Robert Francis James

Hold onto your taste, even when you’re embarrassed by it. — Jerry Saltz Connoisseurs and critics often look down on art that’s driven by pop culture (the source of the “pop” in the term “ pop art “). Not me. I guess I’m a child of the ’60s, because I love pop paintings and subjects. New York  critic  Jerry Saltz nails it when he says of pop subjects, “Never renounce them for the sake of others’ pieties. “Own your guilty pleasures.” My latest stab at depicting what I term a “nostalgic goodie” is  Ding Dongs . I could just have well titled the painting  Ring Dings . Ding Dong aficionados know that in 1967 their maker, Hostess, engaged in an all-out, take-no-prisoners  brand war  with Drake’s Cakes, the maker of Ring Dings, by copying the latter’s immensely successful product. The bloody war, known to history as the “ Ding Dong-Ring Ding Conflict ,” lasted for nearly 20 years. Hostess only won by buying its rival. That takes the cake, yo...

When art critics get together, they talk about content, style, trend and meaning, but when painters get together, they talk about where you can get the best turpentine. — Picasso Painter Liz Floyd told me during a recent interview that she uses empty cat food tins as palette cups to hold her medium. When I share Liz’s practice with other cat-owning painters, they beam and say, what a fabulous idea! Picasso was right when he said painters, unlike critics, are a pragmatic bunch. Like artists in every field, painters know that painting is performative and that an artist’s materials can make or break a performance. Ron, my new supplier Hence their fascination with pigments, mediums, varnishes, brushes, knives, easels, palettes, boards, canvases and a hundred other gizmos—including palette cups. Most viewers—like most listeners to, say, a guitarist—concern themselves with the final product, not the process that led to it. Most listeners don’t know or notice that the guitarist ...

Reality has to be digested, it has to be transmuted by paint. — Richard Diebenkorn Wayne Thiebaud 100 , the not-to-be-missed show now at the Brandywine River Museum , has awakened me to the primacy of cast shadows. Radiant and rainbowlike, Thiebaud’s cast shadows are nothing short of delicious. After consuming a hundred of them, I’ll never take a cast shadow for granted again. Following a suggestion by New Yorker critic Adam Gopnik , the curators claim that the California artist hoped his cast shadows would capture the “sudden glare of West Coast sunlight just after you take off your sunglasses.” That’s as good a theory as any. But it’s important to remember that all cast shadows are filled with subtle color variations, created by the light reflected from the object’s surroundings. That’s true whether you’re painting outdoors in the summer in California or indoors in the winter in Delaware. And all cast shadows feature two additional elements: the crevice (the dark spot ...