Transitioning into the art world

Holidays are all about family around here and that's the way I like it. However, our son from Boston left yesterday afternoon, so I've been clearing the decks and the decorations so I can get back to art and writing.

Art wasn't altogether forsaken, though. We took Jenna to the Dayton Art Institute last week to see the museum for the first time and enjoy the Experiencenter, a special room set up for children to work with art materials and relate art to letters of the alphabet throughout the room. She was delighted. The exhibition will be in place until October. We explored the museum and enjoyed a collection of creches from around the world, as well as the paintings, some of which she said were bigger than her daddy's car. Yes, they were.

On Monday, we drove to Cincinnati to the Contemporary Arts Center and viewed two interesting exhibitions. Maria Lassnig is an 89-year-old Austrian artist whose figural paintings and abstracts are startling and thought-provoking. She considers all of her artwork to be self portraits, even those that have no apparently human content. You can google her name to find many artworks and bibliographical information online. The exhibit runs until January 11, 2009.

Another intriguing exhibit at the CAC was the Discarded Spider series by Carlos Amorales. The artist creates digital shapes from his photographs and other images, assembling them into striking compositions. Many include the same shapes, but in widely differing arrangements.

I've heard from several artists about my article in Watercolor Artist magazine, based on a chapter in my new book, Confident Color: An Artist's Guide to Harmony, Contrast and Unity. The article is a good example of the material in the book, compressed for the magazine format. It gives an idea of the informative content of the book. Take a look. Be sure to visit the demo pages by Dave Daniels taken from the book.