Praeterita

  A new interview with me is now live on Vimeo via Multiple Arts , a series curated by Liana Voia, who lives in Canada and France. It's a really well-edited piece, with me mostly speaking directly to camera about my life, art, influences, and plans, with detours into the history of twentieth century French art! The interview is part of a series  of dozens of similar interviews that Liana has conducted with artists in the United States and Canada: Here is the video (link here if you want to watch it via Vimeo):

  Beginning shortly before Christmas, I have been regularly uploading short videos showing me (or at least my hands) at work in my studio. Many of them are short hyperlapse videos, condensing hours of work into fifteen or thirty seconds, to fit the Instagram format and recommended length. Ai imagine that by the end of this year I will have quite an extensive archive of my painting and printmaking sessions.  

In my last blog post, I talked about a virtual exhibition of my work that I created via the Kunstmatrix hosting site, and which can be viewed on my website. Last week, I held two online events to inaugurate it -- a preview for the VIPs on my mailing list, followed two nights later by a public event -- and I am pleased to report that both were a success. Both events were broadcast via Zoom, and a recording of the public event is available via my Y ouTube channel , website , or here: About 27 people attended, and I sold ten pieces from the show. But most satisfying of all, perhaps even more than the sales, was the question and answer session conducted by artist/curator Joanne Aono . We agreed that I wouldn't see the questions in advance, and it made for an incredibly interesting and stimulating back and forth.  I hope you look at the virtual exhibition, but I also urge you to watch the Q & A, which begins at around the 30:00 minute mark.

  Exhibition opportunities are limited for me due to the pandemic, so I've put together an online exhibition which opens on Friday March 265th. Here is a short video preview of it: The app I used to create the show is called Kunstmatrix , and it enables you to set up virtual rooms through which people can move in a siimulation of 3-d movement, similar to how one looks around Google street view in 360 degree panorama. People can join the opening by signing in to a Zoom call, and then I just share my laptop screen within the Zoom call and perform the virtual walk-through by moving my mouse around. I've "attended" similar online events, but this is the first time I am trying it myself. Report to follow...

  I took this photo ten years, in February 2011. There are so many things about it that are so different from now that I feel I'm looking at something from someone else's life: The location is the living room of an old farmhouse that my wife and I owned back then, in a very small town in northwestern Illinois not far from the Mississippi River. The old fireplace, the old wood pocket doors, are all original, but I repainted the walls and put up a faux tin ceiling. The watercolour over the fireplace is something I did back in London in the 1990s. The ceramic vase was from a ceramic artist who had a small workshop and store on the little high street in this town. Finally, I took the photo on a Samsung flip-phone, so it was probably 160 Kb, as opposed to the multi-megabyte photos we all take with our smartphones now. I imagine this is true for all of us: the older we get, we can look back at more than one time in our lives with the amazement of people discovering the ancient Egypti...

  Every artist knows that you need to have good, high quality photos of your work if you hope to attract any attention online. This applies to: Your website. Blog. Social media. Physical mail such as postcards. We all know this, yet it's hard to get good advice. I am no expert, so I'm merely passing along what I've learned from scouring the internet and talking to professional photographers. So, consider this post a quick source for where to find some useful information, via the following links: https://expertphotography.com/photographing-artwork-tips/ https://www.widewalls.ch/magazine/photographing-artwork In the photo at the top of this post, you can see how I followed the advice. I bought two Neewer softboxes from Amazon ( https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B017D7W57S/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 ) which cost $90. They were well worth the price: very bright daylight-style bulbs, can go up to 7 feet high, and they have an opaque covering over the fr...

  This video clip has audio of me giving a brief description of how this large painting evolved over time, and was finished quickly while glancing at a small oil sketch. What I couldn't say in 60 seconds: the painting began as a completely different image, possibly not even of a giant bird shape with hands reaching for it. The first version was painted in early 2019. Then I overpainted that one so much that the surface became too clogged with paint, so I ripped the canvas off the stretcher frame and stretched a new, blank piece of primed canvas. The next stage was a bird shape across the bottom of the canvas, and four arms+hands reaching for it. That version stayed more or less the same until a month ago. Why did I change it again? Because it looked too much like an outline drawing, something waiting to be filled in rather than looking as if it had been brought to a final stage with any authority. So, this is what I did: I took one of the small oil sketches I made at the start of 2...

Luminaries outside Mount Carroll History Center, IL Despite my left-leaning politics, I generally try only to post art and art-related stuff on my blog or social media. After the events here in the USA yesterday (January 6th, 2021), that is proving a difficult thing to maintain. But here is something that might speak to both urges (please bear with me to the end). A public art project The photos in this post show a public art project that I did in collaboration with @patricia.a.mcnair.7 at the end of 2010. We spent time in a small town in northwest Illinois, named Mount Carroll, on a community memory project. The request: people of all changes supply an old family photo, together with a page of memories they associate with it. What was nice is that we gathered the memories of some of the youngest and the oldest people in the town, ending up with one memory for every decade of the twentieth century. Luminary with phototransfers Phototransfers I then printed the photos and one line of me...

This oil painting rom my current series, Crow and Hands, is four feet by three feet. The version you see here was how it looked until yesterday. Even that was the result of working and reworking the canvas until there were about three previous layers with slightly different versions of the image.  But it still didn't look right to me. Incomplete. Like a sketch rather than a finished painting (if a painting can ever be truly finished). So I decided, one more time, to rework the surface of the painting, keeping the paint as loose as possible, using a big brush and bold strokes, and aiming to finish quickly. I also took a small oil sketch as a reference point: It's a similar idea: a bird shape flying horizontally near the top of the canvas, and hands reaching p from below. The tonality is also warmer, due to touches of yellow ochre, which as a reddish tone, rather than the slightly colder Naples yellow. So I followed the movement of this sketch, working quickly, using big strokes,...