How adverse situation led to breakthrough in painting practice.
"I've always been interested in history, but they never taught Negro history in the public schools...I don't see how a history of the United States can be written honestly without including the Negro. I didn't [paint] just as a historical thing, but because I believe...
"Discovering" an accomplished artist who marches to a beat so outside the acceptable songs of his or her time can be refreshing. In retrospect, when civilization has caught up, the artist often seems to have been prophetic. The Age of Aquarius has familiarized us with...
Very few design motifs have withstood the vicissitudes of fashion as well as paisley. It's incredibly versatile—cacophonous and ebullient elements can be channeled into a sophisticated all-over pattern or individual "pine cones" can be released on their own...
Art may commemorate the sitter, but may also change him, even cancel him, despite the wishes of both parties. . . when high talent, let along genius comes in, the painter is preparing an image which will represent the sitter after death, and thus in some way replace...
Best known as a member of the Italian Futurist movement, Giacomo Balla—painter, sculptor, and set designer—was born on this day (July 18) in 1871 in Turin, Italy. Balla had little formal art training. In 1895, while still in his early 20s, the painter left Turin to...
It would be easy to overlook Othon Fritz’s Fauvist painting in SFMOMA’s second floor gallery. . .
Why has God given me such magnificent talent? It is a curse as well as a great blessing. -Albrecht Dürer400 In 1500 Albrecht Dürer, aged 28, painted the last of his self portraits, a stunning vision of the painter as distinctly Christ-like and mimicking the Salvator...
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a color must speak volumes.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a color must speak volumes.
Happy Birthday to Diego Velázquez, who was baptized this day in 1599. Velázquez is truly a painter's painter and there are so many ways in which he has inspired my own practice. Foremost, his brush work and color harmonies! The multitude of reds, pinks, oranges and...
There are some paintings in the history of art that break free, just as some human beings do, from the confines of the particular little world into which they were born. They leave home—they escape from the tradition in which they were formed, and which seem at first...
No people are more associated with the fashion of black Chantilly Lace than the Spanish. And no painting more delightfully portrays the tradition than Goya’s Duchess of Alba.
What do The Beach Boys have to do with painting?
Does an audience complete an artwork?
Behind the scenes creating The Rocks of Rhode Island paintings.
A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar stood under the open sky, after WWI, in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of forces of destructive torrents and explosions, was the...
Mistakes can’t be erased but they move you from your present position. —Richard Diebenkorn, from "Notes to myself on beginning a painting" To me there is no painter who more evocatively captures the essence of the California landscape than Richard Diebenkorn. Through...
Working toward that moment—what painters call the frozen moment—led me to a new way of narrative painting. Painting is about trying to get to that instant that is pregnant with some special kind of energy. Done right, there's an exquisite tension in the painting...
Recollect that only when habits of order are formed can we advance to really interesting fields of action—and consequently accumulate grain on grain of wilful choice like a very miser—never forgetting how one link dropped undoes indefinite number. —William James I...
