Robert Francis James

Nine days out of ten all he saw around him was the wretchedness of his unsuccessful attempts. — Maurice Merleau-Ponty Professor Matt Saunders offers Harvard undergrads an unusual studio course he titles “ Painting’s Doubt .” “Painting is an engagement between the self and the world,” his course description reads. “It is a practice of embodied making.” Saunders’ ambiguous course title no doubt refers to the way a painting instructor will teach you to doubt “conditioned understanding” and “to see like an artist” But it also refers to the fact that painting is doubt . It’s all about doubt. Saunders’ course title in the latter sense echoes the title of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s pivotal essay “ Cezanne’s Doubt .” “It took him one hundred working sessions for a still life, one hundred-fifty sittings for a portrait,” the essay on Cezanne opens. “What we call his work was, for him, an attempt, an approach to painting.” For all his skill and commitment to craft, Cezanne was never pleas...

The artist has no more actual place in the American culture of today than he has in the American economy of today. — William Faulkner I’m flattered so many friends and acquaintances have taken well to my choice of an “encore” career. At the same time, I’m saddened that I can only pursue painting as a career because I don’t depend on it for the lion’s share of my income. My hat’s off to those painters—successful or not—who found the  cajones  to try in their youth to paint for a living. Faulkner was right to say  the artist “has no place in the  mosaic of the American dream as it exists today .” The average American artist, according to the  Labor Department , earns $50,300 a year. That’s $10,000 less than  a clerk at the post office  (a job  Faulkner  held as a young man, until he was fired for throwing away mail). Of course remorse isn’t good for the soul; and calling America materialistic is trite. But as Wassily Kandinsky obs...

Hurry up and make mistakes! — Lennart Anderson Bob Ross famously said of painters, “We don’t make mistakes, just happy little accidents.” I might dampen that to say, “We don’t learn, unless we make mistakes.” With learning to paint come countless mundane mistakes. Rookie mistakes. Stupid mistakes. Messy mistakes. They’re aggravating. But then, upon occasion, come mistakes that lead to breakthroughs—those happy little mistakes that amount to “ teachable moments .” My biggest breakthrough to date came the moment I realized, with enough time, patience, and detachment , there was no mistake I couldn’t correct. I’ve had that lesson particularly reinforced through my work every week with realist painter Neil Carlin , who’s guiding me to paint tonal studies of plaster casts. When it comes to mistakes of any kind, Neil enforces a gentle, but firm zero-tolerance policy, a no-nonsense teaching approach that forces you to revise and revise and revise, until your merely “passable” r...

How does an artist explain her artwork when she’s not there to explain it? That’s where an artist statement comes in. An artist statement explains the work to buyers, collectors, gallerists, fair organizers, and jurists when the artist isn’t present. It’s also the key to building the confidence needed to present the work in person. Artists struggling to write an artist statement—or who need a statement “checkup”—should attend How to Write Your Artist Statement , a new 90-minute workshop for emerging artists. The workshop takes place Monday, May 16, 10–11:30 am, at Gallery 222, 222 East King Street, Malvern, Pennsylvania. The workshop fee is $25. Seating is strictly limited. Go here to register . How to Write Your Artist Statement will provide proven tips for creating a professional artist statement. The workshop will examine the three core elements of an artist statement; foolproof ways to overcome writer’s block; and artist statement do’s and don’ts. A handout will be provide...

Art is dangerous. — Picasso A non-fungible token (NFT) is a digital deed. With it, you can prove you own the “original” of a digital asset (as opposed to a copy). An NFT is  not  the original—that’s something else; a GIF, for example. But by owning the NFT, you hold the key to the kingdom. By owning an NFT, you have owner’s “ bragging rights ,” plus the creator’s permission to display his original asset on a screen; and, as importantly, you have a meter that tracks every copy of the asset that’s ever existed or will exist. You can also sell your NFT on the $25 billion secondary market for NFTs, if you want to cash out of it. A year ago,  the Charleston graphic artist Beeple  sold an NFT for $69 million, still the record price for an NFT. Purchase of the NFT gave the buyer ownership of a digital collage Beeple titled  Everydays . $69 million. That’s a hell of a lot to pay for the digital key to a GIF—even a GIF by Beeple—considering the dange...

At the core of all well-founded belief lies belief that is unfounded. ― Ludwig Wittgenstein Alberto Giacometti’s painstakingly tentative figurative paintings , influenced by the theories of French phenomenologists, captivate me. They always have. Like perception itself, they’re precarious (the phenomenologists held that “ i t is the essence of certainty to be established only with reservations .”) Artists who aren’t painters attribute Giacometti’s hesitant brushwork to the artist’s self-doubt (Stanley Tucci did this in his exquisite biopic Final Portrait ). But that’s wrong . Giacometti’s brushwork is attributable to something much grander: Cartesian doubt . Tentative brushwork like Giacometti’s represents to me the thinking person’s only permissible response to the world as we know it. Only the child and the unthinking adult live in a world they believe is grounded and accessible to everyone—a so-called “objective” world. The thinking person knows that his take on reali...

Every painting, no matter how successful, leaves the artist with another chance to paint what she had in mind. — Robert Brault “Blessed is he who expects nothing,” goes Alexander Pope’s Ninth Beatitude , “for he shall never be disappointed.” Painters who’ve worked in industry seem to know when to quit, almost by intuition. Deadlines and the cost of goods have molded their instincts. As a freelance copywriter for many years, I learned to spend just a few hours researching, writing, and editing any piece of copy I produced before handing it to my client, always with the guilty knowledge that it could be better, but only at the point of diminishing returns. Painting surely can’t be exempt from the law of diminishing returns , no more than copywriting, accounting, programming, teaching, or nursing. Yet it’s not easy to know when to quit . I could have continued refining New Dragon Takeout , for example, redrawing the rice to heighten the feel of its granularity. But I chose ins...