In retirement, after a rich and rewarding career in the natural sciences, I have taken up oil painting with a passion. I always hankered to express myself visually and felt cheated that I couldn’t do art at school because of timetable clashes with science subjects. I w...

Breaking the Comparison Habit

As artists, none of us are strangers to clichés that non-artists expect of us: from romantic dreamers to tortured creatives. But what about the stereotypes that we fit ourselves into? Perhaps we think that our artistic skills are governed b...

A painting starts in the mind. It must. From there, the complicated, elusive, grinding process of getting your vision onto a canvas begins. Gathering one’s visual data, be it from life, sketches, field work, collected props, or reference photos, you reference all these...

I recently interviewed Dan Thompson and Mary Qian about what it’s really like to take part in a Face-Off! Both artists did their first Face-Off in Atlanta, 2019. The Face-Off is a popular annual Portrait Society of America conference event which kicks off the main conf...