art for the easel’s sake

Easel Knievil. Win a Shannon easel from Winsor & Newton. Three questions to answer. Only catch is that you have to pick it up at the store in Sherbrooke, Québec.

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play it again sam

From Samuel Johnson. What a great writer.From The Vanity of Human Wishes, The Tenth Satire of Juvenal, Imitated. The first section: Let observation with extensive view, Survey mankind, from China to Peru; Remark each anxious toil, each eager strife, And watch the busy scenes of crowded life; Then say how hope and fear, desire and hate, O’erspread with snares the clouded maze of fate, Where wav’ring man, betray’d by vent’rous pride To tread the dreary paths without a guide, As … Continue reading

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rolls over rubies

Men and their cars.  Fetish object? idolatry? The freedom machine? Below:  Colonel T.E. Lawrence at the wheel of an armored Rolls-Royce in 1918. He later wrote:”A Rolls in the desert was above rubies.” (see link at end)…He would eventually command a unit of nine armored Rolls-Royces, which he touted in Revolt in the Desert as “that most involved and intricate weapon.” In a vivid account from that book, Lawrence described using the cars on a one-day mission to blow up … Continue reading

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graf masters

Spray paint and graffiti. The two are inescapable. The percentage of spray paint used for graffiti as opposed to legitimate uses must be significant. After some consideration, that is, vandalism as opposed to artistic expression, the Krylon spray paint line will be featured this spring and summer in most of the popular colors. The Liquitex display for their graffiti paint comes is a sort of cage under lock and key which gives an idea of the theft risk of spray … Continue reading

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paper mates

The big bang continues. Really the two dominant players in the art paper business whether in sheet or pad form is Canson and Strathmore which is a big quality jump from the scholastic paper companies which for the most part are sourcing off-shore. This week’s “hot deals” are two pads from Canson’s XL line which was conceived as a reasonable quality value packed line that was the result of a re-branding of its Jumbo series. Over the past several years … Continue reading

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