This blog begins with me sitting in St. Louis’s International Airport in Missouri. As I sit here and rapidly turn my head I am aware of seeing color, but shapes tend to escape clear outlines. It’s only when I slow … Continued

        I previously referred to Picasso’s remark “I don’t seek, I find.” Our readiness to notice anomalies in our field of vision and our lives enhances our experience of the ordinary. We begin to think about things … Continued

Chiaro (clear light) and scuro (dark, from which we get the verb “to obscure”).  Leonardo da Vinci perfected many ideas for transferring visual experience onto a two dimensional surface and Chiaroscuro was one of his finest. Caravaggio, Rembrandt and Turner … Continued

     If you want the eyes to twinkle, the fruit to gleam, the bottle to shine, then follow Rembrandt’s example. Look at the hilt of his cane. It sparkles. Its sparkle follows a formula; any small area of light … Continued

Back in the 1920s the Bauhaus artists like Johannes Itten and later followers like Faber Birren tried to quantify a recipe for luminosity. Birren would eventually describe the condition in his book ” Principles of Color” as the result of … Continued

In the 19th century many scholars studied the Renaissance to learn painters’ secrets, techniques and principles. Notable among them were Sir Charles Eastlake with his book on the “Methods and materials of Painting of the Great Schools and Masters” first … Continued