‘Only the Spirit and Splendor’
“In our fine arts, not imitation, but creation is the aim... The details, the prose of nature, he should omit and give us only the spirit and splendor.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson Donald Demers, [...]
“In our fine arts, not imitation, but creation is the aim... The details, the prose of nature, he should omit and give us only the spirit and splendor.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson Donald Demers, [...]
Anyone driving north from New York City or south toward New Jersey has passed the famous “Palisades” (or at least a sign for the Palisades Parkway ;) They’re a line of 300-foot-high gray basalt cliffs [...]
Dan McCaw is a contemporary American artist who lives and works in Torrance, California, alongside his two accomplished artist sons, John and Danny. Together, they share a studio environment that fosters exploration, dialogue, and a continual [...]
Love or hate the little critters (squirrels that is, not artists!), artists have been making paintings of squirrels for hundreds of years. A cursory glance at the history of squirrels in art begins with the [...]
“I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape – the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show.” -Andrew Wyeth [...]
Good art wakes us up and shakes us from tired thoughts and dull routines. That’s what brings many of us to the easel in the first place. And the longer we work at anything creative, [...]
It’s the waning autumn of the year. We’re seeing (at least in the Northern Hemisphere) the days shorten and the night-shadows creep in earlier each evening. Art shines a light that can counter the dark. [...]
People used to say, “Is there anything in it?” to question if you could benefit from something or whether it was a waste of time. As in, “What do you do?” Oh, I work in [...]
At first it looks like abstraction: a beautiful entanglement of color, shape, movement, and rhythm, rich with forceful brush-work and painterly impasto. It’s perhaps not entirely unlike Jackson Pollock’s1952 abstraction, “Blue Poles” (below). Jackson [...]
Science is unlocking all kinds of “secrets” to one of life’s grandest and arguable most important mysteries - creativity. There’s plenty of evidence now that creativity can indeed improve and even prolong your life. Taking [...]