Artists Magazine

“It is a happy talent to know how to play. ” —RALPH WALDO EMERSON Pablo Picasso and George Braque are given credit for producing the first modern works of mixed media. It’s in Picasso’s 1912 work, Still Life With Chair Caning, that he first combines paint with collage elements—paper, oil cloth and rope—to produce a work that also plays with the ideas of viewpoint and space, which are so central to his Cubist explorations. Picasso and Braque, to be clear, weren’t the first artists to mix media. Think of Michelangelo and Leonardo combining black or red chalk with liquid media, such as an ink wash, in their drawings—or the French Impressionist favorite, Edgar Degas, who frequently experimented with a mix of materials. It was Picasso’s introduction of the printed imagery of…

it’s known that Édouard Manet worked on The Mother and Sister of the Artist, a double portrait by Berthe Morisot (1841–95). Descriptions of the painting have sometimes extolled Manet’s contributions while shading Morisot with faint praise. On its website, the National Gallery of Art compares Manet’s “suave shorthand” to Morisot’s “nervous refinement.” Morisot was anxious about exhibiting this, her first major canvas, at the Paris Salon. She invited her friend Manet to visit her family’s home and critique the painting on the day that it was to be picked up for the exhibition. Morisot described what happened next in a letter to her sister: “He took the brushes, put in a few accents that looked very well; … That is where my misfortunes began. Once started, nothing could stop him; from…

recently I was lucky enough to take a trip to visit museums, something I’ve missed doing over the last few pandemic years. At the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C., I wandered past a painting by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796–1895) of an Italian woman posed in front of a landscape, did a double take and stopped in my tracks. When I was in art school, my teacher Israel Hershberg took our class to the National Gallery to copy the masters. I had painted a copy of Agostina (left) then, standing at my easel for hours studying every color and brushstroke. Now, many years later, greeting her like a long-lost friend, I was grateful for all she’d taught me about Corot’s technique and palette and about composition and drawing. I learned from…

an abundant froth of silvery hair springs out from behind the enigmatic, yet commanding mask, shielding the face of multimedia artist Suzanne Benton. That hair is the only clue indicating the age of this effervescent storyteller. Born in Brooklyn, in 1936, now in the middle of her ninth decade, Benton is directing part of her considerable creative energy to the art of masked performance. Rather than treating masks as accoutrements concealing a wearer’s identify, the artist sees them as evocative objects, revealing the underlying myths surrounding female characters. “I wanted to look back to the strong women who were the roots of Western civilization,” she says, “particularly those in religious texts, such as Lilith, Esther and Sarah.” (See Benton’s representations of these women on page 16 and opposite.) The artist’s…

“I keep stools and chairs throughout my studio. When I feel the work has developed, I step back and sit with it. When you take the time to live with a piece, you learn how to recognize what, if anything, it needs.”MIA TARDUCCI ARTIST“The overarching goal in my work is to celebrate the people and places I find remarkable. I’m less interested in a futile exercise of highly rendered realism for the sake of satisfying my ego. To this end, I’m not as inclined to chase every minute detail and risk overworking a piece. I must admit that this requires a conscious effort each time a painting is approaching its conclusion.”MARIO ROBINSON ARTIST“I work fast and avoid boredom. I remind myself that paper is cheap and that I don’t have…

Materials · 9x11-inch sheet of Rives BFKcotton rag paper· hard (2B) and soft (6B)charcoal pencils· vine charcoal· white charcoal stick or pastelpencil· blending stump· paper towel or soft rag· kneaded eraser· rubber eraser Demonstration: Portrait of a Woman, in Charcoal REFERENCE PHOTO My drawing is based on a photo by Teslariu Mihai that I found on Unsplash, an online resource for copyright-free photographs. 1 GESTURE Using vine charcoal, I first put down a gesture for the portrait. To do this, I focused primarily on large shapes of light and dark. Squinting your eyes to blur your vision at this stage can help you eliminate the details and see the large value shapes. Expect these initial marks to be inaccurate and simply work to build rough lines and shapes on your paper. 2 MEASURE I gently wiped down the…