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If you are looking for some interesting podcast interviews with artists from around the world you should check out John Dalton’s podcasts called Gently Does It. Kudos to John Dalton for all he does.

His focus in on talented figurative painters.  There are now over 100 interviews mostly with artists and some curators, the likes of Nick Alm, Vincent Desiderio, Zoey Frank, a discussion with Dr Elaine Melodi Schmidt, the curator of the Venus Visions | Vision of Venus exhibit at Zhou B Art Center in Chicago, April 2018.  (I have a piece accepted in this show, btw)

It is interesting to compare techniques, paint mediums, every artist’s individual “art think” and just hear their great stories and senses of humor.

Anyway the podcast is a great listen.

Just added my new carpet to my studio–to my wall. I have a nine foot square wall built in my studio that I use for painting, as a permanent easel.  I use it for large mural projects, well, small paintings too, and just pinning up reference drawings and the like..  My studio has slanted ceilings and windows on the end walls, not much in the way of regular bare walls, so this ‘easel’ wall is partition built in.

I’ve used the wall for a couple years now, just the plywood, but just added the carpet as a great improvement.  I was listening to one of John Dalton‘s great artist podcasts, this one with Cesar Santos, and he mentioned he had a wall easel as well and he had carpeted his wall to give a bit of cushion to the canvas.  Great idea.  I should have thought of this myself, but, hey, here is a shout out thanks to Cesar for the great tip.

Tested it out yesterday and that really does make the brushes feel so much nicer.

March 10 – Update: The carpet on the wall is fabulous.  Gives a nice cushion for the brushes and makes scraping the canvas so much better.  Highly recommend a carpeted wall for painting large pieces.

excerpt from article art review in New City:

“In one of the most poignant pieces, New England artist Christopher Cart presents a nude woman turning away from her mirror in confusion and dismay—perhaps she just realized that she is no longer nubile. In another engaging piece, Polish artist Anna Wypych shows us a “Venus/Demon” who appears to be sexually available but also threatening. Don’t most sexual relationships end badly for someone? Chicago artist Kyrin Ealy Hobson shows us a struggling African-American family where the powerful stare of the mother is contrasted with the awkward, shy glance of the daughter. For many women, sexual appeal might be the least of their concerns.”

Risking Rebuke in the #MeToo Milieu: A Review of “Visions of Venus” at the Zhou B Art Center

Composition is one of those aspects of paint learning that will never be complete.  You can never sign off and say, “Well, I learned that now on to painting”.  Composition possibilities are endless and fascinating.

An art friend and I were talking composition a bit ago, specifically joking about JPI–jolts per inch.  In truth not a laughing matter.  In many schools of composition the punch of your composition or design takes precidence over everything else in the painting.

Any of your favorite illustrations and movie stills have that NOTAN/JPI punch and drama.  The rest of the story is subordinate to that initial kick in the teeth, mainly with your values.

A design of lights and darks that frame the design and all fits within that.

This is one important school of composition.

One thing I have been experimenting with though is applying the composition concepts of Pollock, and Tobey to my figurative work.  Not designing with NOTAN punch but subordinating image elements to the overall flow of the color and rhythm.

In this portrait I broke up all the architectural rigid forms, the lighting and even the figures.  This same composition could have been a very crunched NOTAN design of crisp dramatic lighting and dark shadows. but i purposely broke everything up with pattern and sun dapples.

[vc_row][vc_column width=”2/3″][vc_column_text]One of my goals lately is to make my technique organic, to the story in the piece, not try to impose one technique or process on the entire composition, but rather to have each bit of the vision speak in its own technical voice.

I mean if I decide to paint a scene in a very realistic sense then I impose that technique evenly over every aspect of the scene, the figures, the lighting, the perspective, the bricks and mortar and the atmosphere–to make it all work as one cohesive illusionistic whole.  This is all well and good.  However, if there is one thing that the 20th century artists taught us is that even if you are a realist, there are myriad ways to tell that real story.  For example, Picasso has some powerful paintings of his children, a mother teaching her child to walk, children on the floor drawing.  These have a visual strength, punch in a simple story that had he painted them in a late nineteen century style the paintings would have been trite, treacle.

So different things call out to be painted differently.  And I have never, in my head, been pinned to one style.  But only recently have I been trying to bring that style choice into the workings of one canvas.  In stead of deciding the overall style language first and building within that frame, now I am trying to lefft style choice be left open and to be planned within the painting process on the brushstroke level.  Each to its own voice.

The serious risk is off course, total and ugly disastrous chaos.  But hey, no risk is boring.  If I didn’t love risk I’d be working a paycheck job.  I may end up with all disasters but maybe somewhere in all the trying will be a small gem that shines.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”5257″ img_size=”large”][/vc_column][/vc_row]

watercolor, 12 x 16 inches, 1990’s

I painted this back in the ’90’s after a night beach walk on Popham. While we were walking along the beach Jen told me a story about a seelie.