July Lecture in the Catskills

This coming July 8th at 7 pm in the Catskill Mountains of New York, I’ll be a one-day guest lecturer at the Grand Central Academy’s Summer Workshops for a presentation on color and light.


I’ll give an evening lecture during the workshop of Senior Hudson River Fellow, Thomas Kegler (above). His week-long course called “Field Study for the Studio Landscape Painter.” Tom’s work has the rare quality of being closely observed and poetically inspired, and he could have held his own with any of the traditional Hudson River School painters (Kegler's "Buffalo Creek Dusk," below). 


My lecture will cover material from the new book, Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter, geared for plein air painters who want to explore the methods of the pre-impressionist Hudson River School Painters. Besides the digital slide show, I’ll have original paintings to show and books to share. If it’s like last time I visited, there will be plenty of opportunity for camaraderie and shop talk.

The full course will go from July 5 - 17, 2011 (10 instructed days, 1 free uninstructed day). The tuition is $1350, which includes Mr. Kegler’s instruction, park fees, 2 group meals, and my lecture. The class is open and is now accepting registrations.
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Previous GJ Posts on the Hudson River Fellowship.
Color and Light on Amazon
Grand Central Academy's Summer Workshops
Senior Hudson River Fellow, Thomas Kegler

Van Gogh’s Color Schemes Served as Pie Charts

There are various ways to show a color scheme in diagrammatic form. One way is through the color gamut overlaid on the color wheel, as I’ve shown several times on this blog and in my book. That’s best for defining which color types are in and out of your scheme.


But it doesn’t let you know how much of each color is represented in the color scheme. To show that, you can graph the distribution of colors in a pie chart. Here’s one from Arthur Buxton’s blog. It converts 28 Van Gogh paintings into sector graphs showing the percentages of the five most common colors in each painting.

Warm colors in the dark yellow family predominate, often played against deep blues. Van Gogh doesn’t use much green, red or violet.

Working in reverse, from a set of pie chart to a series of pictures, this would be a useful method for film or graphic novel designers to plan color scripts.
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Arthur Buxton’s blog
via BoingBoing
suggested by John Harris and Susan Fox

The Strange World of Albrecht Dürer

I spent the day with Albrecht Dürer’s monsters yesterday.


An exhibition at Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts presents about 75 prints from the museum’s collection of more than 300 woodcuts, engravings, and etchings by Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), the supreme master of northern Renaissance printmaking.




The emphasis is on monsters, witches, hybrid animals and marauding soldiers. An introduction to a room themed with images of the suffering of Christ and the horrors of war says:

“Just as the media of the twenty-first century—whether films, video games, or comic books—reflect the pervasiveness of violence in our culture, Dürer’s images mirrored his own society’s fascination with human torment..”

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The Strange World of Albrecht Dürer will continue through March 13.
Visitor's Information for the Clark Art Institute in Massachusetts, USA Exhibit is free.

"Decoration is a Sin"

In the documentary “Sketches of Frank Gehry,” American architect Frank Gehry (b. 1929) says, “I grew up a modernist. Decoration is a sin.”


A sin, really? Does Mr. Gehry believe that Notre Dame would be better off stripped of its angels and gargoyles? Would he stucco over the arabesques of the Alhambra? Would he delete the ornaments from the Parthenon?


Although I respect some aspects of Mr. Gehry’s work, I disagree with him on this point. In able hands, decoration is a gift, a joy, virtue. Decoration is not a frosting applied to form. When it’s well orchestrated, it meets our fundamental desire for visual rhythm, order, and variety of scale.

Decoration in some form has been central to every visual culture through all history and across all cultures, until it was banished by the priests of minimalism in the twentieth century. The absence of decoration is one cause of the sterility and impoverishment of much modern architecture.


If decoration is a sin, then I’m a sinner. If I’m going out to a concert, I’d rather go to the Paris Opera, which is gloriously decorated.....


.....than Gehry’s Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, Bard College, New York (above), which is not.
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"Sketches of Frank Gehry" Documentary--2 minute trailer 
Notre Dame Cathedral
Alhambra on Wikipedia
Parthenon on Wikipedia
Frank Gehry on Wikipedia
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addendum: Adolf Loos's 1908 essay "Ornament and Crime" on Wikipedia
Thanks, Digitect and Christoph Heuer

Homemade and Mail Order

This stove and chair, sketched at a history museum in Fairplay, Colorado, suggest that the family sent away for the cast iron stove, and made the chair themselves out of planks of wood.
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South Park City museum in Fairplay, a restored 1880s mining town.