...gotta get my alla prima portraiture-fu back in business again, this summer break's been awesome just for catching up with painting and drawing, and a nice respite from having to view contemporary garbage.

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Sean Cheetham's article, together with Richard Schimd's book and Justin Kaupfman's alla prima demo is truly a one-hit-KO art combo to help improve your painting skills. Read it, know the pallette system intuitively enough, focus on drawing exercises and see your own alla prima skills skyrocketing.

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The past few months has been a pretty crazy learning curve, and doubly so with a summer reading list- both Harold Speed books, the Orientalists (Kristian Davies), Richard Schmid and Sargent. Intimidating, but its also interesting to note how relevant and true Harold Speed's observations on common painting and drawing mistakes and how eerily accurate his predictions are on the future of classical and representative art.

Then I glanced through David Hockney's 'book' on the secrets of the Old Masters, and cringed. Truly so much has been lost, and even with the most modern of artistic tools inane crap is steadily building up in today's artistic landscape. Ah, the BP portrait award is also proof of that, photorealism is kitschy and overrated, painterly approaches trumps over photorealistic copying always (just ask Velazquez, Rubens, Van Dyck and Sargent)


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On another note, the Wyeth exhibition is still on till late August at Dulwich. Cannot say enough about the amazing hereditary talent of the Wyeths, reproductions cannot do justice to the beautiful expressive qualities of Andrew's portraits and landscapes, the beautiful colours and stylistic flair of Jaime and the brilliance of NC himself. There's the Sargent exhibition as well, but thats a default must-watch to visit anyways