Thank you, Lawrence Weschler.

Anatomy Lessons from the Great Masters is the first art book I ever owned. My dad bought it for me at the Palette Shop, when they were in the first floor suite of the white building that marks the entrance to the 3rd Ward in Milwaukee. This book and How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way were side-by-side on my drawing table for a long time as a pre-teen.

Stupidly, in a fit of “moving fever” I gave that first copy away. I recently purchased it again because I realized that I had all of those images memorized from poring over it as a kid and I kept recognizing them in other art books.

Sadly, the Palette Shop is no more. I believe they hunkered down as the in-school art store for MIAD for a while, but an internet search shows that it looks like Utrecht now has wormed its way in there. Le Sigh.

“My struggle is to preserve that abstract flash – like something you caught out of the corner of your eye, but in the picture you can look at it directly.” from Andrew Wyeth: The Helga Pictures.

Pearl Onion, 5×7″, oil on panel. Purchase here.

Well, here it is, Friday’s painting. I think this one is pretty nice. Everything turned out on it the way I’d hoped, so that’s good. Also, a friend told me that the reason my pictures were so dark was due to the difference in gamma settings between Windows and Mac machines, so I’ve set the image to use it’s own color profile, so let me know if the image looks better then the previous entries (if you’re using a Windows machine, that is.)

I’ve also been reading some nice books on Velázquez and Rubens. The two that I find most interesting and useful to painters are the one on Rubens called Drawn by the Brush, and the one on Velázquez called Technique of Genius. Great books. A little pricey, but you can get them used on Amazon for pretty cheap, and the information inside is well worth adding them to your library.