For painting landscapes en plein air, Frank Vincent DuMond taught his students a method of pre-mixing color strings in stepped values, moving from light to the dark value by creating color “notes” analogous to musical keys.
Anybody who has drawn or painted for any length of time realizes that the intensity of creative work cannot be maintained at a consistent level. There are times when I am overwhelmed with visual ideas and wish I had another pair of hands to set down my perceptions. At other times everything seems dormant, though I realize that this is part of the ebb and flow of life.
Is my visual message strong, simple, and to the point? Have I gone beyond the subject and touched on a more profound universal truth? Have I overworked this to the point of no return?
Edwin Dickinson’s paintings are swimming in the ocean of visual sensations and have just barely started to crawl up onto the land and become “things” that the brain can identify, and therefore, exert hegemony over.
I marvel at the beauty and generosity of the people who allow me to search into and contemplate them. What is the source of their strength? What wounds are they carrying? How are we the same and how are we different? How can I do justice to my sitter’s integrity?
I am always trying for a visual synthesis of the sensual realism in Baroque still lifes and the cerebral structure of cubist still lifes, not quite there yet, but I am reconciled to the fact that painting is about striving rather than arriving.
The past ten years have been incredibly transformative physically, mentally, and spiritually. There is real richness there, something magical and beautiful, which I’m not sure yet how to translate into art. I am looking forward to creating a body of work that comes from my core. I can feel the stirring and rumbling within, it is coming!
ASL Alumni, History
“Women Picturing Women” Features Alumnae of the Art Students League of New York
March 29, 2021 0
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An exhibition exploring works by women depicting women in portraits and domestic scenes, home-centered settings, and idyllic, invented landscapes.
I love analyzing the beauty of the human machine.
ASL Alumni, At the League
The Life and Art of Anne Eisner: An American Artist between Cultures
March 11, 2021 0
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Anne Eisner came of age in the 1930s and 1940s, during the struggle among artists and intellectuals to combat fascism and create a better world. After studying at the Art Students League, she left a successful career as a painter to follow Patrick Putnam, with whom she had fallen passionately in love, to Epulu, a multicultural community in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo.
At the League, History
Sarah Taylor Adams: Early Deaf Artist at the Art Student League of New York
February 24, 2021 0
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The Art Students League of New York played a vital role in Deaf artist Sarah Taylor Adams’ desire to challenge ableist discrimination and to grow as an artist.
As a young child, I could not be stopped from drawing with anything, on anything, all of the time. Nothing has changed that.