Innholdsfortegnelse for September/October 2023 i Artists Magazine

Why Study? • Making a study (or studies) is a trial run. You can learn a lot—from testing arrangements and proportions of objects within your composition to gaining insights about materials, form, scale, visual rhythm and color. • It’s a chance to practice—to grow and develop your execution of techniques and skills. Material Matters • Make studies using your cheapest materials—nothing precious—so that you aren’t holding back your explorations or mark-making. This is about noodling on a problem again and again until something bubbles up. • Small-scale art boards that complement a variety of media are readily available. A great alternative is to cut a large Bristol board into a group of small 5x7-inch surfaces for studies. Composition Notes • Position and reposition figures or major shapes in a study.…

For some artists, the core truths of who they are and the career path they’re meant to take present themselves early, and staying on track with their true north is just as natural as breathing. That has certainly been the case for Adonna Khare. Growing up in rural Iowa, surrounded by sprawling land and wildlife, Khare developed an early appreciation for the natural world, the animal kingdom and art. She was born into a long line of artists from the Netherlands, including her great-aunt whose fine-art paintings depicting fantasy worlds of fairies, trolls and unicorns greatly inspired her young imagination. Khare and her mother, who was a teacher and poet, constantly worked on art projects together, and sketching and drawing sessions with her great-aunt were weekly occurrences. Despite her early…

A leading figure in American landscape painting, Richard Mayhew, born in 1924, is approaching his 100th birthday. His perspective and experience as an African American and Native American are integral to his development of a highly personal mode of abstract landscape, which is rooted both in emotional response and the long arc of American history. Since the 1980s, Mayhew’s compositions have focused on what seem to be specific trees, glades and fields, although they’re constructed through the action of his memory and imagination. He describes his process of working colors on the canvas as ‘experiential’ and ‘improvisation,’ harkening to his jazz musicianship. PETER JONATHAN BELL Curator of European Paintings, Sculpture & Drawings Cincinnati Art Museum…

Is it safe to create a charcoal underdrawing for an oil painting? The general consensus is that there’s nothing inherently wrong about painting in oil on top of charcoal, although it can create somewhat of a mess without a layer of fixative to isolate the oil from the charcoal. Let’s compare three different methods for prepping a charcoal underdrawing for an oil painting: Workable Fixatif, casein fixative and PVA size. UNTREATED Painting in the untreated section, the charcoal drawing lifts easily and quickly muddies the paint. The charcoal does hold better in some of the light areas where it has been smudged and worked into the surface. When glazing, scrubbing, wiping and scumbling the paint, however, the charcoal lifts easily. WORKABLE FIXATIF Krylon Workable Fixatif is an acrylic product that…

Jessica Anne Schwartz experiences the world differently than most. The artist has a rare form of synesthesia, a condition in which stimulation of one of the senses automatically triggers sensations in another. For Schwartz, this phenomenon is constant and affects all of her senses. “Colors register a mouth-feel and a sound. Sound registers a visual. Smell is both sound and sight,” she says. “Even my emotions have sounds and visuals to them. All of my senses are cross-wired.” Making art became the way Schwartz made sense of her cross-wired perceptions as a child. “Sometimes I couldn’t tell the internal from external landscapes because of the visuals I was receiving constantly,” she explains. “It was difficult to distinguish the sound of a cough from the sound of a word or a…

Shortly after her retirement, Heather Wanamaker moved from Long Island, N.Y., to Bluffton, S.C. At first, the artist lived in an end-unit carriage home, which didn’t really offer the necessary studio space. “It was too small, and natural light was sorely lacking,” she says. Five years later, however, Wanamaker embarked on a project: a custom-built home in the same community. The primary motivation and design driver was the additional studio space. “My daughter is an architect, and my best friend an interior designer, and I knew what I needed, so together we set out to create the perfect home for an artist,” she says. Since the priority was the best possible lighting in the studio, they first surveyed the listed properties—with compass in hand—in order to select a site that…

Struggling with situational depression during the pandemic, Boston-based illustrator, writer, educator and self-professed “giant vector geek” Jessie Young found herself lacking all motivation to work, create or do much of anything. Then, during a particularly energized evening, Young picked up her tablet (an iPad Pro) and succeeded in creating a simple outline of a single self-portrait before bed. The next morning, she looked at the unfinished drawing and felt inspired by its coloring book-like quality. Young spent the next few weeks using the portrait as a template, adding to it each day, never repeating an idea twice—and “The Depression Coloring Book” series was born. (See examples below.) “Sometimes I let whatever happened on a given day inform what I drew,” she says. “Other times I’d scribble around with no goal…

THE SEATTLE ART MUSEUM OCTOBER 19, 2023–JANUARY 21, 2024 Thanks to the popularity of the instantly recognizable The Great Wave—cited everywhere from book covers and Lego sets to anime and emoji—Katsushika Hokusai (Japanese, 1760–1849) has become one of the most famous and influential artists in the world. Now a major exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum, organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, takes a new approach to the work of the versatile master, pairing over 100 of his woodblock prints, paintings and illustrated books with more than 200 works by his teachers, students, rivals and admirers. Visitors will be able to explore Hokusai’s impact through the centuries and around the globe on a range of artists, including Winslow Homer (American, 1836–1910), Yoshitomo Nara (Japanese, 1959– ), Loïs Mailou…