In the history of portrait painting, it is fascinating to interpret what the artist is trying to convey about the sitter. Sometimes when the portrait is of a member of a ruling family, it’s pret ...
Read MoreI can’t think of a more appropriate month for National Garden Month than April, when we are fresh from winter and want to go outside and see flowers. April was first declared National Garden Mon ...
Read MoreWatercolor can be a very unforgiving medium—boy, don’t I know it! I started out studying for an MFA in painting using gouache and watercolor, but my professors suggested that what I was tr ...
Read MoreBeing a painter, I have colors that I consider essential to almost every painting I make. I tend to prefer phthalo and cobalt colors. (Safety note: yes, I always wear gloves when I paint.) O ...
Read MoreI am painfully aware that very few people learn to write in cursive these days. When I was a teaching assistant in grad school, some students couldn’t read my grading remarks because I wrote the ...
Read MoreI’m celebrating two national days today with this beautiful calligraphy—National Backward Day and National Inspire your Heart with Art Day. What better way than with an image of calligraph ...
Read MoreI was not aware of the association of romance with the month of August, but I think it’s refreshing. On one website that explains national month days, it said that “February isn’t th ...
Read MoreToday's Rethinking Classicism post brings us to the city of Isfahan, Iran. The Safavid dynasty (1501–1736) was a cultural pinnacle in Persian history. The Safavid rulers were massive patrons of ...
Read MoreIstanbul is yet another one of the places on my “to see” list that I probably will never get to see. One of the big draws for me to that city—besides its amazing history as the forme ...
Read MoreAside from painting, architecture is one of the most stunning legacies of the Mughal Empire that ruled most of India between 1526 and (technically) 1857, when it was dissolved by the British East Indi ...
Read MoreThis week, I’m going to recognize Thanksgiving with works of art, rather than odes to a holiday that has evolved from “giving thanks for blessings” to gluttony and narcissism (gee, n ...
Read MoreWesterners usually think of the Archangel Gabriel in terms of Christmas cards depicting the Annunciation, when he proclaimed to Mary that she would conceive Jesus. Well, it turns out that he was a mul ...
Read MoreThe sculptural decoration of Hoysala dynasty (ca. 1050–ca. 1346) architecture is particularly ornate and worth scoping out. In the West, we are so inundated with data about the “sculpture ...
Read MoreI probably shouldn’t be using the word Balance after the latest election. Let’s ignore that by doing some visual exercises. I’m always intrigued with the issue of “balance&rdqu ...
Read MoreI learned long ago how venerated calligraphy is in some cultures, and we speak of that in many of our Davis books. A short while ago as I was reading about contemporary Iranian artist Parastou Forouha ...
Read MoreJuly is World Watercolor Month. I’m always happy to celebrate a medium in which I am really not terribly good. I have a feeling it’s because I’m an impatient Virgo who can’t st ...
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