An Eric Wert’s early paintings the backgrounds were often textiles he found in a fabric store. The patterns and colors would complement his still lifes. Then he met Marci Rae McDade, who has an MFA in fiber and material studies, became editor of Fiberarts magazine, and then editor of the Surface Design Association Journal. She is now his wife.
“Marci’s a great influence,” Wert admits. “When you go to a museum, you focus on what appeals to you. For me that’s Dutch paintings. She dragged me to see textiles, and I gained a new appreciation of them. There are many parallels. The optical mixing of colors was developed by the Flemish masters as they wove together threads of different colors.
“Today the textile collections of museums are online with high-resolution images so I have access to the greatest textiles in the world,” he continues. “I browse and then download images. When I’m working on a painting I leave the background kind of simple and wait for a connection to merge— theme, color, composition. The background is an equal partner in my paintings. It’s just as interesting and worthy of inspection as anything in the foreground.”
I mention to him the leaves in Cherries, especially the lone yellowed leaf, seem to pick up the weave of the fabric behind them. He responds, “That’s one of the things I like—discovering connections. It would be easy to set everything up and work from a photograph. I could make all the decisions in the set-up. As I work over months, discoveries start to emerge. It’s intuitive. It’s the magic of painting. The basic data is there in a high-resolution photograph. The challenge is to leave space in the painting for connections to emerge.”
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Guardians of the Temple – Simon Dinnerstein reflects on The Fulbright Triptych 50 years later.
The Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State University exhibits Simon Dinnerstein's The Fulbright Triptych haunts the visual lexicon of 20th century American representational art. Fifty years have passed since Dinnerstein completed the painting in 1974.
A City Perspective
Leslie Gaduzo has always been interIested in art. Since childhood, he has been drawing constantly, from single point perspective drawings at age 10 to complex architectural drawings.
Living Legacy
The Butler Institue hosts Allied Artists of America's 110th Annual Juried Exhibition.
Elegant yet Approachable
The second edition of the RTIA Show presents even more art to explore and expanded special programming.
Figuratively Speaking
New York has always been an epicenter of artists on the edge of excellence, pushing the envelope and finding their voices.
JAMES AYERS: The Importance of Play
Like many artists, James Ayers' work took a turn during the Covid-19 pandemic. Seeing the enjoyment his kids took from playing with paint in his studio and exploring their creativity inspired him.
GINA MINICHINO: Playing with Food
Gina Minichino started her journey in visual arts because of Charles Schulz. \"He was my earliest influence for drawing and the reason I wanted to be a cartoonist,\" she says.
Island Light
The Cuttyhunk Island Artists' Residency is held in a sprawling, 100-year-old house on an island off the southern coast of Massachusetts.
Solitary Forms
Hogan Brown has been working with Arcadia Contemporary for two and half years and is excited to be featured in his first solo show at the gallery. He doesn't take for granted the many talented figurative painters Arcadia represents and is thrilled to be among them.
Living the Dream
Counterintuitively, David Gluck was a painter before taking up tattooing little more than a decade ago. While skin is a completely different substrate and ink a far cry from oil paint, the skills must be transferrable to some degree because there is a wait-time of nine months to get an appointment with him.