Today in art class I worked more on tone. I’ll show you the progression of a drawing in charcoal on rag paper. The first step is to determine the average tone of the setup, which in this case was a middle tone, about a 4 on a 1-to-10 scale, where 10 is the darkest. The setup was a dark wine bottle, a green pear, and a white onion set on […]
I’ve been learning to think about tone in a painterly way. Tone is the structure of a painting and is what makes objects appear to be three-dimensional. If you think in terms of movies, you’ll notice that a black-and-white movie tells you most of the information you need to know about the environment. You can tell what is grass and what is water and what is skin, and so forth. […]
I haven’t fallen off of a cliff. Just FYI. Lately I’ve made a change from the art of writing to the art of painting. I’m learning to paint from a classically trained artist in a small, self-paced class. It is absorbing a lot of my mental time even though I’m physically drawing only about six hours a week. I’d like to post bits and pieces of things I’m learning as […]
Every now and then I put in the DVD for a lecture series on discrete mathematics and watch one. I like discrete math because a) it’s not calculus and b) it’s all about patterns, so it’s like doing a puzzle. I can actually wrap my head around discrete math. It suits the regimented side of me. Anyway, today’s lecture started off about recognizing patterns in series of numbers added together. […]
I love this sign. It’s outside the full-scale replica of the Parthenon in Nashville, Tennessee. What would Socrates say? P.S. Am looking through vacation photos now that the kids are in school. I’ll eventually write about The Bath.
I haven’t written part two of the essay. Part of the reason is that I’ve been distracted by something more important, but the other part is that it’s hard and I’m still struggling to overcome my academic laziness. I am not proud of this. I like to hope that announcing my weakness will motivate me to overcome it. I see it as similar to telling everyone I’ve started a diet. […]
In 1942 in California, John Steinbeck wrote a novel called The Moon is Down. Meanwhile, World War II raged in Europe, North Africa, and the Pacific. 1942 was a dark year. The Reich was rising. Storm troopers under the command of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist Party had captured and now controlled Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Holland, Belgium, Norway, France, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Greece. A little Jewish girl in the Netherlands […]
Until I can locate my camera’s power cord, there will be no vacation photos. Try to restrain your disappointment. ;) While the kids were at Vacation Bible School yesterday (a concept I find simultaneously delightful and mystifying given my secular upbringing — but that’s a whole other post) I spent an hour avoiding cleaning the house and instead watching the first two lectures in a series devoted to the history […]
Somewhere close to 60 years ago my grandmother planted these “champagne” irises. They’ve survived droughts, freezes, and then 18 years of neglect after she died. More recently they survived being dug up and moved to my house. I’ve been watching them, anticipating the day they would burst forth. Today was a perfect spring day. I brought Augustine’s Confessions outside to read after it got too sunny to keep weeding. A […]
Friendship can only exist between good men. This is what Cicero said in his letter called On Friendship. I decided to read it tonight after seeing it referenced in St. Augustine’s Confessions, which I’m working my way through this month. Is it true that friendship can only exist between good men? Well, to parse it some, I’d argue that friendship can exist between good women as well as between a […]
Flabby Brain 