One of my most vivid memories of drawing is from when I was five years old. I was on the cusp of kindergarten, and my mother took me to my future classroom to meet my teacher before school started. My teacher, Mrs. Eagen, gave me some paper and colored pencils. She asked me to draw…
Here’s a fun project that will allow you to explore new ways of understanding both the illusion of space, inexorably grappled with by artists throughout history, and the inherent flatness of your paper’s surface. These two ideas collide (or reach a peaceful harmony) below. And attempting to draw the impossible (something not visible) will allow…
At best, when I’m drawing clouds, I feel like I’m moving air vapor around, not just moving my pencil. – Barry Nemett on his work “View from Montecastello” I first met Barry when we both taught together several years ago. We had many conversations over the course of the semester and have since gotten to…
I was really close to my grandfather on my mother’s side and spent much of my youth with him and my grandmother, as my mother worked the late shift at the local hospital and they watched me and my brother every night. We also had dinner with them every weekend until I left for graduate…
Matt makes intensely engaging paintings that grapple with the relationship between architectural spatiality and painterly flatness. Their color, gradations, and undulating, isometric patterns reveal shallow spaces that appear to both open and close simultaneously. Subtle shifts in the color and direction of his oil stick stripes and marks can make a wall seem to be…
When I was writing my last essay on Chris’s works, we talked at length over email and his answers to my questions were really insightful. Chris also visited my Experimental Drawing class and the students loved him. Below is an edited version of our interview. John – What was your work like at Pratt…
As a follow up to my previous post, I thought it would be interesting to discuss a few more drawings that deal with the lottery, in more detail – how I thought through them in terms of process, and how I translated the ideas I have about the lottery into works that both reflect these…
For this post I thought I’d talk about a drawing I’m currently working on and discuss how it has evolved over time. My son is 8 years old and one part of his math homework is completing word problems. These are math problems where the main information is presented in narrative form. A fairly simple…
The Butterfly Effect was named in the 1960’s by Edward Lorenz. He used to describe how a very simple system could yield immensely greater effects in varyingly unpredictable ways. Lorenz described the details of a tornado: its form, its velocity, path, etc., as being influenced by exceedingly minor disturbances in the weather. As the story…
Chris and I are both from Westfield, Massachusetts so I know something of what he saw as he grew up. We lived near Northampton, in the midst of the western Massachusetts alternative music scene, and both loved the music of Dinosaur Jr., Steve Westfield, Pangloss, Sebadoh, and others. This music was being made in the…