Praeterita

One of my goals for 2019 is to make more ceramic pieces. I don't pretend to have any groundbreaking skills in the medium, but I do love manipulating the clay and seeing the final glaze-fired piece. Below is a set of photos taken at each stage of making a recent piece inspired by my paintings and prints from the last few years. This is the terracotta clay piece just after I made it: Then after it was bisque fired: And finally after it was glaze fired: Not sure about the colour, but I do love the high gloss effect of fired ceramic. For this one, I brushed on two layers of a reddish-orange glaze, two layers of black on the arch, and two drip layers of blue on the figure and base.

I recently finished teaching a five-week introduction to etching class. They were five talented and enthusiastic adult participants, all first-timers when it comes to etching, and they all produced interesting prints that used many of the available textures you get with copper plate intaglio. One of my favourites from the class was this image of mother and baby, made with line etching, a light aquatint, and drypoint. It has the feel of one of Mary Cassatt's prints. People ask me if teaching takes anything away from my studio art, and I reply: absolutely not! I love sharing the things that I have learned from 25 years of making art, and I love it even more when I see the discoveries people make. Plus, whatever particular art form I teach (printmaking, drawing, handmade books) invariably makes me find out something new about the medium, or spurs me to make something new for myself.

After writing a 1,000 word piece about Winslow Homer's eighteen month stay at an English fishing village, I have been writing a series of primers about other artists who made similar journeys. Links to the series here: Gauguin ; Manet ; John Marin ; JMW Turner ; Monet . In the final post in this series, I rate Winslow Homer himself. Winslow Homer, The Northeaster , oil on canvas, 1895 Who Winslow Homer (1836-1910), American landscape and marine painter. Coastal associatio n The coast of New England in the USA, and Cullercoats, in the north of England. First coastal visit Like several painters in this series, Homer was born near the sea (Boston, Massachussetts), spent much time inland or in big cities while building his career, then returned to the coast, this time that of Maine, in 1883. Reasons for visiting Homer had painted marine scenes before the 1880s, but it was his two year stay in Cullercoats, a tiny fishing cove on the northeast coast of England, t...

January 2nd, 2019. Patty and I had just landed in Paris the day before, on New Year's day. This was taken on our first walk, at about midday. We strolled drowsily from our rented apartment in Montparnasse up the Blvd. St Michel, cutting slightly northeast at Cluny so we could approach the Shakespeare and Co. bookshop via the network of narrow, stone-paved streets that follow the medieval street plan even if many of the buildings now date from the 1800s. This was my first sight of Notre Dame -- on this trip. I'm posting it now for the same reason as everyone else around the globe: millions of Parisians walk past it or see it every day, 30,000 tourists visit(ed) it every day, yet it's one of those buildings that everyone who has seen it comes away with a deeply personal attachment to. In this photo, at the moment I took it, I just wanted to capture the fact that you can walk around central Paris, on the way to somewhere quite different from Notre Dame, just noticing it ...

I took this picture in the Portland Art Museum a few weeks ago. These are three terracotta figures made in southern Mexico or central America, some time between 200 BCE and 400 CE. Meso-American art is one of my favourite things to look at in museums. They could not be more different from the sculpture produced in Greece and Rome during the same time period, but to me they are the equal of classical sculpture in their expressiveness. NB: It's probably inaccurate to call them sculptures, because the anonymous craftsmen who created them may have done so for religious reasons. That is, they were creating figures for ritual use, rather than works of art. Though just as in Western art, there's no reason why those should be mutually exclusive. Another thing: having worked on making my own little figures in clay recently, I have a deep appreciation for the skill it takes to make figures like this -- particularly feet and hands!

Artfully shot black and white photo of me, taken by my wife Patricia Ann McNair , through the tunnel of holes in a sculpture by Barbara Hepworth .

I have these large collage pieces on panels that I made a few years ago. My work has changed a little since then, at least in technique, so rather than throw these older pieces away, I tried to bury the existing surface in a mixture of gesso and piles of acrylic gel medium. When it dried, it left this interesting surface. The Prussian Blue areas were originally a steel grey, which seems to have interacted with the gel to make this colour. The result reminded me of the cyanotypes I've been making, so I taped up a few of those, and they seem to match: Hmmm....food for thought.