Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2020 i Artists Magazine

Every creative person is in search of a good idea, and there are as many different approaches to meeting that challenge as there are artists in the world. Although we tend to put a lot of weight on the choice of subject, it may be that what you paint isn’t nearly as significant as understanding what draws you to a subject, what you see in it and what it is that you hope to express. “A pile of rocks ceases to be a rock when somebody contemplates it with the idea of a cathedral in mind.”—ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY In this issue, you’ll meet artists who bring fresh perspectives and real imagination to subjects that may not otherwise be considered especially innovative. Janet Ruttenberg (page 42), for example, is certainly not…

Some artists have their characteristic subjects: George Stubbs (1724–1806) painted horses; Reginald Marsh (1898–1954) painted crowds at Coney Island and other New York entertainment centers; Chuck Close (1940–) creates large-scale portraits of his artist friends. Scott Prior wakes up to his subject every day. He paints his living room and kitchen or what he sees outside his window or in his backyard, occasionally venturing a few miles from his rural Massachusetts home to paint a larger vista that may include a body of water or a mountain range in the distance. Everybody’s Everyday Prior isn’t a plein air artist—his work is done exclusively in his home and studio in Heath, Mass.—and being true-to-life isn’t his highest priority. He takes lots of photographs, creating mash-ups through Photoshop to produce the exact…

New York NIKI DE SAINT PHALLE: STRUCTURES FOR LIFE THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK CITY • MOMA.ORG DATES TO BE ANNOUNCED MoMA PS1, in Queens, presents the work of visionary feminist and activist artist Niki de Saint Phalle (French-American, 1930‒2002). Featuring works created from the 1970s until the artist’s death—including sculptures, prints, drawings, jewelry and archival material—the exhibition highlights Saint Phalle’s interdisciplinary approach and her engagement with key social and political issues, focusing on artwork she created to transform environments, individuals and society. Saint Phalle didn’t start to make art professionally until she was in her 30s, after her first career as a model. She quickly became famous for her jubilant sculptures of flying women, Gaudi-esque architectural monuments, books, paintings and jewelry. Early on, Saint Phalle pushed against…

Artists never stop learning. Each new painting or drawing can bring another revelation, but when you want to learn more about a specific technique, medium or style, you can’t do better than to take a workshop. Start planning now. On the following pages, you’re sure to find one or many workshops just right for you. Workshops ALABAMA Huntsville Museum of Art 08/20-08/22/20 – David Kessler – Bigger, Faster, Fresher, Looser Abstract Painting 08/27–08/30/20 – Michael Story – Mastering Skies & Reflections in Oil, Acrylic or Pastel 09/18/-09/19/20 – Gary Chapman – CHARCOAL: Expressive Mark Making, A Painter’s Approach to Drawing 10/05-10/09/20 – Brian Bomeisler – Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain 10/10-10/12/20 – Brian Bomeisler – Intensive Painting/Color 10/22-10/25/20 – Lian Quan Zhen – East Meets West: Chinese…

“Memling was the first Flemish artist to embellish his work with decorative Italian flourishes like gilded statues and putti.” The portraits are unified in their gestures of piety, as well as through lighting and color. Both figures are lit from the upper right. Surrounded by dark tones, Maria’s skin is especially luminous. Tommaso was about 42 years old when he married Maria, who was then 14. Both hailed from prominent Florentine families, and they enjoyed a comfortable life in Bruges. Tommaso commissioned works by the major Flemish artists of the era. Later, as manager of the Medici bank, his risky loans to the Duke of Burgundy and the Archduke of Austria resulted in the bank’s failure. The couple returned to Italy in 1497. Tommaso’s standing as a diplomat kept him…

Plein air observation is invaluable to seeing correct values. Cameras and cell phones distort value relationships because digital devices cannot see all the nuances in color and value that the human eye can. In addition, most of us use our devices in a point-and-shoot mode, not taking the time to bracket shots or adjust focus. In point-and-shoot mode, digital devices attempt to optimize the scene, but that often means that some areas fill in with overly dark values while bright areas blow out. Do this experiment to see how your device distorts an image. Go outside on a sunny day and shoot a scene with sky and land elements. Now hold up the image on your screen and compare it to the actual scene in front of you. Take a…

On warm days, if you’re walking along the north side of Sheep Meadow in New York’s Central Park, you might see a woman creating a painting of people lounging on the wide grassy expanse with skyscrapers at the far end of the park seeming to peer over the treetops. She’s there from about 11 a.m. until sunset, catching shadows and tricks of light on her 15-foot-long paper as the sun moves from east to west. The artist, Janet Ruttenberg, has been doing this for more than 20 years. Many passersby pause to watch her. Occasionally, they have suggestions. One man used to stop by regularly with acute comments, the kind Ruttenberg thinks only another artist could have offered. He was “very critical and usually right” she says, although the validity…

has created a monster in the form of millions of men who have been taught to deal and to trade in violence, and who are given the chance to die for the biggest nothing in history.—John Kerry, Vietnam Veterans against the War, from a statement to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee “In some ways I feel the past reverberates in the present,” says celebrated New York artist Harvey Dinnerstein, who at 92 continues a lifelong practice of bearing witness to the political and social forces swirling around him. His new and highly ambitious work, On the Fault Line (pages 80–81), draws on his decades of experience to create an image that encapsulates and dramatizes his perception of the current political climate. It shows a group of figures moving through a…

THE JOY OF SERIES Whether you have more time than you know what to do with or can only snatch a few moments to feed and inspire your passion, a good art-related series can deliver the perfect fit for your schedule. Immerse yourself in the entire collection or select one or more titles of particular interest. Here are a few series worth looking into. LIVES OF THE ARTISTS Needless to say, more than a few notable artists have arisen since painter and architect Giorgio Vasari wrote his 16th-century classic collection of artist’s biographies, Lives of the Artists. Publisher Laurence King recently picked up the mantle by launching its Lives of the Artists series with two highly readable biographies: Artemisia Gentileschi, by art critic and author Jonathan Jones, picks up where…

Picasso assembled this monumental collage during the winter of 1937–38, using the large stockpile of samples he collected from wallpaper shops. The figures have been interpreted as portraits of his wife, Olga Khokhlova (left); photographer Dora Maar (center); and Marie-Thérèse Walter (right) holding what is perhaps a portrait of Picasso. The anxious woman in the center recalls the crying women in the artist’s Guernica and the figure in his Weeping Woman (Dora Maar) series. Picasso had used pieces of cut wallpaper when developing the composition for Guernica, including some of the same papers that appear in this collage. WILLIAM ROBINSON Senior Curator of Modern Art , C leveland Museum of Art This collage is one of more than 300 works included in the new exhibition “Picasso and Paper,” organized by…

These images show how the value of the sky trickles down to all the values in your painting. Painting A is a plein air study I did of a house on Monhegan Island on a late June morning. Since the island is 12 miles out in the ocean, there’s some light diffusion, due to all the moisture in the air. The moisture molecules scatter the light, making the sky hazy and less blue. My goal for this study was to capture the feel of the brilliant light of a summer morning. In Painting B, I referenced the image my camera captured, making the sky darker and more contrasted; however, I didn’t change the values of the buildings or foreground. Compare the values around the cottage in both paintings. In B,…

Abstraction Dos and Don’ts DON’T be literal! Not. At. All. DO free yourself from visual cues of the physical world. You can use these as a jumping-off point, but you won’t need them for where you’re going. DON’T forget the expressionistic gesture. What kind of marks does your inner Jackson Pollock want to make? DO use color, form, line and shape to communicate. DON’T forget that most art has a degree of abstraction. How extreme you make that degree is up to you. DO embrace history. Abstraction existed long before the early 20th century. Aspects of it can be found from all time periods and many cultures, from prehistoric cave paintings to Chinese and Islamic calligraphy. Surrealist Know-How Salvador Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory, with its drooping watches in an…

Anamorphic art uses a form of perspective that intentionally distorts drawings and paintings so they can be seen correctly from only one specific location. We’re all familiar with the classic perspective example of two railroad tracks meeting at a distant vanishing point. Anamorphic drawings work by reversing that process and stretching projected lines away from the vanishing point. When seen from a precise point of view, the eye converges those lines back together with surprising effects, yet from any other vantage points anamorphic images appear unrecognizable. The Latin word anamorphosis was first coined in the 1800s to describe visual distortions in geology, although today it’s widely used in connection with the recent phenomenon of three-dimensional street art and mural painting. The practice of stretching pictures for magical results, however, has…

The figures in Dinnerstein’s Confrontation at Fort Dix (above) reference figures on the right of Raphael’s fresco The Expulsion of Heliodorus From the Temple (bottom left). Dinnerstein’s sketch of Raphael’s figures (bottom right) shows their composition more plainly. In Raphael’s work, these figures are thieves being cast out by angels, but in Dinnerstein’s painting, the figures are sympathetically portrayed as protesters of the Vietnam War.…

many artists avoid applying for grants because the process is labor intensive and the outcome is uncertain. Compared to the satisfaction of looking at a completed artwork, a submitted grant application may not seem to offer an immediate reward for the effort; however, the clarity that comes from describing the meaningful contribution inherent in your work and practice is invigorating and helps many artists rediscover purpose. Down the road, if a grant is actually awarded, it provides opportunities and support that are well worth pursuing. Grants can enable artists to produce a large-scale project when the necessary materials, travel and other expenses would otherwise be beyond their means. Some regional and local grants provide funding as well as a studio, so that artists who had been working in their homes…