When I lived in England I tried to see as many exhibitions as possible. These visits were very formative and have substantially affected my visual arts career. I have only had time to start writing my thoughts on the first two listed. Check back from time to time as I continue to post drawings and reviews. England Citizens and Kings: Portraits in the Age of Revolution, 1760—1830 |Royal Academy of Arts | This was a very difficult show for me to absorb. Quite simply, I was overwhelmed by the volume of works on display; it was a huge collection, I only had an hour and It was quite crowded the day I...

Winslow Homer was a “Yankee to the bone,” during a time when all of America was falling in love with the European aesthetic. American society during the post-Civil-War industrial boom was war-weary and wanted to forget about home for a while so they found solace in European Old World art and architecture. Whistler became an expatriate and America artists followed him en masse. Sargent became the darling of the wealthy on both sides of the Atlantic, but on their return, many American artists could not sell their European style paintings because the wealthy wanted to buy only from authentic...

I have about 20 to 30 photobooks that I use for teaching purposes. Here are a few that I use to teach practice, theory composition and history. I cart these around to the various venues where I teach and make them available for student use during class. The Pencil of Nature (out of print) Eugene Atget (Aperture) Julia Margaret Cameron (Phaidon 55s) Alfred Stieglitz (Aperture Masters of Photography) James Vanderzee (Phaidon 55s) Henri Cartier-Bresson (Photofile) Walker Evans (Photofile) Koudelka Don McCullin (Photofile) Sabastian Salgado (Photofile) Witness in our Time: Working Lives of Documentary...

The Pencil of Nature, William Henry Fox Talbot The Pencil of Nature, in the words of its author, Henry Fox Talbot, was intended as “the first attempt to publish a series of plates or pictures wholly executed by the new art of Photogenic Drawing, without the aid whatever from the artist’s pencil.” Talbot went on to stress that the images were “depicted by optical and chemical means alone, without the aid of any one acquainted with the art of drawing.” The series was published in London between 1844 and 1846 in six separate fasicles. (The word is from the Latin facisculus...