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 ...

Unlike a painting, food is an impermanent, fleeting art form. ― Julie Piatt Ever since the cave painters of Lascaux , painters have depicted food. Picasso was no exception. But while depictions of food in still-lifes had traditionally celebrated abundance, Picasso’s depictions—at least during World War II—were meant to remind viewers of an opposite state, deprivation . Like all fellow citizens, Picasso experienced relentless deprivation during the Occupation of Paris , when the foodstuffs trucked into the city were commandeered by the Nazis, leaving residents to get by on mere table scraps and the meager yields from backyard box gardens and chicken coops. So it was no surprise to his friends that Picasso painted still-lifes of food throughout the Occupation, four hard years when a “growling stomach was the Frenchman’s true voice,” as the writer Alfred Fabre-Luce said. “There was nothing to do but work and struggle for food,” Picasso told Vogue at Paris’ Liberation , “and look ...

Der Mensch ist was er isst . — Ludwig Feuerbach I’m delighted to announce my first solo show opens next week and continues through February at the Newark Arts Alliance . I hope you can attend. Here’s my exhibition statement, to whet your appetite. The parietal painters at Lascaux could have depicted anything: they chose food. Food has forever consoled us. We are what we eat, and what we eat often softens life’s edges—momentarily, at least.  Moms, grandmas, and food makers count on it. I’m lovin’ it, they hope we’ll say. It’s magically delicious. It melts in your mouth. It’s finger lickin’ good. It’s the real thing. But while food combats emptiness, it reminds us of la condition humaine : we are creatures of relentless desire, but our comforts, at best, are cold ones. They cannot fill our unending emptiness. Food is frighteningly fugitive. Above: The Seven Ups . Oil on fiberboard. 8 x 10 inches. The post Cold Comforts appeared first on Original still life oil painting...

Life is a great big canvas; throw all the paint you can at it. — Danny Kaye This week I observed Philadelphia artist Cheryl Schlenker demonstrate her technique for floral painting. I won’t disclose all her trade secrets, but will share that her painting began pretty wildly, at least in comparison to the way I start a painting. First, she lathered her blank canvas—in reality, a big bristol board—with gesso and some vivid acrylic paints squeezed straight from the tube. She mixed the two together, and then began slashing and scraping the mixture with a beefy rubber potter’s rib. From there she continued to paint on top of her surface with a large brush and more acrylic colors that she squeezed straight from the tube. She painted her floral painting in about two hours, without a reference of any kind. From her confident pours, scrapes, and brushstrokes, you could tell she’d ridden in this rodeo before. And she spared no paint. Watching Ms. Schlenker paint reminded me of the orig...

Despondency breaks off its course. Anguish breaks off its course. The vulture breaks off its flight. The eager light streams out, Even the ghosts take a draught. And our paintings see daylight. — Tomas Tranströmer Painting is like a walk in the woods. You set out full of hope with only a blank canvas. It’s bright and airy and meadowlike. You pick up a brush and choose a woodpath. Your first few marks feel promising and offer to become the armature upon which you’ll build a masterpiece. But, quite soon, the path leads downhill—and into darkness. None of your marks are making sense. More paint doesn’t clarify, and erasures only make your murky and miserable painting murkier and more miserable. You begin to suspect the armature; you begin to suspect the painter. They’re neither of them any good. You chose the wrong path and now there’s no way out of the woods. You make more strokes and more strokes and more, stabbing in the dark like a blinded creature. You’re hopeles...