COMPOSE

What a surprise for me when I finally realized how small most daily paintings are. Looking through blog after blog of these little jewels,...

What is a shape? Try this. A shape is an area enclosed with edges, specific or implied . That's my definition. I could not believe ...

Writers have words. Words have roles. A noun tells us what a thing is; a verb tells us what it is doing. Adjectives tell us something abo...

If you haven't already discovered Katherine Tyrrell's brilliant blog " Making a Mark, " you must and not because she recog...

There's no better place for an artist to be than "in the zone". It's a place where all creative people function at their ...

Last week, I introduced the idea that unity and harmony play different roles in our painting. I focused that discussion on harmony. Here...

In the blogs and other art circles, we see the words harmony and unity talked about like a chef discusses salt and spices, but often I see...

This week's and last, I'm responding to Dar who commented: I wonder if you have any thoughts about format (size, shape, orientation)...

Last week, Dar commented: I wonder if you have any thoughts about format (size, shape, orientation) and scale (life size, sight size at arm...

Readers of this blog know by now that I'm an ardent fan of Richard Schmid. Recently while watching the critique section of his video, N...

Nothing grates on the human nervous system like a dominance of dissonance. And so a good sense of harmony is as paramount to a painter as i...

We put thirty spokes together and call it a wheel; But it is on the space where there is nothing that the utility of the wheel depends. We t...

A practice that can directly effect our compositions is tracing projections. No other issue in the field of painting stimulates as much pas...

In the long run, it's best not to work from poor reference material, but on rare occasions, you might want to do a painting or drawing ...

Let's face it. There are times when we must work in the studio using resource material although, I agree, the best reference material i...

Not long after I began this blog about composing, I started receiving e-mails from various artists asking me what I think are the most im...

This is in defense of the tools I keep talking about, those freeing principles that give our paintings an underlying structure just as the s...