Rick Bennett

I taught a week of the Pullen Arts Center Teen Camp. It was one group of teens in the morning and another in the afternoon for five days. It was my first time teaching a group of teens. What a wonderful, challenging, rewarding, exhausting and puzzle solving experience. Drawing out the quiet ones, getting the loud energy ones to turn it down a notch, watch the one that wanted to invent art, while teaching adult level painting techniques with professional level materials. WOW. It actually worked. Exceptional art was made, challenging skills were learned and applied, and confidence was built. An intensely quiet group of six students started talking to each other on Thursday afternoon and were animated on Friday. One student had been painting all her life. She had painted with kids' watercolor paints and palette and didn't like it. But she liked painting in this class. Good materials are so essential. The art inventor included me in his painting. I was smiling, clueless, had coffee and was pudgy. He nailed it.

Learning from the artists who came before you -

Learning from the artists who came before you I had been painting a series of blue crabs when I saw a watercolor painting by Russell Yerkes. This link takes you to his website. His style is different than mine but his painting of a bucket of crabs immediately grabbed me. It was a familiar scene from my childhood and I knew that I needed to pain...

Interesting article. I could have used this information a couple of weeks ago.
I say “many . . . paintings,” for as various as were their techniques, their styles, and their careers, on at least one thing Homer, James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), Thomas Eakins (1844–1916), and John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) could all agree: they intended their pictures to be seen from specific distances, most often farther away than most people tended to stand. To anyone who had the temerity to press a nose against the picture, to sniff at or try to smell it, Homer gave a clear message. In the lower left corner, just below his signature and the painting’s date, Homer wrote in light-colored script, as if it were flotsam from a wreck (fig. 2): “At 12 feet from this picture/you can see it.” Long before bumper stickers proclaimed, “If you can read this you are too close,” Homer set such an admonition on the face of a major painting.
click on the 2nd link to read the whole article.
http://editions.lib.umn.edu/panorama/wp-content/uploads/sites/14/2018/04/Fig.-1.jpg
https://editions.lib.umn.edu/panorama/article/if-you-can-read-this/

"High Seas" 5" x 7" miniature.