Art Blog - Art In History

It is autumn in New England! That means it is both a wonderful and a dangerous time for plein air painters. Nature is begging you to capture her beauty, but also challenging you to compete with her brilliance. Fall color, perhaps more than any other subject, teaches you humility and caution, because it is a competition you will always lose. At any time, the range of color and value in nature is far beyond the range available to the artist trying to represent it. Usually, nature's restraint allows us to compete, by using strong color to represent that which in nature is muted. It is relatively easy to set up a range of color and value which will represent what we see. Autumn in New England is not so kind… Continue reading… 3 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

When we think of the Coat of Many Colors, whether Joseph's biblical coat or Dolly's country version, we think of a patchwork of bright, rainbow colors, intense and splashy. Most of us. When I think of the coat of many colors I think if nature's coat of subtle tones, colors so rich and intermixed that each is every color. Not that nature doesn't have its bright accents too, its pure blue sky and profusion of wildflowers, but for me, the real feast is in the shades of brown and grey. Brown is just a name for a profusion of color that is on balance warm; if the balance is cool, we call it grey. The richest colors in nature come in the Spring and fall, when no one color dominates… Continue reading… 2 comments