuff going on. It's one of the last paintings in the show, well the first room anyway.
     Funny thing about the Met exhibit is that people were neck in neck through the first wing of the exhibit but the rooms were pretty empty in the second part. Poor planning. Most people didn't seem to realize that the exhibit continued in another wing of the museum. I guess that the exhibitors didn't really care too much because the gift shop was right after the first section. Which leads me to another matter. What the heck were they thinking, putting the names of the donors above the masterworks in the first room? It looked at first like some kind of conceptual installation because the letters were really large and bold. Tch,tch. Very poor taste. Not at all what the Met used to be about. After the Rembrandts I had some time to kill so I went exploring in the newly redone European galleries. To my surprise and wonder I found myself in a room with Sargent, Sorolla, Zorn. Boldini and Repain. I have never felt more at home in a room in my life. My eyes just kept flitting back from one to the next making connections and realizing that this is why we paint. One could think after coming out of a room full of Dutch masters that that was it. They have the last word on the subject and what else is there left to say. But clearly Sargent and the others were up to the challenge and that's what needs to happen with each new generation. Artists needn't dispair about issues of content and concept; just keep pushing as hard as you can with honesty and integrity and the breakthroughs will come of their own accord. Theirs still life to be found in those old mediums yet.
      Anyways, I see I've gone off on a tangent, so let me steer my way back. I'm looking forward to working a bit more on my own in 2008. I'm not sure if I've really completed my studies at the Atelier but I felt after three years that I'd been equipped with a fairly well stocked tool box and it was time to do some building. I owe a lot to my instructor. He is truly a gifted teacher and was always able to point me in the direction I needed to go. He has made me a better artist and a better teacher. I find myself using some of his methods with my own students and they really seem to respond to it. " make sense?" has now become one of my favorite quotes.
       I built a model stand in my studio so that I could begin a new series of portrait paintings. The stand helps to keep the model's face at eye level so I'm not foreshortening from the scalp of the head on down. I've put together some fliers advertising to pay for portrait models and my 23 year old son says he already has one lined up for me. I will be entering a lot more competitions this year with the intent of possibly gaining some exposure and building up my resume. My biggest problem has been in finding a good, professional photographer. When I finally did run across someone I could depend on, his circumstances, his daughter has leukemia, left him unable to work for some time. I am grateful that he was able to fit me in and I pray for his daughter to get well. The quiet dignity and strength of Gary and his daughter, the day I visited, is something that I will never forget.
       I've managed to sell a few paintings this past year due in no small part to Sandi at the Blue Door Gallery, Karel at Flowers at the Greenery, Amy at the Argosy gallery, and Paul Toner at the Artists Showcase. Art dealers get a lot of bad press these days but the people I've mentioned have always been very supportive. Ive got a new place to show way out in Palm Desert, California and I'm grateful to Mr. Katz for calling me up personally and welcoming me. I'm hoping that I will have more variety this year to show; landscape, interiors and portraits, as well as still lifes.
     This past year has also been kind of tough on my family. Because I'm basicallly working two jobs, artist and teacher, that doesn't leave me a lot of time for family oriented activities. My wife Nancy, my daughters Krista and Briana and my son John, have been very good about this and I know I couldn't accomplish very much without there help and understanding. At least we have dinner together every night and that has been kind of the bedrock which keeps us strong and together.
      So there you have it, my end of year summary. What's in store for next year? Kicking butt and taking names. I feel like I'm really starting to get somewhere with my painting, and I plan to work even harder, if that's possible, and to spend more time getting the word out. I see what's out there, winning awards and getting exposure, and I'm ready to go toe-to-toe. I may be middle-aged but I ain't settling for the middle of the road. It's time for me to kick it into gear. That's it I'm all out of cliches, so here's to a good year,2008, let it be the year you take your dream off the back burner.

    I extremely dislike using small brushes. Okay, let's face it, I hate using them! I'm not really sure why, I just know that generally when I'm in the process of painting, I try to do as much as I can with the biggest brush possible. I will pick up a small round synthetic if there isn't any other way to grab a significant detail. Few artists like painting with brights (small square shaped brushes). Most prefer flats (long square shaped brushes) or filberts (long semi round shaped brushes). I recently switched from using brights to using flats, to try and get more paint on the canvas. But I miss my Brights because I could use the corner of the brush to lay in a detail which would save me from reaching for the dreaded small brush.
    I guess small is a relative term. Since most of my paintings fall in the small to medium category a large brush for me would be a size 6(about half an inch). There are some artists who will use an inch wide brush on an eight by ten inch canvas. At this stage in my developement I'm more interested in getting the "big picture" to look and feel right. I've done some cast drawing and painting and the mind set is to proceed from the general to the specific to the point where you are "on the form". In other words you are looking for disruptions in the surface texture that translate into micro forms. In my paintings my hope is that if I get the value and color and edges right that there will appear to be a lot more of that going on than there actually is, and I'll be able to skip right past the whole "getting on the form " thing without ever having to have used a small brush. Don't laugh, I'm not kidding, I'm naming a new phobia after a fear of using small brushes." Micro-phobia"
     Perhaps Velasquez was a micro-phobic. Legend has it that he used long three foot handles on his brushes so that he could gage the effects of his tones from a viewing distance while actually painting them. It sounds kind of like sight-size painting without having to log the miles. And of course with Velazquez, less is definitely more. His paintings will make you see details that are definitely not there. Kind of like a blurry topograhical map. If you squint your eyes all of a sudden you can see the mountain tops. Chardin is another artist who may have had micro-phobia. At times he will include a crack in a table or a chippped stone, sometimes even signing his name as a trompe-loeile carving, but generally his paintings seem broadly painted. Vermeer's figures are very often patches of tones, sometimes with very little blending, that fuse together brilliantly when viewed from the proper distance. Am I alone in disliking Vermeer's little pointillist flourishes, supposedly inspired by the camera obscura, where his highlights dissolve into miniature Seurats?. Maybe it's just my dislike of small brushes and small brushstrokes. Speaking of Seurat, him and I would never have gotten along. There he would be with his little pots of colors and his teeny little brushes all laid out and I would be bristling (pun intended) with contempt. Or not. The fact is I really love Seurat and the great German Renaissance painters and Gregory Gillespie and tempera painting but I just personally hate painting with REALLY SMALL BRUSHES!

      We often hear the statement "rules are meant to be broken", particularly when it comes to the subject of art. I've never been a big fan of anything that comes with a set of rules but I also don't believe that "rule breaking" can, in and of itself, be the sole subject of a work of art. One of the most written about set of rules to come out of the modernist era was when the abstract painter Ad Reinhardt set down a list of what was in his view acceptable to include in a painting. You can imagine from looking at his work, which is almost minimalist, that it excluded quite a bit. When I decided about three years ago that I needed to take my work back to square one so that I could retrace my steps, and perhaps find a path that I may have rushed past in my haste to be the next Picasso, I set down a list of rules to follow in my sketch book. The list wasn't meant to be dogmatic. It's purpose was simply to prevent me from getting sidetracked in my goal to becoming a better painter. Anyway, I came across it recently when perusing through my old sketches, so here it is,
                      Rules of Painting
1. No storytelling, implied or actual.
2.No overt symbols.
3.No concept other than the depiction of value, edge and color.
4. No homages to past masters.
5. No surrealism.
6.No painting from photographs.
7.If more than one figure is used in a painting there should be no interaction between them other than what's needed to arrange a good composition.
8. No anthropomorphism.
9.No Impressionism.
10. No outlines other than those that exist in nature.
      Looking at this list, I'm amazed to find that three years later, without consciuosly intending to do so, I've managed to stay pretty true to these rules. They also sum up pretty well, the kind of art that I find most inspiring and the kind of art that leaves me cold. Too much of the art being made today could easily pass for illustration. In fact many of the more succesful painters got there start as illustrators. That's understandable. If you were an art student with an interest in traditional art, the illustration department was the only place to get that kind of training. Still, I feel that much of the realist painting that's being done today has an apologetic air about it. " Forgive me for being a Realist, I can't make it stop, I'll be sure to throw in a concept or two, if that'll make you happy".Many of these painters, I'm sure, would make the argument, that a lot of great old master paintings feature illustrations of biblical, mythological and moralizing scenes. True enough. But we are no longer living in those days. This is a vastly different world from the one that Rembrandt or Rubens existed in. Most images have a shelf life of about five seconds before a button is pushed or a mouse is clicked. It is the Realist painter who can  force the viewer to slow down the act of seeing and truly appreciate nature and appreciate the artists ability to transpose nature into their own vision. When an image comes with a tag line or a story or a novel idea, it forces the viewer away from the finer things that might be contemplated in a painting; the artists use of color and light, the rendering of form, composition etc;. Just because the story or concept is one that the artist made up him or herself does not mean that it's not an illustration. What's so bad about illustration. Nothing. I love illustrations and I love many of the artworks produced during the golden age of American illustration.But illustrations are not sublime. They are not Vermeer, they are not Chardin. Illustrations are all icing and no cake.
     There are artists that I like who's work could be called conceptual or illustrative such as Desiderio, Bartlett and Nerdrum. But I like their work in spite of the story line. Not because of it. I'd much rather that their work had no story line at all. Or concept for that matter. It's kind of like listening to music where I'm really digging the beat but the lyrics are killing me. It's just unnecessary distraction as far as I'm concerned.Would these artists have the fame and notoriety that they have today without their "conceptualizing".? Probably not. That's just the state of the crappy art world that we're dealing with these days. But they would still be great painters, because they are. Many of the writers and current post- modernist philosophers lament the fact that artists today don't make paintings with strong mythologically based signifiers, or that when they do, their images tend to fall flat, like old soda. They believe that a return to classical study will enable a generation of artists to find a thread that's been lost; subject matter painting with real vision and feeling behind it.It hasn't happened yet and it's doubtful that it will ever happen. As Thomas Wolfe said "you can't go home again." In today's world we tend to question everything with a somewhat skeptical eye. I don't necessarily consider that a bad thing. It does make it hard to create paintings meant to evoke pain or tragedy when you don't believe in the symbols that you're using and they become merely compositional devices and somewhat corny in the process. I say leave those subjects for the illustrators who work for Time or Newsweek, we Realists have bigger fish to fry.Empathy. Wonder. Humility. Grace.

       So, another summer comes and goes and with it the satisfaction of goals met and the dissapointment of unfinished business. As an art teacher for over twenty years the summer time has always been a time for me to pursue a special project or test some new ideas. If I meet my desired goal I'm usually ready to go back to work with a smile, if not, well, there's always next summer.
        One of my goals this summer was to take a workshop. I ended up studying at the Grand Central Academy in their "Summer Intensive". Most of my teacher friends thought I was crazy, why would I spend the entire month of July, five days a week, nine to five, studying in Manhattan when I could be at the beach barbequeing. Well, I have to say it was worth it. I'd always wondered about the mystique that surrounds Jacob Collins and his Water Street alumni. I wondered if there was anything from their three year training regimen that could be distilled into one month. The mornings were spent figure drawing and the afternoons I worked on a cast drawing. Although there was a lot of emphasis on technicque, I found, as with most workshops, that the real benefit came in watching the instructor's approach to art making. In other words, there was this idea of protecting your initial concept, and taking a lot more time in the initial stages of a drawing, so that your end result was pretty close in size and intent to your original block-in. Certainly a different approach from the Matissean morphing of a drawing that I had been taught in college. Jacob Collins's demonstrations were helpful in that he was pretty down to earth and talked quite frequently about his thought process as he proceeded through the stages of a drawing. After studying cast drawing in the Classical manner I could see why the French Impressionists wanted to revolt. It is mind numbingly tedious, difficult and yet ultimately rewarding.
       One of my goals for the summer had been to do a lot of plein aire landscape painting. I did manage to get out a few times, mostly to the local beach, but just as I was getting into the swing of it, the work bell sounded. My biggest problem with painting out of doors is that when I'm painting I'm painfully shy. I try to find places to paint where I'm least likely to run into other people. The beach turned out to be a good spot because I went to a well known fishing hot spot knowing that the fisherman would be more interested in what the fish were doing than watching me.
        My exhibit in East Hampton went pretty well with quite a few of the larger paintings selling and I've recently heard from the Argosy gallery in Maine that they sold a few of my paintings over the summer. So I can't complain, but I will anyway. I've managed to convince another gallery, the Coda gallery, way out in Palm Desert, California to give me a try. One of these days I will have to get out to California. I was born there but then whisked away to the Bronx before my first birthday. I've got a whole slew of family members out that way that I've never met. Maybe Angelina and I are really cousins. Doubtful. I know theres gold in them thar hills!
      At the suggestion of my painting instructor, I've started to work with thicker paint, particularly in the lights. What I'm finding out is that with the thicker paint, you don't get the light coming through the pale primer quite as much and it forces you to equate color with light. If the color intensity isn't right the paint just lays there as an inert mass because the light reflecting off of it is all surface. I am mostly pleased with the results, but ultimately my goal is to find a harmonious balance between the use of thick and thin passages.
    I've started a full figure painting of my wife posing in front of a door opened to a view of the backyard. I'm hoping to finish it before the leaves turn and I have to change the entire concept. Nancy's been generally pretty good about posing for me, but sometimes getting our schedules to coincide can be pretty frustrating. The life of the artist and model is a far cry from the joie-de-vivre depicted in the movies. My wife complains that I always make her look old and I argue that she's always scowling because she hates to pose. But, I am nevertheless pleased with the results so far and looking forward to finishing it. Next summer I think I'm going to try and talk both my wife and one of my daughters into posing, simultaneously. Talk about opening up a can of worms. I'll keep you posted.