In the church tradition I belong to, there are no paid clergy giving the weekly sermons or Sunday School lessons. Instead, the congregants themselves stand at the pulpit to speak on an ad hoc basis.

Public speaking is not something that comes naturally to most people. It requires deliberate thought, preparation, and even training. Beyond basic delivery, a sermon requires research. Even an extemporaneous sermon relies on a deep personal repertoire of scriptural, doctrinal, and historical knowledge1. That’s a big request for folks who don’t do this sort of thing regularly.

So maybe it’s not surprising that, over the last few years, I have noticed a distinct trend during these lay sermons and Sunday lessons. Speakers increasingly sit at the pulpit and cite, quote, or repeat things they heard on popular podcasts2.

For a long time, this bothered me, and I could not figure out why. At first, I assumed it was just jealousy. I love doctrine, theology, teaching, and presenting, so I figured I was just being petty. But eventually, I realized the frustration went much deeper than personal ego.

There is nothing inherently wrong with these podcasts. Many of them are thoughtful, inspiring, and well-produced. And I don’t blame people for turning to them. But there is a problem. The problem is that the talks prepared from them feel formulaic rather than thoughtful. There is no genuine depth. A speaker might present good information that is spiritually enlightening on the surface, but at the end of the day, those ideas are not theirs. They are co-opted. The speakers are merely repeating things they were told, rather than wrestling with the concepts themselves.

Who cares? Why is that a big deal?

It matters because it is indicative of the broader culture we inhabit.

The Algorithm in Our Heads

I fall into this exact trap myself. When I want to know something, I often skip a standard search engine entirely and go straight to Gemini or another AI interface. As intelligent as I like to think I am, I do not always fact-check an AI output with the same scrutiny I would apply to traditional research. I take it at face value, read it, internalize it, and move on.

In doing so, I stop thinking. I stop pondering. I stop considering. I replace deep, emotional engagement with shallow digital thoughts replicated by an artificial intelligence operating on algorithms.

An AI does not think for itself. Like a human, it can only operate within its existing repertoire. While its map of knowledge is infinitely larger than any single human brain, it is still strictly bounded. An AI cannot wander out into the world on its own. It cannot explore or be curious without a user prompt directing it3.

When we rely on external shortcuts for our thinking, whether it is an AI model or a popular podcast, we sacrifice thoughtfulness. We stop truly processing the reality around us.

The Reductionism of Modern Expertise

I see this exact same dynamic in academia, particularly across my own social science discipline of criminology, but also in political science, sociology, and economics.

There has long been a heavy push toward extreme positivism, which often degrades into plain reductionism: the fallacy of stripping a complex phenomenon down so far that it ceases to be meaningful. Measurement by its very nature is reductionist, and while it has a clear utility, it is not a substitute for meaning.

In modern quantitative research, scholars constantly mistake statistical outputs for intrinsic meaning. People assume that if a study uses complex, sophisticated statistics, the research automatically matters. Statistics by themselves tell you nothing4. They provide a probability and a coefficient, but the actual meaning is entirely up to the researcher to construct (per se).

Perhaps that is why criminology still struggles to answer the basic question of why people commit crime. For every risk factor identified, you can easily find multiple people with those exact same attributes who never commit a crime in their lives. Most people in high-risk environments never commit serious offenses. Clearly, our explanatory models are missing key components, I believe in large part because we are prioritizing statistical formulas over genuine conceptual thinking.

Decades ago, researchers like Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay from the Chicago School, or early policing scholars like Egon Bittner or John Van Maanen, did not just run numbers. They sat with their observations and truly thought about what they were seeing. Today, we have substituted statistical thresholds for deep thought, just as speakers at the pulpit have substituted podcasts for personal meditation.

We see this in clinical settings as well. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is widely treated as an automatic solution. The statistical literature shows it works well, but “working” often means a 40 to 50 percent success rate5. That leaves 60 to 50 percent of people who don’t respond to CBT. Yet many practitioners apply CBT formulaically, assuming that if it fails, that, well, I don’t know what they would assume was going on; maybe that the client wasn’t following the CBT exercises?

True understanding requires looking past procedural routines and actually paying attention to the unique, messy human element in front of you.

What Art Demands of Us

If algorithmized thinking and surface-level shortcuts are taking over our public discourse, our research, and our religious lives, to name only three, how do we fix it? How do we rebuild our capacity for deep, uncomfortable thoughtfulness?

I am convinced that art is one of the few things that can save us from this dynamic.

Great art challenges us. It refuses to hand over pre-digested answers. Learning should be uncomfortable, and art forces that discomfort by requiring us to sit, look, and reflect.

Most contemporary artists do not create a work with the expectation that you will decode one single, pre-packaged message. Once an artwork is put out into the world, the artist’s intent yields to the viewer’s personal experience. It becomes your job to stand in front of an unmoving canvas and ask yourself: Why do I like this? Why does this make me uncomfortable? What is happening inside me right now?

Below, I have included several paintings by contemporary artists. I selected these works specifically because they do not carry the immediate, recognizable social status of the Mona Lisa or the Venus de Milo. They require you to bring your own framing to them.

I invite you to sit with these pieces. Give yourself anywhere from five to sixty minutes with them. Do not rush to analyze them clinically, at least not at first. Note what you feel, let your mind wander, and allow yourself to have a genuinely unmediated experience6.

Delivering a good sermon, conducting meaningful research, or engaging deeply with art are not skills that happen by default. They require practice, patience, and soemtimes even training. My goal is never to disparage people who are leaning on podcasts or external guides to navigate their faith or their work. Rather, I want to encourage all of us to step past the comfortable shortcuts, rely a little less on pre-packaged answers, and rediscover the value of doing our own heavy thinking.

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We really cannot discount small, local galleries and museums as being “regional” in a derogatory sense. They’re anything but. Most art museums are simply not that big in terms of their collections, influence, endowments, or activity. But that’s true for damn near anything. And because it’s universally true, “size” simply should not be taken into account when judging a museum1. Nowhere have I seen this more true than at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art.

Truthfully, it’s not even that small of a museum. It’s no Hermitage, but, again, what is?

This is a really long post. It even has subheadings! I considered breaking it down into multiple posts. But I decided against serial posts about the same museum because I only post weekly, and didn’t want to delay other posts from publication. So, I settled on breaking my “keep it to 500-800 word count” rule, and to instead go hog-wild. Because there was just too much to ignore from The Westmoreland.

Wyeth

When I visit museums, I do not do my research. Maybe that’s foolish of me, but I like to be surprised. And what surprised me the most about The Westmoreland was its awesome collection of Andrew Wyeth paintings2. My love of the Wyeth’s is directly owed to Ivan Fortushniak, who used a number of their works, along with those of Winslow Homer, in his own landscape watercolors and oils3. This was really my first time seeing Andrew’s work outside of Ivan’s collages, and I’ve since purchased Duff’s An American Vision: Three Generations of Wyeth Art : N.C. Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth, James Wyeth, to learn more.

Public Sale was the first Wyeth painting that caught my eye, initially because of the strong lines from the road and the tire tracks that pull the viewer into the picture with incredible force. Given that the subject matter is the foreclosure of a farm this effect is especially salient. And there’s a callousness in how the automobile driver not only leans uncaringly against the truck’s door, but also in how he didn’t even bother to drive on the actual road, choosing instead to demonstrate his apathy to the owners’ plight by damaging their property.

But what kept me lingering on this image was the sharp angles of the man standing next to the truck driver. There’s an incongruence to the shape of the figure that breaks up the more rounded patterns that Wyeth has already established. I think it’s this juxtaposition of an older way of painting - something blearily like the Hudson River School - and a more recent illustrative style that is reminiscent of both the period’s interest in worker rights and the exaggerated realism of pin-ups, advertising, and war-time propaganda, that succeeds in telling a story about change, industrialization, and modernity that gets you in the gut before it gets to your brain.

As much as I appreciated dwelling on Public Sale, these next two Wyeth paintings really took my breath away, largely because of their mastery with charcoal, graphite, gouache, and watercolor.

Everything in The Last of Autumn is a prelude to the tree: a dark and dying thing ready for the winter. The tree itself divides the picture plane into a diptych: autumn on one side, winter on the other. Like Public Sale, The Last of Autumn tells a story of change on an emotive level. It’s almost a magic trick: at first, the picture is lovely: mysterious, ethereal, really neat. But the more you look at it, the sadder, more mortal it becomes. This is an end more than a beginning.

A similar theme can be discerned in Waiting for a Bus. This is clearly an old woman, dressed to the nines. But she is waiting for a bus: not a chauffeur. It is not even clear if the land in the background is hers; although her shadow points us to it, there’s a suggestion in the snow that her footprints come from the left of the picture. The mailbox is empty, begging the question if she is alone with no expectation of enduring relationships. Despite being faceless, the emotion exuding from her body - how she stands, how she waits, how she clutches her coat tightly to her bosom - are all telling.

And let’s pause on the buildings. Again, these are not the manorial homes of the well to do - these are blue collar buildings, where home and work and livelihood are confounded into one. I want the buildings to lead me to the old woman. But in reality, with their roofs slanting violently towards the left, they lead me away from the woman and ultimately away from the picture. Again, this is not the beginning of a journey on a bus; this is an end, and an end into oblivion where the woman will not be remembered. Indeed, we don’t know who she is, and her faceless features only remind us that she simply does not, or rather, no longer, matters.

A nod to Jacques-Louis David?

That was pretty heavy. How about a detour?

Yeah, I know: not exactly a more cheerful subject matter. So much so that The Westmoreland included a disclaimer of sorts for this specific painting: “This artwork engages complicated ideas, most prominently suicide. Dialing or texting 988 connects to the national Suicide & Crisis Lifeline…” Incidentally, I like how they handled this: they neither removed the painting nor did they ignore the implications of showing it. Art matters; art is powerful. Images can affect us in ways that we cannot always anticipate. This disclaimer acknowledges that without diluting the power of the painting or ignoring the gravitas of its imagery.

This particular painting is considered by some art historians to be a major turning point in American art. As The Westmoreland put it:

In 1931, at the age of thirty-seven, Franklin Watkins was suddenly catapulted into the national spotlight when his painting Suicide in Costume won first prize at the prestigious Carnegie International … The choice immediately polarized artists and critics - traditionalists detested its subject matter, avant-garde artists saw the win as a sign of modern progress, and for others, the choice seemed to signal the ascendency of American art on the international stage.

“…traditionalists detested its subject matter…” I wonder how they felt about Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat. Honestly, when I saw Suicide in Costume, David’s famous painting was the first thing that came to mind. I was really surprised that I couldn’t find that connection on the Internet. Does anyone know if there’s a connection here? Or is this just me enjoying some art history pareidolia?

Because if Watkins did have The Death of Marat in mind when he painted Suicide in Costume, what does that say about his intent? Because The Death of Marat is a loaded, revolutionary painting that carries with it the political and societal baggage of an entire erstwhile Kingdom and a blossoming republic.

The Scalp Level School

Ok, for reals, now, let’s talk about something less somber but no less artistically intense, and that’s the work of George Hetzel and the Scalp Level School. Prior to my visit to The Westmoreland, I had no clue that southwestern PA had its own Hudson River School of landscape art. Having learned about it, I am now all about it4.

I would be disingenuous if I said that I was drawn to Hetzel and his students’ paintings because they didn’t remind me of the Hudson River School, but that is, if anything, a compliment. Hetzel’s work, and that of his students, are examples of finding beauty in your backyard. This is true of artists everywhere, but to appreciate it you have to juxtapose it against other artists who felt the need/call to go elsewhere, such as to New Mexico or Arizona - or France. There is value in both scenarios; but the Scalp Level School of art reminds us that inspiration is a matter for the eye, not the locale5.

There was also something about the paintings from this school that I can only describe as “time travel.” Consider this painting by Wall titled On the Monongahela. See, if you were to look at a painting of, say, Bear Lake by Harrison T. Groutage, and then were to go to the very spot that he painted, you would see essentially what Groutage saw. This is not true for Wall’s painting of the Monongahela River. This view of the river simply no longer exists. For whatever reason, I find this both captivating and fascinating.

Economy of Stroke

One of my goals as an artist is to be deliberate in my work. This means, among other things, painting or drawing from a philosophy of economy of strokes (or marks, or whatever). In a nutshell, this means that 1) each brush stroke matters; 2) each brush stroke is deliberate; and 3) I use the fewest brushstrokes possible to get the best effect6. Almost all of the artwork I’ve featured above demonstrate this economy. But I want to highlight three in specific that captured my attention for several minutes because of their economy (ie., independent of their composition, subject matter, etc.).

Let’s start with this adorable portrait by Cassatt. Take a moment and try and count how many times her pencil touched paper. Because you can do that within a reasonable degree of confidence. Yet the picture is so complete.

My figure drawing professor once suggested that I study the drawings of Degas to help me with understanding how to apply line weight. That in and of itself was a great use of my time. But what stood out to me while I was observing Degas’s works were his economy of stroke: similar to Cassatt, Degas was able to say so much with so little. I’m speaking specifically of his rough sketches which were often created in medias res and with exceptional speed.

There’s another great example of this economy of strokes from James Abbott McNeill Whistler. This picture, however, is more than a drawing, adding a splash of color with watercolor. I love this “ink and wash” study. It’s so energetic, and so complete, yet is utterly barren, relying largely on the tone of the paper for much of the painting’s local color7.

And taking it one step further, this piece from Winslow Homer is fully painted, but with an extremely limited palette. More so, it is composed of mostly simple shapes and silhouette. The story that this picture generates with such limited colors and shapes is enormously engaging. There is no optical distractions here; no over-stuffed Rococo motifs. It is an honest painting that carries its complexity despite - or perhaps because - of its simplicity.

Economy of stroke is more difficult to attain than it may appear. It takes a trained eye, practice and experience (with guidance and feedback), an understanding of anatomy/geography, and - and this is the most important part, in my humble and correct opinion - it requires guts. You have to have the stones to put paint to canvas (or pen to paper) and, with a few simple, directed, and deliberate strokes claim representativeness8.

The closest I have come to this is probably this study I recently did as part of an exercise from Jean Haines’ Atmospheric Watercolours:

I showed it to a few people, and no one was really clear on what it was :) And honestly? I’m kind of ok with that, because I really like this one, regardless.

A random interlude

Speaking of studies, I adored this display. (This was tucked away in the same gallery room where they stored their numerous Pennsylvania Dutch Frakturs.) This is another example of my new obsession (the Scalp Level School), and another testament to the importance of keeping a sketchbook for planning, playing, and making mistakes and experiments.

Regional Nods

The Westmoreland, appropriately, has several dozen works - and at least one exhibit - dedicated to regional pieces. For Westmoreland County, as well as Indiana, Cambria, Butler, and Allegheny counties (to name only four more), the most regional thing to portray is, reasonably, mining and industry. I generally associate those two words with filth. No judgment in saying this. I grew up in a coal mining community with a major power plant and coke plant. What I mean is when I think of beauty, mines and big smoke stacks ain’t it. Van Gogh may have found beauty in such conditions9, but I’ve lived in southern Belgium, too, and there’s a reason why Charleroi (the one in Belgium not Pennsylvania) and Pittsburgh and Birmingham (England) are all sister cities.

Still, I found several portrayals of industry and mining deeply compelling. These drawings by Wilfred Readio are wonderful pieces of art. Besides being a clinic in contrast, they use an almost journalistic tone: these pieces present the coal mines as they are, that is, dark, somber, utilitarian. Nature fades into the background as industry invades the hillsides and strips away the trees. The mines simply exist: they are as much a part of the landscape as the flora they are replacing.

One regional piece that really caught my eye was this one of Pittsburgh by Kindred McLeary. The energy of the painting sets me somewhat on edge. Which isn’t helped (or, rather, is helped) by the busyness of the composition. How the image leans also speaks to this vibrating energy.

The color choice is important. It is, in a word, dirty. It really demonstrates the subjugation of the environment by industry, and the effect of commerce on the natural world. Pittsburgh (and Charleroi and Birmingham) are cleaner, today, but their industrial past is far from invisible.

Taken together, the regional work reminded me that there are layers to enjoying or appreciating works of art. These are not going to be the sort of art that I personally will return to for inspiration or pleasure, but that does not mean that - when I do see them - I can’t glean considerable inspiration and even pleasure.

Coda: Potpourri

There were a handful of paintings that I just enjoyed because I found something about them delightful, whimsical, or engaging.

First is this congenial piece by Alexander Kostellow. What first caught my eye in this painting was its diagonals, both explicit and implied. The entire painting is a patchwork of crisscrossing lines generated by the careful positioning of shadows, benches, and lawn. This in opposition to the strong verticals created by the trees and people. The people are especially important because unlike these powerful angles, they offer a gentler, rounded image that makes the entire painting peaceful.

However peaceful it appears, though, I admit that there’s something off-putting and uneasy about this painting. I can’t put my finger on it, but the body language of many of the characters is skewed, creating a malaise. There’s nothing malevolent going on in the story, here, but there is a “cliquishness” that betrays the otherwise peaceful scene of community and neighborliness. It’s people going about their business among strangers going about their business.

This is another piece by Hetzel and therefore falls under his Scalp Level School. This composition is less dramatic than much of their landscape work, but no less awe-inspiring. And it’s not the road that meanders right off the canvas that captures my attention: it’s how the log (which acts as a sort of culvert) interrupts the entire flow of the composition. Between the overpowering vertical of the dirt road and the natural effect of the portrait orientation, my eye should want to go straight up and out of the picture plane, exit stage right.

But the log breaks this flow rather abruptly, and pushes me over to the otherwise easily missed trail on the right. This is encouraged by the sign. I really love this level of subversion in a painting that, at first glance, was uninteresting. It literally invites us to take the road less traveled. What a wonderful painting.

Finally, there’s this great drawing by Himler. This piece fits under the category of “regional work” as I discussed above, but that’s not what I enjoyed about it. It may be silly, but what I loved about this piece were the windows. Despite there not being a single figure visible in the windows, you can still sense liveliness and action. It’s almost a voyeuresque effect, akin to living in a big city and looking across the street at the neighboring apartment building. How she pulled this off with no figures and seemingly no effort is truly beyond me - but I love and wonder at it!

End of the road

I know, it was a long one. Let me know if you like this kind of long form essay. I don’t plan on doing them regularly, but maybe once in awhile when it seems appropriate, such as for museum visits. But at least in this case, The Westmoreland Museum of American Art really deserved a big treatment. What an incredible museum! I can’t wait to return.

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3

This is just one example. Fortushniak has a more recent series based on his reactions to the war in Ukraine that are even more potent and poignant.

7

You know who was a master of this? Frank Frazetta. Take a look at his Night Stalker, published as the cover for Creepy Magazine (#32, 1970). An enormous amount of real estate on this painting was “just” the natural color of the Masonite which Frazetta used for his support.

I’m not alone in this, of course. I think anyone who draws or paints starts to see the world differently. You start to see things that you never…

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An artist friend of mine recently shared their terminal diagnosis. The medical professionals have given them 5 to 8 years, but it could be any day.

Like me, they came late to art and creativity. And like me, they even went back to school to enrich their creativity. Unlike me, who went to art school in t…

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“Trees don’t look like trees.” I can’t recall where I first read that, but I’ve seen it plenty of times since, especially in books about landscape drawing. And it’s true. Try to draw or paint a tree such that it looks like a tree, and, at best, you’ll get something like this.

…

Ok, that looks pretty good, if a tad too symmetrical. Let me try again:

There we go.

Trees are weird. They are seemingly symmetrical. They seemingly grow straight up. But in reality, they actually look really weird. Comme ça:

Drawing trees was one of the first times the idea of draw what you see1 really clicked for me. And I think that - along with my abiding love of Ents 🌳 - is what really made me love trees and drawing them.

They’re simultaneously complex and simple. Varied, and patterned. Macro- and microscopic. A forest is made up of many trees, but a tree itself is not a forest2.

I am far from the first or only one to be enamored with the artistic interpretation of trees. I love this video from Walt Disney featuring four illustrators painting trees en plein air.

Different artists may endow their tree drawings or paintings with their own idiosyncratic pathos, but I do believe that there’s a common thread among tree-loving artists: a love of the tree’s personality.

In my humble and correct opinion, nothing really compares except the human figure. I image most if not all artists who deal with figure art have had the experience of seeing beauty in the simplest thing - a hip’s curve, a shoulder’s form, the first time you realize what lips actually look like. That same joy and fascination occurs when drawing a tree. “Who knew a tree actually looked like that?”

For my own tree-work, I don’t go too far beyond “wow, this is fun and cool looking!”, as you can see above with a few examples of my work. But there are plenty of artists who see much, much deeper than I.

For example, my friend Beth Wheeler, who finds solitude and the Divine in forests and trees.

Gustav Klimt’s trees are, in a word, enchanting.

I will always appreciate Uncle Bob’s love for trees. It’s sheer joy (no pun intended) watching his arboreal paintings come to life.

And, of course, I couldn’t leave out my idol, the Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, who often painted trees with a unique intensity.

The list is getting too long, so let me leave you with a few links to enjoy.

• First, Michael Chelsey Johnson is one of my favorite tree painters. Cf. his Southwest and Small Paintings collections. I especially admire Sedona Snag.

And second, some articles with lots of great images of tree art.

• Portraits of Trees, a Favorite Subject of Artists

• In praise of trees: a look at arboreal art

• Famous Tree Paintings – The Most Famous Paintings With Trees

• George Hetzel and Scalp Level

Bon appétit!

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What do I do? Depending on the level of stress, I either solve Excel c…

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When1 I first moved into my studio, I did what I always do in a new-to-me building: try to open every door in the building that isn’t locked or obviously private2. I didn’t find much3 but I did find the “back door”. My studio is on the third floor, and this was a door to a stairwell that went down to the ground floor and let out into the alley.

The stairwell is pretty scary: no windows [EDIT: there are indeed windows! It’s just really scary….], only artificial light, much of which is burned out or just missing. Bare brick walls and unfinished wooden planks for steps, and random pieces of forgotten art ephemera - broken stretched canvases, studies, and a pallet thick with dried oil paint and covered in dust. It’s the kind of place you’d expect to see a vampire sleeping. I usually avoid it, now.

But at the door leading to the stairwell was a card that said “Keep Going | No matter what!”

There is something really appropriate about having this card on what is an exit-only door in a building filled primarily with artists’ studios4. Among the artists I know, even the most accomplished have moments of self-doubt where a reminder like that offered by this card is a boon.

I don’t have any solutions for self-doubt (the remedy is self-confidence), but I do know that when faced with it, it’s best if I move through it. It gets to come along for the ride, but it has to take a backseat so I can just keep working. When self-doubt takes over, I lose patience and make silly mistakes that simply wouldn’t happen if I had been more deliberate. So it can be a passenger, but it’s not allowed to drive. Or talk.

Inherent to all of this is the fallacious believe that failure is not only fatal, but it’s simply not an option. Of course failure is an option, it’s always an option because it is always a possibility. And suggesting that failure is fatal is a false equivalency. As the inventor of Polaroid film5 said, "An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail."

See that? the essential aspect is not to not fail; it’s to not be afraid to fail. That change of emphasis can lead to a change of perspective.

And really, isn’t that what art is all about? Or at least a part of what art is all about? Creating the opportunity for an experience where someone gets to see how I see the world is, by definition, a change of perspective. Less dramatically, art teaches us that what we think we see is often not what we actually see - a valuable tool when perception is often mistaken for reality (cf. the Thomas’s).

So why not treat self-doubt in the same way? As a product of our perception rather than a representation of reality. In a different context, Dieter F. Uchtdorf encourages us to “doubt our doubts.” Why not apply this to creative work?

And to rip a verse of scripture out of its context, Paul taught:

So we are always of good courage … for we walk by faith, not by sight. Yes, we are of good courage.6

Self-doubt is more than a lie: it’s a liar. You can’t trust it. Better to doubt it and move forward in faith.

And if you ever doubt that, drop me a message, and I’ll remind you that yes, you can, in fact, do this, self-doubt be damned!

It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.7

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Background music used in the voiceover from the freesound_cummunity and are titled Birds and

Glory be to God for dappled things –
   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
   W…

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I am deeply inspired and moved by artists. The works of painters like El Greco; draftsmen like Menzel; illustrators like Elmore; and architects like Boromini do more than strike a chord with me. Art can arrest me in a way that almost nothing else can. Once I had a taste of what art can do for the soul, the idea of living without art was, to quote Vizzini, inconceivable.

The word I usually employ when I come across art that moves me is striking. Frederick’s Monk by the Sea, Goya’s The Third of May 1808, and the Cretan fresco called Bull-leaping are all striking. They take my breath away. And it’s almost never a “one-off”: if one artwork from an artist strikes me, it’s almost a guarantee that other pieces from their body of work will also strike me.

It is difficult for me to look at the work of these painters without wanting to make art myself. But they do more than inspire me to paint; these great artists give me permission to paint.

Consider Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earing. At first glance, this is a wholly representational and realistic painting, which is in keeping with both Vermeer’s other paintings (remember the maps?) and the overall genre of the Northern Renaissance painters. But once you move from her face to her turban or to her chemise, it becomes evident that this is a painting.

I’m not trying to expertly point out the obvious, here: of course it’s a painting. But compare her turban to that of Van Eyck’s (purported) self-portrait:

The turban in the Van Eyck portrait is far more finished than that of the girl with the pearl earring. It is, to use contemporary parlance, more rendered. The turban in the Vermeer portrait, by contrast, is more “painterly”, with visible brushstrokes and abbreviated hue and value changes. Vermeer lets your mind “fill in the gaps”; Van Eyck leaves nothing to the chance of human imagination.

So, how does this give me permission? There are times when I am painting that I like something I did that either is not there in “reality”, or maybe is an accident, or - to boil it down to the core - does something to break the fourth wall between art and viewer. A part of me wants to conceal such “blemishes”; but I really like them. Artists, like Vermeer, give me the permission I still feel I need to let such flaws stand.

I have found that one of the keys to being an artist is knowing your tools: how does your medium work against a given ground using a specific brush with a certain type of solvent, for example. The more you know your tools, the easier (and more fun) it becomes to let your tools do their own thing.

There’s an interview/advertisement with Joseph Zbukvic where he talks about this very thing: “This is quite nice, it’s painted itself. And the more you can do that when you paint watercolor the better off you will be.“

I am still learning my tools, and I certainly have a better feel for some media than others. For example, charcoal is a medium that made sense to me the second I tried it. Watercolor, less so, but I’ve worked really hard at it. And that is where I’m at, right now, in terms of learning my tools: I’m still experimenting, learning, seeing what each can do, and working hard not so I can bend my tools to my will, but so that I can learn to work in sync with them in a truly creative process. Hopefully one day I can make art just as arresting as those of my creative heroes.

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Take a quiet moment to look at this painting. What do you see first? I see the woman sleeping placidly in the grass. She has been reading a book, enjoying a cup of tea, and decided to cover her eyes from the sun (shining down in the same direction that her head faces) and nap. She is completely at ease; safe. Like a cat who lets you rub their tummy, she trusts her world.

Why is the dog not asleep? Where is his attention? What does he hear? The dog’s gaze; the woman’s laterally reclined body; the shadows; the slope of the gentle incline; and even the boughs of the right most conifer each point us to the right of the picture. Is the sky in that half painted a little darker? Less cerulean and more ultramarine?

The title of this painting is Distant Thunder (1961). With that in mind, take another quiet moment to look again at this painting. How has the experience changed (if at all)?

This painting, like so much of Andrew Wyeth’s works, makes me so sad. Is her world about to betray her trust? Will that betrayal be so complete as to render her peace permanently handicapped?

And now for something completely different.

Anyone who grew up reading the Dragonlance novels or playing AD&D will be familiar with Larry Elmore’s works, if not his name1. This painting was done for Dragon Magazine (#163, November, 1990) and is unique insofar as it portrays a single character. The majority of Elmore’s illustrations included at least two characters, usually more. This was in keeping with what he was typically commissioned to illustrate: adventuring parties in media res. Elmore would paint these bands of merry miscreants2 at the beginning of their odyssey, in the middle, and at the end, and at all levels of experience and maturity3.

This illustration is a radical departure from those tropes. Given the accoutrements and dress of the main character, it’s obviously a fantasy theme, which is in keeping with his standard repertoire. But not only is she alone, we are not able to tell at what point in the adventure she is portrayed, or even if she is an adventurer at all.

Her facial expression is even more ambiguous: is she lonely? grieving? bored? longing4?

She sits on a gnarled tree5 at the edge of a sheer cliff looking out onto a vista at such a distance that Elmore employs areal perspective from foreground to background. It could be dusk, as the shadows are short and soft, and the sun on her face is gentle6. Maybe this scene tells the story of an unanticipated conclusion. Or is this dawn, before the sun crests the rolling hills just outside our interloping field of vision, and represents a feared beginning?

Why the ambiguity?

Some paintings leave us with very little doubt as to their intent and meaning (eg., Picasso’s Guernica); others take a little more work given the time and location of their creation, but are still quite obvious (eg., Van Eyck’s The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb). Still others only give us a general mood and atmosphere and let us fill in the rest (eg., Hopper’s Nighthawks). I find this piece by Elmore to be the latter: like the woman he’s painted, the entire narrative is frozen at a moment brimming with so much potential the illustration almost vibrates.

It begs a question of us: now that we’re here, at this cliff’s edge, looking out over the vast unknown, solid ground behind us, dark and ignored, how will we move forward?

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I am really taken with this painting by Rick Landesberg:

It’s very small, I believe 6 x 6 inches, and seemingly very simple. And it “breaks” some “rules” of landscape painting, eg., by using a square …

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Generative artificial intelligence throws a real googly against the sticky wicket of the art world, possibly for better, possible for worse, but probably for both. I’m not passing moral judgment on the use of AI generally, but, as with most forging and faking, I feel relatively comfortable passing…

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As I’ve been researching art crimes1, I have been, well, I don’t know the right word here. I’m going to go with amused. I’ve been amused at how difficult nailing down what exactly a fake or forgery is can be. On the one hand, some fakes2 can be crystal clear. On the other han…

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With the help of AI, I prepared a few fake pieces of art for my students, and thought it’d be fun to share them here. The point of the exercise was to get an idea of how difficult (unreliable?) connoisseurship can be. Granted, my students don’t have the sort of saturation required of connoisseurship (I hear you, Thomas Hoving), but it…

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