If any art is truly timeless, it is the still-life. The still-life does not depict a moment frozen in time, a chosen instant snatched from the temporal current, but a moment outside of time, beyond its erosive reach. There is no past or future, only an eternal...
Using only simple tools, Italy’s Firmo Fracassi achieves astonishing detail in his bulino-style engravings. If suffering is a muse for artistic genius, it came early in the life of Firmo Fracassi. Born in 1939 in Tavernole, a village nestled in Italy’s...
The most profound influence on color, of course, is light. Without it, a prism is little more than a chunk of glass. Northern tribes like the Inuit have many words to describe what most of us simply call “snow.” The irony of such a vocabulary lapse — one...
Billfishing was the perfect pursuit for a man endlessly intrigued with saltwater watching. Saltwater at first sight was Al Barnes’ epiphany. Its many manifestations dazzled the boy newly arrived at the fishing village of Port Isabel on the Texas Coast and became...
Tait worked hard at his craft, his sketches, his technique. It was this essential labor that helped him, when his imagination called, rise to the occasion. American landscape and genre painting of the late 19th century, in which Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait excelled, is...
“I’m not trying to record history or paint from an historical perspective. I don’t particularly care about the rib on an over-under. I’m capturing a mood.” If James B. Robinson wrote scores for movies, which he does as an offbeat hobby,...
The men and women who studied under Howard Pyle all but dominated American illustration during the first half of the 20th century. At the beginning of the 20th century, Howard Pyle of Wilmington, Delaware, was most popular illustrator in America. He had only one...
John Doyle sees the ocean as one of the last frontiers where man can test his courage. John Doyle once showed me a photo from his boyhood in the mid-’40s. The picture was of him, standing next to a string of five largemouth bass that his father had caught on a...
The very nature of hunting requires that you know as much as possible about the game you pursue. And that’s why, the author maintains, artists who hunt are able to capture the essence of their wild subjects. For the past few decades, wildlife art has enjoyed an...
Ramblings: Tales From Three Hemispheres features 240-pages and over 180 black-and-white photographs that richly document Michael Altizer’s contemplative and intimately composed accounts of his hunting and fishing journeys, from Patagonia to Alaska—along with the...
