This post is to inform our customers that we are not changing any normal business practices and class schedules due to the corona virus concerns. We are following all protocols of the CDC and will continue to stay informed and make any changes in our future temporary business practices. The store is owned by somebody that has been affected greatly by infection, the irresponsibility of others and knows autoimmune conditions. The store is cleaned and sanitized regularly for this reason.
Our business hours will stay the same. Our class times will stay the same. Our services are enlarging to meet any demands. Our weekly order is placed on Mondays and is received by Friday. Special orders can be placed by Friday will be arriving on the following Friday as long as our vendors are able to fulfill them. Until the end of March, the store is able to order daily as our vendor is allowing small orders to be shipped daily for your home studio needs. At this time a large order has been shipped from Nevada of our diminished stock from our classes restarting.
Class offers will be increasing into April as the best way to survive such an onslaught of anxiety driven press is to find ways to alleviate this stress. How do we do so and follow our requested “social distancing?”. Of course, you think out of the box as most artists do:
- Our painting class on Thursdays was so popular that we have decided to also offer this on Tuesdays in April. Doing this will limit the amount of students/artists congregating and follow the requested CDC guidelines. Drawing class is moving to Saturday mornings. Colored Pencil and Watercolor Pencil Class is changing to Pastels for April. Please remember that all classes only allow 8 or less students. A minimum of 5 students is needed for these classes to proceed in April.
- Watercolor Workshop on the 30th and 31st has available seats at this time.
- If you need to know what is in stock in the store, please call us. We can take payment over the phone organize a pickup time for you. If you wish for us to meet you at the curb of the parking lot, we can also do this.
- Local delivery is possible upon request. This will be determined by demand.
Stay tuned for upcoming workshops and classes for April and May
Now for the stress relief. If some of us are going to hoard toilet paper, all I ask is that you do something creative with it. Throughout this post is some good ideas:
1) Build some beautiful drapery designs
We live in a beautiful world……..yeah we do, yeah we do, don’t forget to create today!!
Painting Techniques: Glazing Basics
There are some basic characteristics typical of my art, but the three most common are reflections, transparencies, and the depiction of fabric folding and turning throughout the canvas. Achieving the above-mentioned characteristics requires subtle changes in values. It necessitates allowing the light to penetrate the colors and reflect back to the viewer, just as it happens in nature. Glazing, sometimes known as layering, is the technique that I use to achieve the desired results.
What is glazing? Glazing is an old technique, as old as oil painting. Leonardo Da Vinci used this technique extensively, and when you see one of his portraits, you can appreciate the luminosity and smooth value transitions.
The first key to glazing is to know your paints. Each paint has a different degree of transparency. In other words, some paints are seen through and some are totally opaque paints, because they block the light. Think of paints as different types of fabric. Sheers are transparent while a fleece type of material is opaque. Many fabrics fall in between the two and they are semi-transparent or semi-opaque. Now, think about putting very transparent sheers one after the other in such a way that allows your eyes to penetrate the layering. You will be changing the colors, softening the edges, and adding a glimmering impossible to achieve with an opaque material.
It is not hard to learn the transparency of each paint. It is actually written on the outside of your paint tube. The letters are usually very small but you will be able to find the word “transparent” in the paint tubes of a phthalo, a quinacridone, an ultramarine or some of the sienna colors.
The word “opaque” is written on many paint tubes, and an opaque paint will hide whatever is underneath; therefore, the “sheer” effect will be blocked. For example, a titanium white or a cadmium color as a top layer will cover whatever is underneath. Keep in mind that mixing a transparent color with an opaque on your palette will also change the degree of transparency and block the light.
Once you know the transparency of your paints, the second key is to use the colors without mixing them with other colors on your palette. A beautiful glaze is achieved by using the color directly from your paint tube without compromising it and without mixing it. Just add linseed oil or a glazing medium, make sure the paint on your canvas has dried, and then apply a new layer to start transforming your art.
The layers are very thin applications of paint — one over the other. If successive layers of the same transparent paint are applied one on top of the other, that area will become darker, thus achieving folds if painting a fabric. If a transparent color is layered on top of a different color it will transform the base color, allowing you to create smooth transitions, unique luminosity, or perfect shadows. For example, an ultramarine blue on top of a red will create a violet or a perfect shadow for a red object located outdoors. If painting a precious stone, such as a ruby, glazing will help to shape and add darks to the jewel without sacrificing its luminosity and transparency.
Glazing seems easy enough, but where is the catch? Glazing requires time and patience when painting. Each layer must be dried before the next layer is placed on top. Glazing also requires planning since errors can be easily seen underneath transparent layers. And finally, glazing requires not only the knowledge of your paints but it also requires you to follow the rule of fat over lean. In order to avoid cracking, one must start with lean layers and slowly increase the oil content in top layers.
Glazing can give you wonderful effects of luminosity that can not be achieved with colors mixed on your palette or with wet on wet techniques; however, there is no reason not to use the two techniques in the same painting. A glazing can be applied to a dried impressionistic painting. An ultramarine blue glaze can push back an area of an impressionistic landscape, creating distance. Glazing can be used for a portrait, while the background can be done with a wet on wet technique. William Bouguereau, one of the last great masters of the glazing technique, used glazing to achieve incredible skin tones, but he used faster and more direct painting techniques in other areas of his paintings.
Mixing techniques can even be an advantage in that it helps to draw the eyes of the viewer to the glazing areas.
In essence, glazing brings wonderful effects to a painting by harmonizing the work, by achieving subtle hues, by softening edges, by creating distance, by simplifying shadows, and by adding a luminosity by the imperceptible penetration of light through the transparent colors. Outdoor Painter
Fredrix pre-stretched canvas is 50% off!
Craft pre-stretched canvas is 50% off!
Painting Boards from fredrix are 40% off!
All in stock desks are 50% off!
Richeson’s Navajo Easel is 50% off!
Art Advantage’s Box Easel is 50% off!
Strathmore 18×24 Drawing Paper Pad is 30% off!
All Daniel Smith Watercolors, sticks and grounds are 25% off!
These prices will be held until the 25th of April
2) This is not a toilet paper roll……its a painting of a toilet paper roll…….its also not a pipe.
‘The Scream’ is fading. New research reveals why
“The Scream” is fading. And tiny samples of paint from the 1910 version of Edvard Munch’s famous image of angst have been under the X-ray, the laser beam and even a high-powered electron microscope, as scientists have used cutting-edge technology to try to figure out why portions of the canvas that were a brilliant orangish-yellow are now an ivory white.
Since 2012, scientists based in New York and experts at the Munch Museum in Oslo have been working on this canvas — which was stolen in 2004 and recovered two years later — to tell a story of color. But the research also provides insight into Munch and how he worked, laying out a map for conservators to prevent further change, and helping viewers and art historians understand how one of the world’s most widely recognized paintings might have originally looked.
The art world is increasingly turning to labs to understand how paintings from the late 19th and early 20th centuries are behaving. Vincent van Gogh’s chrome yellows, some of which have started to brown, and his purples, some of which have turned blue, have been widely studied. But less is known about Munch’s palette, and scientists, using updated technologies and tools like transmission electron microscopes, are breaking new ground.
Jennifer Mass, president of the Scientific Analysis of Fine Art lab in Harlem, whose team is on “The Scream” research, explained the science recently in her lab. She pointed to a photograph of what looked like a set of stalagmites: It was the surface of “The Scream” seen under a microscope.
“This is really, really not what you want to be seeing,” she said. Nanocrystals are growing on the painting, held by the Munch Museum — stark evidence of the degradation near the central figure’s mouth, in the sky and in the water.
Conservators and researchers at the Munch Museum contacted Mass, who has been working as a fine art scientist since she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1995. She is also a professor at the Bard Graduate Center and has partnered with many major institutions in research.
Eva Storevik Tveit, paintings conservator at the Munch Museum, said the museum had sought out Mass because of her expertise in cadmium yellow, which she had studied in Matisse’s work, and because of the high-quality scientific tools the lab has at its disposal. (One of Mass’ colleagues, Adam Finnefrock, once took tiny samples of Cézanne’s emerald green pigments to a particle accelerator at Stanford University.) And the museum, which will move to a new building this year, needs to figure out how to best display the painting, balancing conservation concerns with viewing experience.
Munch’s materials have now been more fully analyzed, and the research, due out this spring, fleshes out a more complete story about the painting. Mass’ team was able to narrow down Munch’s paint choices using his paint tubes, some 1,400 of which are held by the Munch Museum. Over time, with exposure, the yellow cadmium sulfide has oxidized into two white chemical compounds, cadmium sulfate and cadmium carbonate.
The analysis, Mass said, has implications for impressionist through expressionist paintings made between the 1880s and the 1920s painted with cadmium yellow, 20% of which she estimates are experiencing similar phenomena.
Mass and her team work with museums, private clients, auction houses, art fairs and artists on everything from large-scale contemporary outdoor sculpture in the Hamptons to ancient Roman sculpture. They are a part of a niche in the art world — boutique labs that operate outside of large institutions, though often in tandem with them — something that has become more common as the demand for scientific research has increased. Perhaps best known was James Martin’s Orion Analytical, which was purchased by Sotheby’s and became the first in-house lab of its kind at a major auction house.
Other such companies include Geneva Fine Art Analysis, based in Geneva’s Free Port, and the London-based Art Analysis & Research. Often they are called in by collectors or potential buyers who are interested in questions of authenticity.
“There’s been a real explosion in the field,” Nicholas Eastaugh, founder and chief scientist at Art Analysis & Research, said. “There are a lot more people coming in with new approaches, new ideas and new insights.”
Whether for conservation or authentication, the work often reveals something about an art object that the naked eye can’t see — how old a painting really is, whether it contains drawings underneath its surface, or what factors in the environment might be causing it to deteriorate. This last question is particularly important when it comes to artists working in the same period as Munch, as research is just starting to illuminate the era.
“There tends to be an interest in the bigger-name artists, for obvious reasons,” Eastaugh said. “But actually these are problems that will affect all artists of that period if they are using these materials.” He said that more research would be helpful in showing “more general patterns” in the pigment degradation mechanism.
The colors of the late 19th century and early 20th century are fading especially rapidly because of changes that took place in paintmaking. Paints had been made by hand-grinding minerals extracted from the ground or using dyes made from plants and insects. The industrial revolution brought about the production of synthetic pigments like cadmium or chrome yellows, which artists would mix with oil and fillers. Artists began experimenting with these synthetic pigments, which were sometimes haphazardly prepared and untested for longevity but were exceptionally bright — enabling the brilliant palettes of Fauvism, post-impressionism and modernism.
At that moment, many artists were abandoning traditional painting techniques, said Lena Stringari, deputy director and chief conservator of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, who has studied color change and pigments in van Gogh’s work. “Many artists were working in plein-air, and they were experimenting with various paints and color theories,” she said. “There was this explosion of color with the rejection of the academy.”
That made the new pigments popular, Mass said, but they were unpredictable. “We can’t say, ‘Oh, it’s a tree, so we know that the foliage would be green,’” she explained, “because in the case of Matisse or Munch, that’s not necessarily true, so we need to turn to science.”
Recapturing these hues is impossible, but science can get us closer. Koen Janssens, a professor in the department of chemistry at the University of Antwerp who has studied the pigments of van Gogh, Matisse and others, said, “The idea is to try, in a sort of virtual way, to reverse time.” Conservators wouldn’t apply new pigments to a canvas — but digital reconstructions can gesture at the past. Mass predicts a shift toward augmented reality in reconstructions, so that you might hold up your phone to a painting and see its former color layered on the canvas.
It hasn’t always been a totally easy marriage between physics, organic chemistry and the art world, said Kilian Anheuser, head scientist at Geneva Fine Art Analysis. “Until very recently, the art historian expert reigned supreme, and it was really the art historians who insisted on having the last word,” he said. “And then in recent years we’ve had quite a number of forgery scandals where things have come to light through scientific investigation, and this has turned the tables a bit.”
Ronald Varney, an independent fine art adviser, said: “There’s probably a bit of resistance to the world of science in the art market. This is still a business that depends enormously on the expertise of individuals rather than machines.”
The study of degradation may be increasingly important to buyers, he added, as “condition is something that’s ferociously important now.”
Research has certainly altered the way art historians see some of van Gogh’s works. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and the Metropolitan Museum have mounted exhibitions in recent years highlighting his disappearing hues. Teio Meedendorp, an art historian and senior researcher at the Van Gogh Museum, said: “It’s something we’ve really only realized in the last 10 years. Research that has focused specifically on the technical aspects has changed the way we think.”
Interestingly, van Gogh, among other artists, was aware of the pitfalls of the new pigments. “I’ve just checked — all the colours that Impressionism has made fashionable are unstable,” van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo, in 1888, “all the more reason boldly to use them too raw, time will only soften them too much.”
In a later letter, he wrote, “The paintings fade like flowers.” artdaily
3) Modern problems of a capitalistic third world country or paint what you most want?
For this week only: unrepeatable chance to see Raphael’s tapestries with Michelangelo’s ceiling
The Vatican Museums celebrate Raphael’s 500th anniversary by hanging his tapestries in the Sistine Chapel for which they were created
Hurry, hurry to Rome. You have just this week, until Sunday 23 February, to see a very great rarity, the ten Raphael tapestries hanging on the walls of the Sistine Chapel as they were intended to do. You will see them without glass, below frescoes of the lives of Moses and Jesus Christ by the greatest Italian painters of the 15th century, Botticelli, Perugino, Ghirlandaio and Signorelli, and under the sublime ceiling by Michelangelo completed in 1512.
You will see them as the Pope Leo X, who commissioned them to hang here, saw them first, on 26 December 1519, the feast day of St Stephen. He had asked Raphael, the genius whose frescoes and paintings have made the Vatican the centre of the 2020 Raphael quincentenary celebrations, to paint scenes from the lives of St Peter and St Paul to be woven as tapestries in Brussels.
These paintings, known as the Raphael Cartoons, are on loan to the Victoria & Albert Museum from HM The Queen. The tapestries, which were woven in the workshop of the Fleming Peter Van Aelst, are normally shown under glass (unavoidable for conservation reasons but always a disappointing way of seeing textiles) in the Salone di Raffaello in the Pinacoteca Vaticana.
The tapestries caused a sensation that winter’s day because of the drama of their composition and their large-scale, expressive figures right at the front of the picture surface. They moved the master of ceremonies, Paris de Grassis to say, “There will never be anything more beautiful on earth until the Last Judgement”.
Tapestries were so precious that they were only hung on major religious feast days, so it is possible that this was the first and last time that Raphael himself saw them in situ, because he died less than four months later, aged 39.
Access is free with a ticket to the Vatican Museums, which offer a €28 ticket to skip the queue and go quickly to the Sistine Chapel (see the website for details). The Art Newspaper
Richeson Pro Synth Brushes have returned to the Art Store! For both acrylic and oil painting………
4) Art is feeling what you see, its getting others to feel it with emotion – Keith K.
Faced with segregation, black artists sold their work from their cars. They became known as the ‘Highwaymen’
Harold Newton did something that took guts.
An African American artist from Georgia, Newton in 1955 walked through the front door of a well-known white artist’s home in Fort Pierce, Florida, to ask A. E. Backus for advice.
“Backus had a reputation here in town for being inclusive and open to people no matter their gender, no matter their beliefs, no matter their race,” said J. Marshall Adams, Executive Director of the A.E. Backus Museum and Gallery in Fort Pierce. “Backus was very encouraging of his work, gave him critiques, gave him demonstrations, gave him art supplies to help encourage him.”
Newton soaked up everything Backus taught him.
Selling paintings along the highway
But Newton had one more hurdle to overcome if he wanted to sell his own landscape paintings.
“He couldn’t set up his own gallery, his own space in those segregated times and attract white clientele to a black studio so he had to figure out a way to get his art to his clients, to his customers,” Adams said.
Newton’s solution: sell his paintings out of his car along U.S. 1. That method spread and was adopted by more than two dozen artists in the area, leading to more than 200,000 paintings and a vibrant African American art scene up and down the Treasure Coast. The artists were later given the name: Highwaymen.
The story of Alfred Hair
One of the artists considered to be the scene’s leader was Alfred Hair. When Hair was 14 years old, he, like Newton, fell into Backus’ orbit.
Hair went to the nearby segregated school in Fort Pierce — Lincoln Park Academy. It was Hair’s teacher who suggested Backus take him under his wing.
Backus taught Hair how to paint landscapes and how to make frames. Hair started to believe he could turn painting into a career, something unheard of for blacks of the time.
“The only jobs you could get was working in the fields, that was your job, in the orange groves,” said Hair’s widow, Doretha Hair Truesdell. “Alfred didn’t see himself doing that. He said painting is what I’m going to do. This is my job. This is my employment.”
As Hair grew in the industry, he knew he would have to do things differently from his white mentor, who could set up in galleries and share his paintings with mass audiences.
So Hair came up with his own business model.
A new business model
“What he could do is lean into his talents, and one of those talents was painting fast,” Adams said. “If he could learn how to paint faster and paint more volume he would have more to sell — he would sell them for a less expensive price point than an established artist — but at the end of the day make as much money.”
Soon, Hair took a page from Newton’s playbook. He began driving up and down the highway selling his paintings.
It worked. During the early part of the 1960s Hair, and many other artists with a similar painting style, thrived.
“On Oct. 16, 1965, we moved into our house that we had built from those paintings,” said Hair Truesdell. “When we moved into that house that’s when we really exploded. We could produce about 20 paintings a day. We hired salespeople. Some of the people that are Highwaymen now were our salespeople. They sold for us, so we were really making a lot of money for that time.”
Hair and Newton’s practice of selling art out of their cars came to be used by many African American artists along the U.S. 1 corridor on Florida’s Treasure Coast.
Many found success.
When everything changed
However, in 1970, the African American art scene lost its charismatic leader when Hair was gunned down in a bar. He was only 29.
“Overnight, everything dies,” said Hair’s widow. “Nothing is left.”
Many of the African American landscape artists continued to paint, but waning interest after Hair’s death coupled with new tastes and styles in the 1970s and 1980s saw much of the success fade away.
“We survived it all,” Hair Truesdell said. “We’re still living. Still standing and still we have the memory and we will always have the memory of Alfred, of his vision.”
In the mid-1990s Jim Fitch, a Florida art historian, discussed the African American painting movement of the 1960s in the St. Petersburg Times, using a label to describe their art.
How the ‘Highwaymen’ came to be
“That term is ‘The Highwaymen,’” Adams said. “The name came from the artery of U.S. 1 being the chief way to go up and down and sell your works of art. So it’s easy for us to, now that we have a term, to describe these artists.”
This created a new interest in their art, which is estimated to include 200,000 paintings.
One of the distinctive things that make the Highwaymen art unique is the frames and vibrant colors of the landscapes.
Especially early on, because they lacked the resources and supplies, Hair and others would paint on upson board. They framed paintings with crown molding and brushed them with gold or silver to give them a rustic look.
“I really think the board that we painted on, I just think it gave it vibrancy that you don’t get from canvas,” Hair Truesdell said. “Also, we shellacked our board, and then we put a sealant on the board, and then the paint just adhered to that sealant and I just think that it gave it life.”
The true number of Highwaymen artists has been debated, with some being considered second or third generation Highwaymen.
However, in 2004, the number of identified Highwaymen was set at 26 when they were inducted into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame.
They include: Curtis Arnett, Hezekiah Baker, Al “Blood” Black, brothers Ellis Buckner and George Buckner, Robert Butler, Mary Ann Carroll, brothers Johnny Daniels and Willie Daniels, Rodney Demps, James Gibson, Alfred Hair, Isaac Knight, Robert Lewis, John Maynor, Roy McLendon, Alfonso “Pancho” Moran, brothers Sam Newton, Lemuel Newton and Harold Newton, Willie Reagan, Livingston “Castro” Roberts, Cornell “Pete” Smith, Charles Walker, Sylvester Wells and Charles “Chico” Wheeler.
“Even though they might be painting similar subjects in a similar manner they each have their own individual viewpoints,” Adams said. “I think it’s important to honor these individual artists as well as the collective group. The collective story is really important, but it shouldn’t obscure the idea that these are individuals who are looking at subjects and painting with their own style. If you look closely you can see a wide range of different perspectives of how they approached a single subject.”
Highwaymen paintings can be seen at the A.E. Backus Gallery & Museum in Fort Pierce, as well as the Museum of Florida History in Tallahassee.
Many can be purchased at various websites in their honor.
There are also some pieces on display at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.
“It’s wonderful that these artists are being recognized today and they’re continuing to be recognized,” Adams said. “These works have a timeless beauty. They are of a certain time and there were certain social and political and cultural forces that shaped how they were made and how the people made them, were able to make them. They really speak beyond that.” Florida Today
GOLDEN OPEN Acrylics 5 oz. Tube Expansion
Starting early February, all OPEN Acrylic colors will be available in 5 oz. tubes, offering more choice to the growing community of artists enjoying the benefits of slow-drying acrylics.
· Less Waste – OPEN Acrylics will stay wet for the duration of a painting session. When kept in a sealed palette, paint mixtures can stay wet for months so artists can stop or start painting anytime.
· Time – Slow-drying gives artists time to relax and enjoy manipulating paint on canvas.
· Control – OPEN mixes and matches with other GOLDEN color formulas perfectly, so artists can use OPEN to create slower drying blends with Heavy Body or other acrylics, or use regular acrylics to accelerate OPEN drying.
· Ease – OPEN allows artists to blend and create traditional oil-like effects without solvents and messy cleanup.
5) Build some imaginative scenes of every day life!
Larger sizes coming to the Art Store: Pearl Ex Powdered Pigments
Our most versatile product yet, Pearl Ex Powdered Pigments may be used any time a metallic or pearlescent effect is desired: mix them into acrylics, oils, printing inks, encaustics, alcohol inks, epoxy, glues, casting resins, clay, varnishes…the list goes on!
Try it mixed with Gum Arabic for a DIY metallic calligraphy ink or watercolor, in the Pearl Ex Varnish for working on non-porous surfaces, or mixed into one of Jacquard’s colorless extenders for use on fabric.
Pearl Ex is a safe, inert pigment that exhibits extreme colorfastness and stability. The different particle sizes produce different effects, from a smooth pearly luster, to a highly metallic sheen. Pearl Ex creates a metallic effect without being a real metal—it will never tarnish or fade!
Note: Pearl Ex Powdered Pigments were specifically developed as an art material. They are NOT for cosmetic use.
FABRIC/FIBER/SURFACES
polymer clay, encaustics, paper, shrink plastic, leather, glass, canvas, wood, and more! Mix with a binder to use on natural and synthetic fibers.
BENEFITS OF ART THERAPY FOR ANXIETY
Art therapy helps facilitate cognitive disruption by moving attention away from rumination. This redirection of attention away from worrying then helps to regulate the nervous system.
Art therapy allows us to express ourselves visually and rely less on verbal expression. Verbal expression can be a difficult task if a client is catastrophising. The feelings of being overwhelmed can make verbal expression difficult which then negatively impacts the clients perception of self-managing feelings and thoughts.
Art Therapy can benefit clients by initially diffusing a stressful environment in the therapy setting. Techniques will help the client feel calm and able to focus on the task at hand. Once this anxiety is defused, the client is then more open to process thoughts, emotions and assess behaviour.
Art therapy can also assist anxiety by improving self esteem, resolving problems, expressing feelings, problem solving and goal setting which aids in working towards improved thinking patterns.
Below is a summary of some of the benefits of art therapy for helping with anxiety:
- Calms the nervous system
- Acts as a distraction
- Interrupts rumination
- Encourages focus on one thing
- Increases self-esteem from the act of creating something
- Reduces over-stimulation from external sources
- Provides tactile stimulation
- Venting, releasing stress
- Useful when verbal expression is limited
- Encourages “play”
- Art activities can be undertaken outside of therapy when situations arise
We at the Art Store hope you have been finding our monthly coupons in the coupon mailers coming to your houses. Keep looking for these and take this anxious time of “social distancing” as the best time to create in your studios. You have the time and the excuse to do some therapeutic work………so GO for it!
