Vibe: a scientifically accurate illustration I’ve been thinking about something the saxophonist Donald Harrison said in a clinic some months ago: “Music is about vibe. Music is all about vibe.” It was a useful comment […]
Category: art
Very occasional quote of the day: mistakes
“The idea of a mistake is beside the point, for once anything happens it authentically is.” – John Cage
Bruce Gilden, a street photographer
A few videos of Bruce Gilden, a New York photographer. He’s known as a street photographer, and a rather invasive one. He gets right up in people’s faces and photographs them with a flash. It […]
Keep your pencil sharp
Drawing by Josef Albers Every student was required to have a pencil sharpener and to keep a sharp point on the pencil when drawing. — Rob Roy Kelly on studying art with Josef Albers Reading […]
Very occasional quote of the day: random factors
“Life is a cut-up; consciousness is a cut-up. Every time you walk down the street or look out the window, your stream of consciousness is cut by random factors.” — William S. Burroughs, The Adding […]
More Robert Henri: on technique
SOMEHOW CONNECTED: The way art and music is taught, most artists and musicians really have nothing to say. There are acres of anonymously competent junk like this in the museums in Rome, as there are millions of hours […]
Very occasional quote of the day: the abilities you have at the moment
Hey, that looks like I can do it. WHY NOT TRY IT? From The Art Spirit, by Robert Henri: An art student must be a master from the beginning; that is, he must be master […]
Form and spirit in art
Piero della Francesca And now for something completely different— I can’t just dump 50 pages of practice materials all at once. So here is a piece of art writing that has been very important to […]
Painting again
It looks like we’ll be seeing a small shift in emphasis, here, as I’ve set up a studio, and am painting again after about a ten year hiatus— plus another few years when I was […]
Milton Resnick
The painter Milton Resnick (1917-2004) was one of the first generation of New York Abstract-Expressionist painters— a contemporary of Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, and the rest— and the longest-lived of […]
Very occasional quote of the day: perfection
I used to think about this quote a lot: “I never was interested in how to make a good painting. For many years I was not interested in making a good painting— as one might […]
Very occasional quote of the day: ideas
JOHNS: I was doing […] sculptures of small objects—flashlights and light bulbs. Then I heard a story about Willem de Kooning. He was annoyed with my dealer, Leo Castelli, for some reason, and said something […]