The Old Masters knew a secret which made their paintings enduring masterpieces.

In 1841 a portrait painter and tinkerer, John Golf Rand, invented the collapsible artist’s paint tube.

He lost his mother at fourteen.

How does an artist guide the viewer through a painting? Too many distractions and you'll lose the viewer. The picture will confuse them, and they will move on. Oops... missed that sale!

Laurie and I were talking the other day about our love of model trains. I shared some stories of the train set my dad bought me for Christmas when I was six or seven. On reflection, he, most likely, bought the train set for himself. I happened to be a handy excuse at the time.

Last time we mentioned that Bill lost his home. We’ll get to that in a minute. First, though let’s answer this question.

The Alexander Wet-on-Wet Technique revolutionized the art of oil painting. Bill Alexander spent years developing and refining this special technique to make it possible for anyone to create a painting with a minimum of instruction. With traditional oil painting, it often takes weeks, or even longer, to finish one painting. With the Alexander Method™, you can complete your painting in an afternoon.

Bob Hoffman is a popular speaker and author in the field of advertising and marketing. He is an outspoken critic of digital marketing in particular. He doesn’t spare his peers in the traditional marketing realm either. His quote below applies to both spheres.

Is this an accurate statement? For master artists – maybe. How about the rest of us? I don’t know about you, but the only thing I see in my work are mistakes. There seems to be no worse critic than ourselves.

A “polymath” is a person whose expertise spans many domains – or subject areas. Leonardo was a polymath. He lived during the Renaissance, so Leonardo is the quintessential “Renaissance Man.”

In the footnote, the translator states that many readers misunderstood Leonardo’s suggestion. Leonardo did not mean that the student should be a master of perspective. He intended that the student should understand the fundamental problems that beginners make. It would be up to the apprentice’s master to instruct him in the broader laws of perspective.