Continuing on our theme of painting our animals from last week’s article, Work Like a Dog -

In portrait and still life work, artists are observers of the intimate—the interior worlds of home and studio. Here, the figure, the object, the people and animals which inhabit the space become the dominant focus. Finding and expressing a connection with them is essential to the expressive power of these paintings. The rule is simple: paint what you know and love. And so it is that we, along with our artist colleagues past and present, have painted our animal companions. Not only are they patient and generally serene models, but they also possess a dignity and acceptance of life that we would do well to try to emulate.

We’ve sampled a few favorites here, from Impressionism to Futurism and have found great diversity and always a passionate sense of connection between artists and their own canine companions or those of the households they are painting. James H. Rubin focuses in his book, Impressionist Cats and Dogs: Pets in the Painting of Modern Life on the era of Impressionism, a time when dogs began to be included more often in portraits with families and not just as working animals. In some of these paintings, the dog is the only figure directly looking at the viewer, “acknowledging the outside world”, as it were, while his human companions are rendered as oblivious to the painter and viewer. Rubin writes: “The tradition revealed . . . is one that turns the most ordinary visual scene into an extraordinary experience of art. By acknowledging the presence of an observer, the pets call attention to the maker of the image, and engage in a sort of dialogue with the viewer. Thus, Renoir and Cassatt used these pets not only to accompany and comment on the people in their pictures, but to call attention to their own presence as sensitive observers and creative portrayers of intimate scenes.” Often, the dog observes the observer.

(Read more about the wonderful artist known for his animal portraits by clicking here - Edwin Henry Landseer.)

Recently, an acquaintance of ours lost her vineyard dog, a Landseer Newfoundland of immense charm, to cancer. As we were reminiscing about the friendliness and boundless joy of the breed, we became curious about the origin of the name Landseer. We were pleasantly surprised by what we found. This variety of the breed is named for a British artist, Sir Edwin Henry Landseer, who achieved considerable fame during the Victorian era for his paintings of animals and dogs. In particular, Landseer was known for his portrayals of a type of Newfoundland working dog notable for its black and white coloration. He featured this dog as the rescuing hero in several famous paintings, such as Off to the Rescue, Saved, and A Distinguished Member of the Humane Society. The variety has been called a “Landseer” Newfoundland ever since.

Landseer was something of a child prodigy. It has been written that he was ambidextrous—able to paint with both hands at the same time. At the tender age of 13, he exhibited works at the Royal Academy, and after studying with the well-known history painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, he was elected an associate to the Academy at the age of 24. By the time he was 29, in 1831, he was elected a full academician. His work had immense popular appeal in the Victorian age because he often imbued his paintings with a moral dimension. Engravings made of these paintings by his brothers were widely circulated throughout England.

Landseer was also quite popular with the aristocracy, including Queen Victoria, who invited to him to Balmoral, to paint a large group portrait of the family. Unfortunately, Edwin Landseer suffered from melancholy and bouts of depression throughout his entire life, often affecting his ability to work. Although the royal portrait was never finished, he was given a knighthood in 1850. Despite his ill health, he continued to paint brilliantly and in 1855, he was awarded the great gold medal of the Exposition Universelle in Paris.

Interestingly, it is his sculpture for which he is perhaps best known. In the 1860s he was commissioned to sculpt the four great lions which sit at the base of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square. Each lion measures 20 feet long and about 11 feet tall. They are subjects avidly photographed by tourists from all over the world. Upon Landseer’s death on October 1, 1873, shops throughout England lowered their blinds, flags were flown at half-staff, and his great bronze lions were hung with wreaths. Crowds lined the streets to pay their respects as his funeral cortege passed by. His paintings may be found in the collections of the Tate, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Kenwood House, the Fitzwilliam Museum, the British Library and the Wallace Collection in London.

I’m not an animal painter by vocation. I think I have painted only four or five dog portraits for money in my entire career. I just like painting them. It is a joy because, they, are a joy. No malice, no guile, just living day-to-day taking what comes, or doesn’t. I would like to live like that more often and I do—when I’m painting. The rest of the time, not so much. So whenever I get the chance, I whole-heartedly recommend novice painters to paint their animals. Dogs and cats, especially, can lie still for vast amounts of time—and then roll over. It is a great way to learn how to paint fur and hair quickly with the minimum of strokes, or, go wild and paint every curl on a standard poodle. I think that what we are doing when we paint a living being is extending our awareness and our compassion beyond ourselves.

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It is no wonder that we seem to have instilled within us the perception that creativity declines with age. In 1874 American neurologist George M. Beard studied the productivity of dozens of scientists, artists and writers throughout history to find the years of their highest and lowest productivity. His findings?—that 80% of the greatest masterpieces painted and most important scientific breakthroughs discovered happened between the ages of 20 and 40.

Perhaps it’s time to reevaluate those figures! More recent scientific research shows that the aging brain manages information differently (and sometimes more efficiently) by “cross-indexing” better than the younger brain may be able to do. Roberto Cabeza, a neuroscientist at Duke University, calls this “HAROLD” for “hemispheric asymmetry reduction in older adults”. Through functional magnetic resonance imaging scans perform…

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Ann and I recently started teaching painting classes again after a nearly three month hiatus caused by my neck injury. During that time I was not able to paint either. As annoying and irritating as my neck brace is, it is nothing compared to my sudden cut-off from the easel. I am back painting again, and, in a few days, my neck brace comes off, we hope, for good.

What I realized, during and after our first class, was that I really enjoy teaching—always have—precisely because teaching art is about living well. I treasure the social interaction with students who have also become friends, and I welcome the focus on matters of art and painting. I get swept up in the magic of the vibe in the studio as people engage in learning about everything related to art and painting, and the rarely spoken desires of the soul that drive them to take art classes and grow.

Above all, the studio functions as a place of sanctuary, a refuge for se…

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Lt. General Omar N. Bradley, Lt. General George S. Patton, Jr. and
General Dwight D. Eisenhower inspect the Stolen Paintings
Stored in the Merkers Mine on April 12, 1945.
Also pictured in the center is Major Irving Leonard Moskowitz.
(National Archives and Records Administration)

Times have certainly changed and sometimes it is refreshing to look backwards to a time when the protection of important artworks was paramount to the government.

The movie, The Monuments Men, is an interesting look at the work of a group of men and women serving in the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives section established in 1943 of the Allied armies. They came from thirteen nations, most volunteering and most with expertise in the arts as curators, museum directors, artists, archivists and architects. Regardless of some inaccuracies in the film, it serves as a reminder of the importance of safeguarding civilization’s cultural and artistic treasures and of the heroes who have sacrificed their lives to do so.

…

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Ukrainian Landscape Volodymyr Orlovsky

The Smithsonian Institution Cultural Rescue Initiative (begun in response to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti), is working in conjunction with the Cultural Heritage Monitoring Lab at the Virginia Museum of Natural History to identify at-risk cultural targets in the Ukraine. The team lab, housed in Martinsville, Virginia, is acting as a rapid-response team working around the clock. The lab uses satellite sensors and infrared technology to track military strikes, mapping their proximity to culturally significant areas. Their work at matching strikes with their cultural heritage inventory maps helps to minimize response time for the conservators and other professionals who are working to protect important art and cultural sites.

Their work also creates documentation that can show the crimes being committed in violation of the UNESCO 1954 Hague Convention treaty, signed by both Ukraine and Russia which pledges protection of cultural sites, scientific coll…

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When we were young and just beginning to walk on the wire as self-employed artists, we embraced how much we had to learn about balance and not falling off. We weren’t necessarily brave, just very determined. Back then, we expected that we would fall every so often, so we cobbled together a net to catch us when we fell. That net consisted of an art support group at the local art center and library, free rent in exchange for work and income from numerous temporary illustration and design jobs. Many of you will be familiar with combinations similar to those. It is part of the young Funambulist’s repertoire. That word, funambulist, is ancient Roman in origin. We think it is interesting that in English, it embodies the word for pleasure wrapped up in the very real danger of attempting to walk on a wire high above solid ground—the fun generally being in the not-f…

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During this time of convalescence, I am somewhat confined to my home base for painting subjects. I cannot possibly consider this a restriction though, because over the last 30 years, Ann and I have been slowly, intentionally transforming it to be a grand painting subject. Monet’s example was but one of our early inspirations for what might be done by artists with a nose for plants, trees, space organization and ecology—given enough time. Before we even bought this property, we were engaged in learning everything we could about those subjects.

We also understood that Monet had considerably more financial resources to draw upon than we in creating his gardens and famous lily pond. Our property is largely forested and hilly, so we have worked with that and given up the notion that a big lily pond would be very practical. Instead, we decided to learn all about trees, build paths and manage our forest so that it would become aesthetically more beautiful…

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I am presenting a new exhibition of my work this month which includes older paintings from my personal collection not offered to the public before. The show did not start out to be a retrospective, but is, instead, a creative response to my recent injury, which halted all progress on the new paintings I had in the works in my studio. This left a gap which needed to be filled, so I selected the best of older pieces I had, to add to the exhibition. Now that I see it beautifully presented on the gallery walls, I think that this exhibition is really more interesting than what I had originally planned.

As an example, the painting above, Swan Dance, was created from a moment I saw in the Papal Gardens in Avignon, France. I was there, along with Ann, teaching a watercolor workshop at various locations in the south of France. I had the class set up at an overlook onto the Rhone River which had a spectacular view of the Château-Neuf du Pape vineyards in the…

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“The lovely flowers embarrass me.

They make me regret I am not a bee.”

– Emily Dickinson

The tiny bee plays a monumental part in making our lives possible. Without their pollination of both wild and cultivated crops, we would lose over a third of our food supply. A quote attributed to Albert Einstein says: “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would have only four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.” In the spiritual realm, bees have represented a bridge between the natural world and the afterlife, hence the tradition of “telling the bees” when important events (deaths, weddings, etc.) take place. This was common practice throughout European countries. It was believed that if the custom did not take place, the bees would go into mourning and leave the hive, become sick or quit producing honey.

Beekeeping and domestication of bees is evidenced in art and in trac…

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Recently, I had a freak accident, fell and fractured a vertebra in my neck, creating what the doctors refer to as a “hangman’s fracture”. My break was the least serious of those kinds of things, the worst cases being unthinkable. Healing will take some time — it is another mountain to climb, but I will be fine. A thing like that, coming out of the blue, as it did, can change the way a person thinks about their life and perhaps their priorities.

As I was creating work for this exhibition at the time my accident happened, I realized that the opportunity to reshape my vision for this had been thrust upon …

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Gardens have provided immeasurable inspiration to a list of prominent artists beyond what are perhaps the most famous, the gardens of Claude Monet in Giverny. Among the French artists of the time, three who delighted in creating and painting gardens of their own were Gustave Caillebotte, Pierre Bonnard and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

The opening up of trade and travel in the late 1800s brought a surge of new plant species to Europe from around the world. Advances in hybridization and production led to availability of a greater variety of flowers at prices affordable to the individual gardener, not just larger public gardens. Iris and chrysanthemums were exotic new species to the European garden. Garden styles were becoming more naturalistic, steering away from the tight Victorian styles.

For some, the ability to manipulate nature by creating gardens for subjects of their paintings may have been a response to the turbulenc…

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(To read more articles about artists and their gardens (including Frida Kahlo, Gustave Caillebotte, Pierre Bonnard, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and more, type “Artists and Gardens” in the search bar above.)

We take for granted the great variety of colors of water lilies, including those in Monet’s most famous paintings, Les Nymphéas, displayed at the Orangerie Museum in Paris, but they are a relatively recent development. It wasn’t until 1889 at the World’s Fair in Paris that the first colorful water lilies were seen by the public. Before that, the only hardy water lily in Europe was white, but because of the relentless work of Monsieur Latour-Marliac, fair-goers were treated to yellow, pink and deep red water lily varieties for the very first time.

This was a breathtaking achievement in horticulture. Latour-Marliac had worked for decades to hybridize the new colors and they were a sensation, winning a first prize at the World’s Fair. Claude Monet attended …

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“I paint flowers so they will not die.” – Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo’s short life (1907 - 1954) was filled with color. Casa Azul, her home from childhood, remains a legacy to her love of flowers and brilliant color. Today, sixty-seven years after her death, the gardens and home are a museum open to the public. (Be sure to check the Casa Azul website for Covid-19 restrictions.) The garden is maintained as closely as possible to the inspiration that first created it, with plants that were used in Kahlo’s art and in her life, some still flourishing from when she lived there.

In 1929, Kahlo’s father, Guillermo, transferred ownership of the home where Frida was born and had grown up, to Frida and husband, Diego Rivera. They transformed the home and gardens to celebrate indigenous Mexican culture, removing non-native plants and European influences.

Flora and fauna surrounded Kahlo. She wore flowers from her Casa Azul garden in her hair, filled the house …

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We received a response to our article “Living in the Ow” from artist Shere Chamness, who shared with us her challenges with having to limit her outdoor painting time in the bright sun due to eye surgeries.

Her solution? Creating tiny fifteen-minute-only paintings using Altoids tins. To her surprise, it was not only fun but improved her overall skills. We, too, have found it interesting that unexpected forced limitations often kick our creativity into new exciting spaces.

Shere writes: “Somehow, doing the quick little plein air paintings helped me move past my previous weaknesses!

It forced me to work on composition, proportions, color mixing and capturing a non-detailed image in a short time. And, the little tiny paintings are still fun.

I just completed my 60th one. Each canvas is just 1.75” x 3.25”. I carry all the supplies I need in a child’s insulated lunch pack.

Anyway, my main message is that your injury might end up pushing you beyond your lim…

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The Color Green

Mixing accurate and harmonious greens can be a real challenge for the painter. Trial and error and lots of practice often leads each artist toward developing favorite mixes of greens which they use reliably in their work. To add complexity to the subject, recent scientific research has revealed that men and women perceive greens differently. (See “Tomato Tomahto”). Different seasons and different climate zones can require modulations of the cool/warm relationships of the greens in our palettes, and we must be aware of these changes as we travel or the entire painting will be off. For example, spring greens can be shockingly bright against the muted winter colors often still present. These fading winter tones create a backdrop that allows the sparkle of spring colors to stand out for a few weeks. But it won’t be long before what we call “The Wall of Green” descends upon the landscape, and those bright greens gain depth…

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For many years now, Ann and I have had a running debate about the color green. Specifically, the greens I mix and use in my landscape paintings vs. the greens she mixes for hers. She thinks my greens tend toward the too-blue side and I often find that her greens, especially in foliage, tend toward the too-yellow. She claims that she just sees the colors differently than I do, and to that, there is no logical rebuttal. We can never see eye-to-eye, so to speak, on this subject, and now we may know why.

There is an article by Libby Copeland from the Smithsonian magazine that reveals new research on the differences in perception and visual acuity between the sexes. Neuroscientists, led by Israel Abramov at CUNY’s Brooklyn College, administered a series of visual tests to a group of men and women, and the results are illuminating. Abramov spent fifty years studying human vision and the neural mechanisms that determine how we perceive colors.

While men have an advantage in detecting distant…

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The early arrival of spring here this year has caused an explosion of rich “spring” greens on the ground and in lacy cascades in the tree canopies. With our blue skies and puffy cumulus clouds, it is an inspiring and cheerful sight after winter. Green becomes a dominant color again in our plein air palettes, especially the mixes with cadmium lemon and cobalt. It is a moment when the rhythmic architecture and warm tones of the winter tree trunks take on a new dimension while wearing their new scarves and hats of bright spring colors. It is a great time to be painting outside, and we try to get it while it is here, for we know what is coming next. The Wall of Green.

Once the trees move beyond the bright introductory spring number, the forest fills in almost top to bottom with a homogeneous blanket of deep summer green. In summer, Nature’s exuberant burst of chlorophyll dares us to discern between the many subtle nuances of g…

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Being laid up the way I (John) am, currently has the benefit of lots of time just to think about art and puzzle over the brokenness in the world. Rather than retreat in despair to the solitudes of my studio as a reaction to the darkness outside, I’m choosing to agree with the late Toni Morrison’s take on times like these. In 2004, she said,

“This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language.That is how civilizations heal. I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge - even wisdom. Like art.”

Wise words indeed for all of us Sensitives who can easily fall into feeling alone, hurt and abandoned by the world, isolated as many of us are who …

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