Bob Davies Acrylic Painting Videos

Here are several good acrylic painting videos by Bob Davies. There are more of his videos on BobDavies88's Channel on YouTube. He also has tips and tutorials on a variety of media on his website how-to-draw-and-paint. A related website idrawandpaint.com has a community for sharing your artwork, getting critiques, and meeting other amateur artists.

Dutch Still Life Painter

I have been working on my apple still life and decided to look up apple still lifes. I found this website by a Dutch painter, Jos van Riswick. I love the simplicity of these still lifes. They show that a lot can be done with a few bowls and a few fruits or vegetables.

Prokudin-Gorskii's Color Photography

The current exhibition (September 28, 2009 – February 28, 2010) at The Museum of Russian Art in Minneapolis is Photographer to the Tsar: Revealing the Silk Road. The exhibit features the work of Sergei M. Prokudin-Gorskii. Prokudin-Gorskii was one of the pioneers of color photography. Between 1907 and 1915 he documented Russia's Central Asian territories and other regions of the Russian Empire.

My favorite photo in the exhibit is the Fabric Merchant of Samarkand. Sergei M. Prokudin-Gorskii used a special camera that made three black-and-white images through three separate color filters. The Library of Congress online exhibit The Empire That Was Russia describes this photographic process and shows examples of his work. The Library of Congress made digital color images from Prokudin-Gorskii's negatives.

images from the Library of Congress

ART:21 Videos and TV Program

I recently checked some ART:21 DVD videos out of the library. These are collections of episodes from the PBS program about "Art in the Twenty-First Century" featuring a variety of artists. I have never seen this program on TV. I don't know whether it is shown here, but is worth watching for.

There are many brief videos from the program on YouTube. (Search for "Art: 21" for all of them or "Art:21 painting" for just a list of those about painting). Here is a Season 5 Preview (October 2009). This video is excerpted from the Season 5 episode "Fantasy," premiering on Wednesday, October 14, 2009 at 10pm (ET) on PBS (check local listings).

Mimi Sammis Video

This is a video about the joy of creating. It is an excerpt form a PBS art series, "Love to Paint with Mimi."

Minnesota Artist: Jean Leuthner

I saw an exhibit of Jean Leuthner's nostalgia paintings last month that I really enjoyed. These paintings were done from old photos and do a good job of maintaining a snapshot quality and capturing nostalgia without putting in too much detail. The look is kind of hazy like a memory or an old photo that isn't quite clear.

Jean Leuthner website

The Art of Kimmo Pälikkö

Kimmo Pälikkö is a Finnish artist. I discovered him when I saw a postcard of one of his paintings of lighthouses on the Wild Postcards blog (Note: my other blog is about postcards http://www.postcardy.blogspot.com/). Many of Pälikkö's paintings have been reproduced on postcards. According to Pälikkö's website "By 2009, over 1300 postcard motifs of his paintings have been produced and over 85 million postcards of his works have been printed."

There are many examples of his artwork online that can be viewed and/or purchased. What I especially liked about about his website are his books on watercolor painting techniques that can be read online in English.

Vincent Van Gogh Gallery

The Vincent Van Gogh Gallery looks interesting, though I haven't had time to look at much of it.

Art Knowledge News

Art Knowledge News is a free online art magazine sponsored by the Art Appreciation foundation. Art Knowledge News has information and news about art and the art world: museums, artists, exhibitions, articles, quotations, and art resources. A wide variety of styles and mediums are covered. Only a few topics show up in the "recent posts" section, but older posts can be accessed by entering a topic of interest in the search box.

Don't miss the Vincent Van Gogh video with music--it is fantastic! This and some other Powerpoint shows (pps) are listed under "Of Continuing Interest..." (Note: I think most of the other Powerpoint shows are mediocre.)

Flowers in Modern Art

I discovered this website while researching an artist.

Flowers have always been a popular art motif. An exhibition Flower Myth - van Gogh to Jeff Koons examined flowers in modern art. There are many paintings that one does not usually see.

It is not very obvious how to get from the description page to the paintings. The only link I could find on this page is "Temporary exhibitions (10)" so I drew an arrow to highlight the link. Once you get to a page of paintings there is more than one way to navigate the site, and most of the small images can be enlarged by clicking on them. You can also take a virtual tour of some of the art by clicking "Panoramic View" below the header image at the top of the page (both on the main page and the individual room pages). The "See the Tabloid" link is a convenient way of viewing a number of paintings on a page.

Try this site for some neat Mpls Photos

http://www.phototour.minneapolis.mn.us/bob_firth/bob_firth-minneapolis5

Web Art Museum

The Web Museum is a good place to view and read about paintings by famous artists (look for the page with famous artworks or the artist index). It also could be used as a source of paintings to copy. Most of the images are large enough to see details. If you are working at home, you can use the image on your computer without need for printing. If you are viewing the painting directly from your computer screen, it will look brighter and clearer than if you printed it.

Watercolor Painting

I am taking a watercolor painting course this fall that meets on Tuesday and Thursday, so I won't be able to attend the acrylic painting class. It seems harder to get started in watercolor than in acrylic.

Here is a watercolor painting website that looks very good for learning watercolor painting.

Acrylic Color Mixing & Glazing

These are several interesting and useful articles I found on the Golden Paints website:

Color Mixing Guide has important color information and mixing exercises.

Clean Color Mixing compares inorganic and inorganic pigments and the effect of matting agents on color.

Golden Acrylic Glazing Liquid describes many ways of using acrylic glazing liquid.

Karen Cooper Acrylic Paintings & FineArtStudioOnline

When I study the examples in painting books, I often find that I like an intermediate stage better than the finished painting.

I really enjoyed Karen Cooper's acrylic paintings at the Stone Arch Festival of the Arts. She has a simple colorful style that I find more interesting than detailed realistically colored paintings. Karen Cooper has an excellent website, Karen Cooper Paintings. The portfolio section of the website is divided into still life and figurative paintings. Her recent paintings are mainly figurative, which she describes as "people in places you want to be." Her people are usually very simplified and are not meant to be portraits.

In addition to showing many paintings in her portfolio, there are two blogs. Cooper, about painting, blog is a journal blog. Cooper, daily work blog is a "project blog" where she writes about and shows various stages in a painting's progress.

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Note for dedicated web surfers: I couldn't resist clicking on the link at the bottom for Artist websites by FineArtStudioOnline.com. There you can find many artist websites--go to the page that has a list of all the artists.

Landscape Composition Rules

I am taking a Photo Composition and Design course this summer, and I was given a link to a list of Photo Composition Articles. I found one article on the list that is actually about painting — Landscape Composition Rules by Johannes Vloothuis.

Since I am currently working on a landscape painting based on one of my photographs, I found this article very interesting and useful. I discovered a couple things in my painting that I should probably change. I recommend this article for anyone interested in painting a landscape. As the author states: "Rules are made to be broken, in which case you should at least know what rule you are breaking and why and not err due to insufficient knowledge."

Pierre Bonnard

I recently read an article on Bonnard in an old 1984 issue of House & Garden, and my favorite painting in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts is Pierre Bonnard's Dining Room in the Country. Curious, I searched online for more Bonnard paintings.

I found a site that apparently was created at the time of a 2003 National Gallery of Australia exhibition Pierre Bonnard Observing Nature. The text accompanying the paintings pointed out important features of composition and style, and was the reason I found this site so interesting.

Note: I couldn't access the main National Gallery of Australia website--it may be undergoing updating.