Category: Art and Society
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I first heard about Warkworth when I bought a painting by Lucy Manley from a craft fair in Cobourg. A plein-air painter, Lucy regularly paints around central east Ontario, including Warkworth, where she gives continuing education classes in painting. Our picture was from a winter scene in a residential part of Warkworth. We travelled to…
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Arles, France, was the starting point for our trip up the Rhone River. Throughout the town are signs indicating where Vincent Van Gogh painted many of his iconic pictures. That included one where the house he once shared with Paul Gauguin stood. It was the victim of Allied bombing in World War II, and is…
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Tourism has been in the news lately. Despite the fact that most of us are or have been tourists at one point, the worm appears to have turned in our culture. Residents of cities like Barcelona are actually using squirt guns on tourists in their city, angry that tourism has led to overcrowding and a…
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I’m totally addicted to the UK Sky Arts duo of Landscape Artist of the Year and Portrait Artist of the Year. As Frank Skinner, the original co-presenter of the shows said, “I love the idea that you can make great entertainment out of watching paint dry.” If you are an artist or would be artist,…
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Women make up 80 per cent of fiction sales, according to statistics from an opinion column in today’s New York Times. “The fiction gap makes me sad,” writes columnist Maureen Dowd. Me too. It also explains a lot. Dowd quotes author (and man) Richard Babcock: “Not to blame the current cultural landscape on Ronald Reagan,…
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There is a sad story in the New York Times today. As an artist, it made me stop in my tracks. Could this be me some day? Author Alissa Quart writes about having to sell and give away about 400 paintings by her 90-year-old mother, who was a literature scholar up until her retirement 30…
