In the month of April, the Phinney Neighborhood Association is having a group show themed along the lines of Earth Day.  I will be exhibiting a drawing and will be present at the opening on Friday, April 3rd starting at 7pm.  The Phinney Neighborhood Center is located at 6532 Phinney Ave. N kitty near Red Mill Burgers and the Francine Seders Gallery.  Hope to see you there!

Best painter alive.  He has a retrospective show at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston with 55 drawings, paintings, and sculptures from foreign and domestic collections.  If you live in the Northeast and have a chance to visit the museum before July 27th (the show's closing), I highly recommend taking this rare opportunity. Here's a link to show details and here's a helpful review.

The methods and philosophy of every painter are intricately interwoven.  From the great artist Rembrandt, whose impasto reveals the humanity of his sitters, down to even the popular artists of yesteryear like Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol, every artist’s philosophy is visible in the works they create.  Every piece of art reveals its content through form.  To put it even more simply, every work of art tells you something about the person who made it just by the way in which it is made. In this article I hope to give you a general outline of my painting method and purpose by briefly describing what it is to “paint from life.”

There are several phrases I use fairly often to describe my artwork. The two most common are painting from direct observation or from life.  Both of these phrases mean the same thing to me: to paint “from life” is to paint looking directly at objects, people, or places.  In this mode of painting the artist is not imagining a place and then painting it, nor remembering a place.  Here the artist doesn’t use a sketch or a photo for reference as a source, but rather is looking directly at the scene which he desires to capture and attempting to paint what he observes.

The term painting “from life” traces back many centuries and has been used in different languages by various cultures.  Northern Europeans in the 17th century used the terms ad vivum and Naer Het Leven , literally “from the life,” to describe paintings done from direct observation.  More recently the French Barbizon school and the Impressionists (Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Pissarro, Degas, etc.) were described as working en plein aire , literally “in the open air.”  This term is used quite frequently by artists of our day,  and the spirit of the phrase (to paint directly from nature) is certainly relevant to my work.  I tend to use this phrase less than others mainly because subjects like still lifes aren’t usually painted outdoors.

Alla prima is another French word which describes how paint is applied to the canvas. In alla prima painting the artist is applying (usually) thick paint to the canvas without any glazing or layering.  Many artists refer to this method of painting as painting “directly” because the final color the artist would like to achieve is mixed on the palette and then placed directly onto the canvas in one layer instead of using a series of glazes layered over many days to achieve the final look of the painting.  Great artists have worked with both methods. See the paintings of Jan Van Eyck (~1395 - ~1441) for an artist who glazes and the work of John Constable (1776 - 1837) or the oil sketches of Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot (1796 - 1875) for examples of painting which is more “direct.”  I sometimes use the term “observational immediacy” to describe the quality of paintings which capture a moment in time with the atmosphere and light of a particular scene, and this term describes a measure I often use to judge a work’s success.  Does the piece invite me to participate in the light, atmosphere and location of the scene it depicts?

With these methods I look at a subject and attempt to capture its liveliness on canvas or paper.  You may be wondering about the value of depicting ordinary subject matter.  What is it about ordinary life that makes it worthy of contemplation?  What's so exciting about trees, and buildings, and glasses and gourds?  Why spend any time or talent telling the tale of everyday life?

Since there are many different ways to answer this question, and since many other people have answered it so much better than I can, I will keep my reply succint.  Life is extraordinary. Colors are incredible.  Light is a miracle, but no one tends to notice!  The long and the short of this complicated question is that everyday our eyes take in more wonders than our mind could possibly count. The number and nature of these wonders is so astounding that they must be worthy of more than a meager nod of acknowledgment.  Whales and canyons, water and bees. The Author of these wonders should be praised, and painting is praise.

“Seasons and times, and moons and hours, Heav’n, earth, and air are thine; When clouds distill their fruitful showers, the Author is divine.” -Isaac Watts, 1719

One of the many marvels invented in the modern era, photography has irrevocably altered the way people paint.  From premier artists like Gerhard Richter down to the most casual painters of cowboys and rodeos, no artist who paints in the 21st Century remains unaffected by the vision photographs have given us of our world.  

But without denigrating the value of photography as an artistic medium, and without disparaging the use of photographs in painting, I’d like to briefly outline a few reasons why a person (like me) might choose not to paint from a photograph. Here goes:

So that’s it. I’m a big fan of photography, and I know lots of painters who make great paintings working from photographs.  From time to time I also work from a photograph.  But for most of my work I rely on direct observation because I think it's more personal, more lively, and just plain more fun.

Several authors have composed in writing much of what I try to capture in painting.  GK Chesterton’s Man Alive is a fictional narrative about a character named Innocent Smith, and the tale unravels a number of mysteries that reveal Smith’s desire to constantly see the world afresh.  He is accused of polygamy, but really he re-proposed to his wife repeatedly to remind himself of what it was like to be newly-wed.  He is accused of burglary, but it turns out the house he broke into was his own.  An expert marksman, he shoots a man through the hat to make make him thankful for life.  Innocent Smith sees everything afresh.  I try to do the same through painting.

 Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard is widely acclaimed and also shows an author reveling in the wonder of the visual world.  Dillard’s book is much more biological than Chesterton’s (which centers more around personal relationships than nature), but relishes in objects of nature much the same way that Man Alive pries the sweetness out of simply being alive. A flock of small birds exploding out of a cluster of Osage Orange provide an event worthy of contemplation, wondrous in itself. Both of these books encourage their readers to wonder at the miracle that is human and natural life.  

Here’s a taste of Chesterton from his more systematic philosophy of life, Orthodoxy (1907):
"...to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to lifelessness, but to a rush of life. The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon.... The repetition in nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore."

It’s been a long time in coming but the latest version of bentleyfineart.com is finally up and running!  Many thanks to all those of you who check back here regularly for new content; you should now find a few more new paintings since my last website revision several months ago. This new version of the website also has several nice features that should make it easier for you to look at more work quickly, and see bigger images.  I hope you enjoy it.  Thanks for visiting!