Saying Goodbye to World Watercolor Month 2023
Watercolor 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 ...
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Curator’s Corner
Beautiful in Cobalt Blue
Being 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 ...
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Curator’s Corner
Wistful about Writing: Tughra
I 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 ...
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Curator’s Corner
Muthanna: Calligraphic Mirror Writing
I’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 ...
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Curator’s Corner
National Romance Awareness Month 2021
I 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 ...
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Curator’s Corner
Rethinking Classicism Part 4
Today'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 ...
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Curator’s Corner
Gem of the Month: The Blue Mosque
Istanbul 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 ...
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Curator’s Corner
Gem of the Month: Mughal Architecture
Aside 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 ...
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Curator’s Corner
A Multicultural Proclaimer
Westerners 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 ...
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Curator’s Corner
It's All in the Details, part 2
The 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 ...
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