The Art of Caricature: Try Teaching That!

I’ll be teaching a 5-week course on The Art of Caricature this summer at the Evanston Art Center.  The class will be held on Thursday evenings from 7 – 9 p.m.,  starting June 14.  Due to an email glitch, the class is not listed in the printed summer catalog, but it will be listed online [...]

Read Full Post »

Is It Finished?

In my drawing class, I like to create still lifes that don’t follow the classical model of decorum and grandeur.  My still life tends to look more like the left overs of a garage sale.  I do arrange the objects carefully and tug at the drapery to make it dramatic, but the whole thing is [...]

Read Full Post »

Picasso and the Process

If the question posed in the previous post seems simpleminded—of course it’s not art, it’s only an illustration!—then why do all beginning painters and limners get obsessed with illustrating what they see? And more often than not they get stuck in that obsession. Just this morning, a student (in a painting class that I was [...]

Read Full Post »

This Is Not Art!

A Chicago area French teacher is working on her PhD and writing bits of conversation to illustrate points of grammar and idiomatic usage.  To spruce up her presentation she asked me to come up with some illustrations. The distinction between illustration and art is one of the themes running through this blog.  It’s also a [...]

Read Full Post »