beside the easel

I don't believe in making pencil sketches and then painting landscape in your studio. You must be right under the sky. William Merritt Chase The Nursery, 1890 William Merritt Chase was born on November 1, 1849 in Williamsburg (now Nineveh), Indiana. Chase was a member of Ten American Painters which included Child Hassam and Joseph DeCamp , among others. Having studied both in America and Europe, he was a multifaceted Impressionist artist working in several kinds of media and subject matter, and was also well-known as an instructor where he opened his own school in 1896, the Chase School of Art . That school exists today as Parsons The New School for Design . Chase's work is characterized by deep saturated color—even when he uses a more monotone palette there is always a sense of depth and richness to those values. In The Nursery above, he contrasts complementary colors red and green under a soft, diffused afternoon light with a very warm-toned earth the figure...

Self-Portrait, 1892 Born in Ferrara on December 31, 1842, Giovanni Boldini was a painter from the Belle Époque era. Known as the "Master of Swish" by a Time magazine article published a couple of years after his death, Boldini's style actually evolved over his career in a chameleon-like fashion. Sometimes loose and brushy, other times tightly rendered, it is towards the final years of his painting that we associate the swish of his technique with long, vigorous strokes and distorted figures, emphasizing line and grace, as if a modern Mannerism. Boldini associated with some famous artists of the day, including Degas and Sargent, who would become a life-long friend. The world was modernizing and changing rapidly, especially in France, and with it art itself. Boldini is unique in that he captured both landscapes and portraiture with ease and in the process characterized an era, evolving and moving along with it, never missing a beat, remaining very popular in both Lon...

Ballet Rehearsal,1873 Master of pastel, and an artist that really needs no introduction, Edgar Degas was born July 19 (day before my birthday!!) 1834 in Paris. Degas is interesting in that he started as a very Classical artist that changed direction towards a realist study of modern society with keen powers of observation and attention to color. Technically, Degas deserves particular merit for his experimentation with materials, especially in the way he would prepare his pastels such as combining them with water and steam into a thick paste, and even mixing them with oil paint sometimes. Gracefulness (as well as awkwardness) is a common theme in his work, especially in the numerous works of ballet dancers and women bathers, yet he also depicted people with casual realism, neither enobling them nor making them ugly. He was also a pioneer in making use of the camera as a reference tool for his art. Above we see ballet dancers in an airy room with light spilling onto the subjects fro...

Last summer I did something quite ambitious, challenging...something I wasn't sure I could do...something that only after being in Italy for a month in the previous September would rouse my brain to attempt: I decided I needed to do an Old Master study. Up until this point I had done numerous sketches like most artists, but the extent of my practice was mostly visual. I went museum crazy all over Rome in 2010 and in the process I felt like I learned enough to move up to the next level. Somehow, the pastel work I had done made me want to give it a shot. I had found this image online from my usual research of Old Master Baroque paintings: Vision of St. Jerome, c 1627 Johann Liss was a German Baroque painter of the seicento, or 17th century, who lived in Venice for most of his career. Having been inspired by Caravaggio and the deep colors of Titian and Tintoretto he blended those styles into his own craft of drama, solid figures and intense color. St. Jerome has been a subject ...