Alias Arts

How do we actually look at pictures, and how does that affect what we see in them? I started thinking about this again when I read about the Kuuk Thaayorre, an Aboriginal society in northern Australia. Lera Boroditsky (mentioned previously on A&P) reports on The Edge that their language and …

Title: Running Free
Size: 102×127 cm
Medium: Oil on canvas

My latest opus, a duck rushing along the river during mating season:

12 x 16, oil on board

Oil painting is pretty exciting for me. Unlike a professional, I never quite know where I will go next or what will serendipously happen next. For example, at first, my duck made its first …

Jerry Rankin is a Montana artist who seems able to come up with completely new ideas in every project he undertakes. Only a few of these from his career are available on his web site. Recently he created two sculptures, variants of a theme, that have no precedent in anything …

Bruce Marsh Commented on Josef Albers in reference a recent post on Giorgio Morandi. He presented the challenge of finding three colors that would create the sense of two colors overlapping – if I understand correctly. It made me wonder if this daunting task could be automatically solved by the …

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My day in Yellowstone last month was a long and varied one (see previous posts one, two, three). As I was leaving the park along the Madison river (almost the longest in the U.S.), I stopped occasionally to photograph the line of mountains on the opposite side of the valley.
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As …

This has to have come up among the copious writings surrounding Cubism, but the facet – a unit of composition often used by Picasso and Braque – can resemble a sheet of paper hung on a wall.

Signature elements include a generally rectilinear shape, a highlight and a shadow side. One …

My hazy recollection is that I  first heard cubism explained as a style that showed multiple points of view in a single painting. That may be fairly typical of the popular conception of what cubism is. But since one often has difficulty even telling what the subject is, it’s pretty …

This time of the year is special. Last spring I was taken by dappled light as it fell upon the house and the old fence. But that didn’t last as trees were felled and the fence was replaced by something smooth, implacable and untouched by time. But the setting sun …

I just visited the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, where I saw, among other things, a couple of Rothko paintings and a Barnett Newman. Maybe that’s why this installment of the continuing Yellowstone day is more colorful than previous ones (see parts one and two).

I stopped at a favorite spot …