Today is Easter, a symbol of death and rebirth. It is a beautiful thought that though the child passed away 14 or 15 years ago, she lives on the memory -- through a drawing that will always be alive.
Rebirth: Death and Life through Art
A Little Greek Pastel Painting Trip by Michael Newberry
Years ago I took a pastel painting trip of a lifetime, for three months I traveled from Athens, Greece to many islands, eventually to Istanbul, and slowly back again to Athens. My first island was Tinos, from the harbor I rented a scooter, booked a tiny house outside of town for 15 dollars a night. The porch had a sloping view over gray-green olive groves down to the dark and brilliant ultramarine blue Mediterranean, about 300 ft to the left was a small, room-sized luminous white-plastered Byzantine church.
Embargo Series by Michael Newberry
The Animal Lifted Embargo Series has significantly changed my opinion about including animals in my paintings. They really help set off the scale and atmosphere of the landscapes. I am surprised that just two tiny marks, in the case of the sandpipers, can reset the landscapes dramatically.
Newberry, Seagull at Picnic Island, 2020, oil on panel, 12×16″
There is an exciting tension in placing an animal just right, it seems to set off the landscape and definitely twerks the composition, like a zigzag incorporating the direction of the light, the bird's flight path, the feeling of "lift," setting off the formal composition of the water and land masses. Delightfully fun.
Doggie at the Beach and an Aesthetic Musing
In the past I have rejected doing animals because humanity is at the forefront of my mind. I love my dog, Frida, and she loves me, but she doesn't even glance at my art. :(
Workshop Series: Composition!
Newberry Art Tutorials Some Guidelines For Great Compositons In my workshops students have plenty of time to compose the work, the line drawing set up before painting begins. The following tutorials show techniques you can focus on as you map out the painting's composition. Composition in One Easy Lesson For demonstration a markup of Van …
Workshop Series: Triangulating the Composition
Newberry Art Tutorials From Simple Placements to Super Complex Things The very first thing I teach in workshops is to compose using triangulation. It is a sight method of finding two main landmarks then triangulate to find the third landmark. The problem: when you are just drawing freely it is easily to over generalize, and …
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Pushing the Composition Envelope, Melissa Hefferlin Still Lifes
It is interesting to contrast Hefferlin with Picasso (he is one of my favorite artists). He created some of the best compositions of all time, but he frequently distorted the subjects – like the woman's face, body, and other objects – to make very clever compositional arrangements. But in distorting reality so much he threw the baby out with the bathwater. He was visually saying that reality is a chaos of distorted perspectives that are not true to real life. What is exceptional about Melissa is her ability to tweak these pattern motifs while keeping a realistic perspective, a feat of integration that Picasso doesn't match up to.
John’s Sunset by Michael Newberry
My brother committed suicide and this is a memorial drawing. Newberry, John's Sunset, Charcoal on Rives BFK, 26x19" Studio Collection. A few years ago I got the sad news of my brother's passing. The moment I heard I knew I would be doing a memorial drawing. I was a little scared to do it, I …
Michael Newberry 