Sunflower Seed Paintings 19 – 24

The Sunflower Project
These 6 sunflower seed paintings, exploring a blue-violet/orange-yellow palette, have been brought to you by Tracy Burton, who donated the funds for the materials for these six paintings. They are all looking for a good home! Go here to learn about the project and sign up to receive one free, or donate to ensure we keep this project going!
Read More

Reading: PANTONE The 20th Century in Color

Working Artist
I picked up this book at my local library on the advice of a friend, and it is just a fantastic read, a must have reference for anyone interested in creating art evoking certain historical periods, or anyone interested in predicting future trends in colour preferences. Essentially, Leatrice Eiseman and Keith Recker take the reader on a grand tour of 20th century western history exploring the influence of politics, social changes, science, art, design and fashion on colour preferences from decade to decade. From the utilitarian and action oriented colours of war time decades, the soft neutrals of recessions and upbeat pastels of post war returns to stability and optimism, PANTONE seeks to not just show the what and how of colour preference, but also the why, in as much…
Read More

Fear of Rejection – Lessons from Jia Jiang

100 Rejections, What's the Big Idea?, Working Artist
I watched this (and highly recommend you do as well), [embed]http://www.ted.com/talks/jia_jiang_what_i_learned_from_100_days_of_rejection[/embed] shortly after the new year, but it took me half a year to act on it. I realized that I was hanging too much of my dreams of future happiness on each application, proposal and submission I was sending out in to the world, and then disproportionally thrown off course by very rejection letter I got. So much so that I was finding every reason not to respond to this call or that, knowing how much time I would spend crafting each and how floored I would be if it was turned down. Jiang's talk convinced me I should be taking a more light hearted approach to the process, and I decided to make it my mission to collect 100 rejections…
Read More

Process: Paintings are grown, not executed.

Art Lessons, Commissions
I was posting some progress images of a wedding portrait I am currently working on to my Facebook page, One Life Fine Art (if you are on Facebook, make sure to like and follow me there), and it occurred to me suddenly that the person for whom I am making the painting could actually be terrified by what they were seeing! The first phase was the line drawing, the second, a grisaille in chromium oxide green, and the third was the layer where I work out my major colour story (in this case a series of full strength washes of pthalo green, green gold and Quinacridone red/violet mix). On top of that I will start to refine the forms and paint in details, balancing lights, darks and colour as I go…
Read More

Reading: Art Visionaries by Mark Getlein & Annabel Howard

Working Artist
A good primer on some of the major artist's of our times, and their ideas and innovations. It is an easy read, with a democratic 3-4 pages dedicated to each artist, even ones with incredibly long and illustrious careers like Picasso. Each artist is covered with a portrait, a timeline, a page condensing key points about their biography, career and innovations, and 3 or 4 representative images of work. I would recommend this book to beginners interested in getting a crash course in art since the beginning of the modernist period. However, even as an artist familiar with the western canon and art since the beginning of the modern period, I found fresh insights on the work of familiar artists. One critique of this book would be that despite it's recent publication (2016) the…
Read More

SPAM!

Uncategorized
Okay, I know I have been away since March 13th, and if you have posted a legit comment on a post since then, I am genuinely sorry that it will not be read or posted, however 2800 pieces of spam are a little much to expect someone to sift through in order to find the one nugget of authentic human contact in my inbox. I skimmed the posts as I marked them spam, but for the most part they were neither specific nor relevant to this blog. So, if you would like to have your post actually read and responded to, PLEASE make sure that it is specific and relevant, and is very obviously so. There are so many generic spam posts that are clearly copy and pastes, saying how wonderful this…
Read More