by Barbara Downs | Aug 17, 2011
On to Caravaggio. I’m a great admirer, but I know he has his detractors. “Too theatrical!”. “Painted in front of a backdrop, no sense of defining place”. Ok, ok, perhaps true, but perhaps that theatricality is what I like so much...
by Barbara Downs | Aug 12, 2011
What I love about Tintoretto are all those moving, writhing figures. Everyone in the picture plane is twisted in one direction or another, foreshortened to some degree. Figures grab and hold onto each other. There is drama and intrigue and narrative. This painting,...
by Barbara Downs | Aug 12, 2011
More drawings soon, but first this photo I’ve been meaning to post for a while… This is R.R. Jones photographing my piece Bridge of Sighs. Lit correctly, this piece has a yellow shadow which is integral to the piece. As you can see in the following photo,...
by Barbara Downs | Aug 6, 2011
Titian, the great master, provides fertile ground with which to work. This particular painting, The Madonna Pesaro, has been on my mind for years. In my university days, I wrote a paper musing about the way that he turned an otherwise-static donor-family-in-the-corner...
by Barbara Downs | Aug 6, 2011
I just took a large-scale drawing workshop taught by my friend and fellow artist Claire Thorson. It was a wonderful class, and Claire is truly a gifted teacher. She created a classroom environment in which it felt safe to experiment, and gave us the tools to do so....
