Art Blog - Art In History

In my last post I dealt with the subject of multiple levels of meaning in an image. I realize that there is another way in which we use levels of meaning which I had not even touched on, the way which is most natural to me: the pun or double meaning. This can be a double meaning between the image and its title - word play - or within the image itself, which I will call image play. I am a punster from my earliest years, much to the dismay and suffering of my friends and companions. The earliest pun I remember (except maybe "what is black and white and red all over?") was the riddle "when is a door not a door?" "When it's ajar". What makes a pun so appealing (to a few of us!) is that we have that moment of connection between "ajar" and "a jar"… Continue reading… 2 comments

The other day a member asked me how she could get more visitors to notice her gallery among the multitude on the site. I gave her several suggestions, including sending people to your gallery through other media such as Facebook, blogging about it, or using key descriptive words in your text. Another way is to have a niche, a little corner of the art scene which, when a viewer is looking for it, they will find only a handful artists who qualify. If you are an Equestrian painter, or a painter of infant portraits, your chances are vastly improved… Continue reading… 4 comments

A couple of weeks ago I was driving up Interstate 89 in Vermont, keeping an eye as usual on the rockfaces which border the highway. Highway cuts expose the inner skeleton of the living rock, almost like cracking open a geode. What struck me is that not all exposed rock is interesting, and of the interesting rock, not all of it "works". Rocks, and any element in nature, may compose, or it may not. Many things can contribute to this natural composition: color, texture, the conformity of lines, all things which are available to the artist as well. But what I particularly noticed was that a rockface worked when it had large forms, and did not when there were none… Continue reading… 4 comments