My mother loves to give people flowers. We have dinner together often, and it’s all very spur of the moment, but every once in a while, she likes to observe a little formality of bringing a hostess gift in the form of flowers, even if it’s a simple bouquet from the grocery store.My mom knows my favorite flowers (lilies), but she also brings me what happens to catch her eye; a bouquet of daisies or sunflowers; sometimes gladioli or yellow roses.
Pastel painter and oilpainter Albert Handell.Albert Handell: Weekend With the Masters InstructorPastelist and oil painter Albert Handell was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1937. He began formal studies of drawing and anatomy at the age of 16, and in 1954 enrolled at the Art Students League of New York to study drawing and anatomy with Louis Priscilla and Robert Ward Johnson, and later studied painting for two years with Frank Mason.
The pastel painting of Nancie King Mertz covers an enormous range of subjects, light conditions and palettes. Her world incorporates grand views of urban vistas, twilight visions of rush hour traffic, delightful Italian hilltops, exquisite garden still lifes, floodlit night scenes, evocative interiors and much more.
Q. I haven’t used a fixative for my pastel paintings for more than 30 years because of the fixative’s tendency to change the color of the pastel pigment. I’m considering integrating more wax-based pastels just to try the metallic pigments, though, and would like to start using fixative again. What fixative(s) would you suggest to use with multiple brands and types of pastels?
They call New Mexico “The Land of Enchantment” and a good portion of the magic results from the drama of the sky. Our dry atmosphere and high altitude make colors clear and bright, setting clouds aglow against our famous turquoise skies. I prefer to paint sunsets from a photograph, which stills the rapidly changing light, but I bring to the painting memories from long observation, as well as plenty of plein air experimentation.
In the January 2007 issue of American Artist, Ohio artist Linda Wesner depicted American scenes that were quickly disappearing because she felt it was important that the viewer recognized the universal theme of change. We offer 16 more of her colored pencil landscapes in this online exclusive gallery.
