Congratulations, Sharon Knettell!

Congratulations to Sharon Knettell for her beautiful painting, featured on the cover of the March, 2010 issue of Artist's Magazine!

(Click on her link - http://www.sharonknettell.com/ to see more of her work.) Sharon has been a great help to me in setting up my own studio for life painting sessions and I love her passionate and sensual work. She has a remarkable talent for arranging color in her setups. I'm including a photo of her teaching at Scottsdale Artists School a couple of years ago - she brought her own costumes (tutus, corsets, etc.) for the models - really great stuff.

New Drawing DVD coming soon from David Kassan

New York artist David Kassan is a terrific draftsman and generous teacher who does beautiful work (see my previous post in 2007: http://lindatraceybrandon.blogspot.com/2007/09/drawing-with-david-kassan-in-brooklyn.html ).

His new drawing DVD is about to be released - to see the trailer, click on the button at http://dvd.davidkassan.com/ and then sign up for email notification. Of course, I haven't seen the DVD yet, but I'm sure it will be a good one.

Gerome Exhibit at the Getty Museum, June 15 - Sept. 12, 2010

Fans of Jean-Leon Gerome (French, 1824 - 1904) will be happy to hear that the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles (http://www.getty.edu/visit/exhibitions/future.html ) will be hosting a special exhibit of Gerome's work from June 15th to Sept. 12th, 2010. This particular painting, Pollice Verso, has long been one of the jewels at the Phoenix Art Museum and it's good to know that it will be part of the show. I'm also attaching a photo of the sculpture of Gerome with his gladiator models at the Musee d'Orsay.

Artdaily has more information about Gerome here: http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=35768

Oil Sketch on Frosted Mylar

Frosted Mylar is an affordable and archieval support if you plan on painting lots of figurative work from life. If you're generally new to doing this kind of life work and don't want to waste a lot of expensive linen during your first sessions, try the frosted Mylar. It's good for open studio sketches and for making preliminary sketches for paintings on more traditional supports. In my case, I was trying out a new pair of binoculars in an open studio situation and I wasn't sure if I would be able to find the right place to set up. (I'm going to blog about binoculars later.)The Mylar comes in a big sheet which costs around $5.00 (the portion shown is a quarter sheet). It's opaque and semi-absorbent - actually, it's a little hard to describe, but the strokes show up well and I especially like the way transparent paint reacts to it. I've taped the sheet onto a board to do the actual painting. I've been wondering how I'd frame this piece - I think I would glue the edges of the Mylar to a white gessoed board of the same size and then put the piece under glass (with a spacer between the glass and the Mylar). Everything I've read about Mylar indicates it's archieval but I might still be inclined to put it under glass and treat it as I would a drawing.The open studio session was three hours, but I wiped off my first head and started a new, smaller version, so this one is at about an hour and a half of painting. My wonderful teacher William Whitaker (http://www.williamwhitaker.com/) showed his students how to use Mylar a few years ago and since then I've seen other artists using it as well.