I’m learning how to draw, and let me tell you—it’s nothing like I expected. Drawing doesn’t require years of art classes or fancy tools. According to Betty Edwards in Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, we already know how to draw. The key is getting our left brains out of the way so…
Ten years ago, I found myself sitting in on a drawing class in Oakland. The topic that day was shading—how to capture the play of light and shadow around an image. The instructor gave a beautiful demonstration, and I was captivated. I thanked them, left the classroom, and barely made it out the door before…
In 2001, during National Poetry Month, Robert Siegel on NPR’s All Things Considered asked Poet Laureate Stanley Kunitz whether poetry was a dying art. Kunitz replied, “No, in fact, people are more involved with poetry now than I’ve ever seen in my lifetime.” This optimism wasn’t always Kunitz’s outlook. In the 1970s, fewer people were…
Last Friday January 23rd, the French painter and art teacher Paul Reynard died in his New York home. He wasn’t particularly well known for his art in the United States (in fact I couldn’t find any images of his paintings on the Internet.) However, I loved something he once said about the creative process: “…there…
There are so many gems of wisdom in Robert Henri’s The Art Spirit that it’s hard to choose just one to share. (If you flipped through my copy, you’d see “wow,” “cool,” and “neat” scribbled in red letters in the margins of practically every page.) But perhaps the most profound insight is this: creating art…
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