Dear Artist, Mobile easels include everything that goes by land, sea or air. My friend Toni Onley used to paint from the cockpit of his amphibian Lake Buccaneer. Floating studios permit the marvel of drifting — silent, Zen-like contemplation and rendering along waterways. There’s nothing like a rowboat or canoe — tethered or not. A small custom unit can be made to fit a kayak — the “Keasel” — where water-based brush swizzling is a piece of cake....
Robert Genn
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A worldwide community of artists from over 115 countries visit The Painter's Keys website for information, inspiration, artist advice, friendship and connectivity. Most have signed up to receive the Twice-Weekly Letters, which have been running continuously since 1999. Our page provides a way to receive the Twice-Weekly Letters on social media and interact and share the letter online.
Dear Artist, This week, my twin, James, and I are following a narrow, shoulderless ribbon of pavement around the perimeter of Iceland. The never-setting June sun follows us up and down the moors and along the cliff edges, then disappears behind rain-heavy clouds. It winks through melting iceberg chunks, washed up casually like an emptied sack of uncut gems on the black velvet of a volcanic beach....
Dear Artist, New light is being shone on the nature of creativity, and it’s coming from a surprising source: animals. If you accept the idea that we are all fellow travellers on this planet, right down to the simplest amoeba, and that we are all continuing to evolve, albeit at different speeds, the animal world is there to teach us....
Dear Artist, In 1987, speculative fiction writer Ursula Le Guin wrote an essay entitled Where Do You Get Your Ideas From? Le Guin suggested that there are two myths about how fiction is written: the first being that there is a secret to being a writer, and that all you have to do is know the secret and you will become one....
Dear Artist, Inspiration and motivation — how do you find it, where does it come from, how do you maintain it? Rankled by time and money considerations to say nothing of non-supportive others, some folks find it a tough order. Like a lot of life’s struggles, the solution might just be a simple one. As many know, I’m a believer in effective habits and bold pump-priming....
Dear Artist, A couple of weeks ago, a case began in a chamber of the Paris court to decide if Daniel Druet can lay claim to the authorship of some wax models he made for Italian conceptual artist Maurizio Cattelan. Cattelan is known for, among other things, duct-taping a banana to the wall of Galerie Perrotin’s booth at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019, selling two editions of it for $120,000.00, having it eaten by another artist, replaced, and then removed from the fair....
Dear Artist, A two-day workshop last weekend refreshed my memory of how artists often go the recipe route. Some, not all, asked regularly and took detailed notes of colours used by the beleaguered demo-doer. Some noses came awfully close to picking paint from my palette. Of interest was the particular mixture of grey imprimatura. I frequently repeated that this recipe was changed daily depending on mood, degree of experimentation, and the needs of the work....
Dear Artist, My twin, James, and I hugged the winding road into Topanga Canyon and hit the trailhead with a couple of film friends. In the snug of the montane chaparral – today a June gloom cloud forest – we tumbled through a steady thread of favourite documentaries, what to do with turmeric, the mating habits of rattlesnakes, how to save a good idea, Nova Scotia, and what defines a cult....
Dear Artist, Vincent van Gogh died in 1890. Theo van Gogh, art dealer and brother of Vincent, died six months later, in 1891. Johanna, Theo’s wife, inherited all the shop remainders including virtually all of Vincent’s work. She soon moved with her small son from Paris to Bussum near Amsterdam. Johanna, age 29, went into distribution mode. Reading the brothers’ correspondence, she became convinced of her brother-in-law’s genius and set about to do the right thing by him....
Dear Artist, A friend’s high schooler recently mentioned she was working on a still life assignment. “What are you doing?” I asked. “I’ve only just started,” she replied. Without a beat, I blurted a rhapsody of how she might go about such a fun activity. She nodded warmly. Later in bed – while dreaming of still life – I wondered if my zealous instructions had been clear enough....
Dear Artist, Yesterday, Rich Woy of Ocala, Florida asked, “How do you know when a painting is overworked? Are there boundaries or clues? Is this judgment left to the artist or the critic?” Thanks, Rich. Good question. Funnily, at dinner last night a subscriber happened to mention that I habitually overworked the word “overworked.” I had to explain myself. For sure, it’s a term among artists....
Dear Artist, While painting and listening to my sister-in-law, Tamara’s podcast recently, American tech consultant Sara Wachter-Boettcher laid out the symptoms of burnout: “An increased sense of depersonalization – feeling distant from people or maybe yourself; exhaustion, foggy brain.” Referencing the past two-and-a-half years of global pandemic and its disruptions and reckonings, she said, “For a lot of people, the world has changed and their lives have changed – and so sometimes you don’t care about the things you care about just because you’re different now.” She suggested asking yourself what your “current you” cares about....
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