Adelie Bischoff

Adelie Bischoff, Still Life, 1967

Adelie Bischoff -- Where have you been hiding all my life??  Stumbled across this fantastic painting today and was thrown into a frenzy!  I can see the clear relation to her husband and the other Bay Area artists, but the first painting that came to mind was this one: 

Pierre Bonnard, The Bowl of Milk, 1919

Because I have been studying that tabletop for a long time -- and any artist that makes me think of Bonnard and the Bay Area in the same brain wave, in my mind, has great taste and talent.

Casadei Still Lifes at Gross McCleaf

This week my friend Lauren and I dropped in to Gross McCleaf to see their current show, a two person exhibition of Tim Conte and Giovanni Casadei.  There were a lot of nice little paintings by both artists but we got the most discussion out of Casadei's still life paintings.  There are probably about fifteen, with some really nice color and compositional stuff happening.  I was once again re-inspired by another artist's take on the still life and new directions I could take my own work.  The show is open until May 25th.

Jet Setting

Since my full time job ended April 30th, I thought I would have so much time (too much time) to blog and think and peruse the internet.  But for the first two weeks I pretty much just jet-set around the country like a socialite haha!  I got lucky in that Alex had a work conference in San Diego that I could accompany him on and my brother had his college graduation in Orlando.  Neither city had too much to share here in terms of pictures or art, but I had fun doing a bunch of little sketches:

This is on the ferry to a little island, Coronado, in San Diego

My dad at the pool in Orlando

A chaise lounge and my mom in the pool in Orlando

It was so much fun, but now I'm back and as you can see I'm blogging and perusing the internet.

Website Updates

I have put some time into updating my website finally!  I should do it more often but its such a pain that I always put it off -- but I have a few new works up and it feels really good to share them because these days the studio has become a pretty solitary practice.  

Drawing as Experience

"....there's something that's very intense about the experience of sitting down and having to look at something in the way that you do in order to make a drawing or a painting of it.  By the time you've done that you feel that you've really understood what you were looking at...and somehow it becomes a method of possessing the experience in a unique way."  -- Robert Bechtle

I came across that quote recently in a book about drawing.  Because I have been teaching a beginning drawing class at the Main Line Art Center it really resonated with me and what my students are finding.  In their drawings I can see them thinking and re-seeing and trying to translate it onto paper, a quality I think is always important in a good drawing. 

As a result of trying to help them along, I looked for examples online of student work that seemed achievable (I always found master drawings too hard to grasp when I started out drawing myself.)  So the images here are some of my personal favorite finds by anonymous students, not mine.  I didn't show them these pieces because I don't think they would like them as they are after a more elegant look at this point -- but I find these and some of their in class drawings to be outstanding in the way they embrace intense looking at their subject.

Jan Baltzell at Schmidt Dean

Last Friday, I went to a fantastic opening.  It was a ton of new work by Jan Baltzell at Schmidt Dean's new gallery location on Chestnut.  The opening was packed and the work was exceptional.  I have always looked to Jan (who was briefly a critic of mine) for complex and inventive color and compositional choices.  The new space is very nice too, its a large square room on an upper floor with big, black beams on the ceiling which provided a nice contrast to the show.  I'm looking forward to going back between now and May 19th to really take an extended look at some of the pieces.