Art Blog - What Makes A Painting Work

This account is in praise of experimenting with art, and stumbling into success As an artist it's a way to stretch, learn, and have fun. If you are a collector you may find some very engaging pieces that developed when the artists took a leap outside their usual media and modes of creation. "Dark Elephant" developed out of an experiment that just kept stretching. I've been doing a fair amount of brush painting on rice paper recently, and I've done a number of pieces on less traditional surfaces such as Bristol paper. I had a piece of handmade rough watercolor paper from India with leaves and stems embedded in it, and I decided to try painting an elephant in sumi-e ink on it… Continue reading… 3 comments

Visual impact is the first thing we work toward in a painting, with color, value, and composition forming a triad of essentials. After the sense of sight, we most often appeal to that of touch. We want the viewer to be able to imagine from our visual clues the silken smoothness of a fabric, the rough bark of redwood or oak, the scratch of a kitten's tongue, the heft of a stone. Less often we spark the senses of taste, hearing, and smell. When I developed "Heavenly Aroma", I hoped to visually depict a smell. I was afraid the painting shown here was a little too "local" to make it into the highly competitive juried show currently open at Delicato Winery. Only about 30% of the paintings entered made the cut, and I had better hopes for my other entries… Continue reading… 3 comments

Western Art presents plentiful examples of excellent use of black and white: ink drawings by PIcasso, photos by Ansel Adams, the best of the motion pictures' early decades are but a few examples. It is in Chinese and Japanese Brush painting that the varying shades of black or gray are actually called colors. The classic paintings of China and Japan range from simple bamboo shoots to complex landscapes. What they have in common is the power of color within the blue black or brown black that is used. We see this also in modern masters such as Xu Beihong whose horses I particularly admire http://www.xubeihong.org/ In working with the ink I love the subtle shades made possible depending on the amount of water in the ink and in the brush… Continue reading… 1 comment