Sliver of Light, Downtown

~Dan McCaw“

"Any subject can become a spring board for your imagination when you start to play the game of "What if?" In your mind, visualize an object and then ask, What if I exaggerate it? What if I manipulate, distort or change it? For example, what if I paint that red apple in shades of purple? Try different things. there are no wrong solutions - only what feels good to you and what doesn't appeal to you.”
~ Dan McCaw

 

Girl Dancing, 1906

Bessie Potter Vonnoh,

Wife of artist Robert Vonnoh.

Bronze statues

Corcoran Gallery, Washington D.C

 

                                     

                                      Girl Reading

The Dance,1908

 

A Special Book

~Dan McCaw

Morris and Whiteside Galleries Hilton Head, SC

“Good paintings are like friends,” he has said, “they encourage you to do more, to search, to experiment and to grow.”

Moon Madness

Andrew Wyeth
1982

“I put a lot of things into my work which are very personal to me. So how can the public feel these things? I think most people get to my work through the back door. They’re attracted by the realism and they sense the emotion and the abstraction — and eventually, I hope, they get their own powerful emotion.” ~Andrew Wyeth, New York Times, January 16, 2009

 

Landscape Echoes

Jan Blencoe

2008

Squall

Andrew Wyeth

1986

“Nature is not lyrical and nice; behind the peace is violence."

~ Andrew Wyeth 

Ancient Friends
Unknown Artist
2003

First Waves

Dan McCaw

“What's essential, I think, is that you have to be unafraid to grow. Do not fear change; be afraid of never changing.”

~ Dan McCaw



Girl with a Pearl Earring

Johannes Vermeer

1666

Mauritshuis, The Hague

 

Susan on a Balcony Holding a Dog
Mary Cassatt
1883
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C


“I have touched with a sense of art some people – they felt the love and the life. Can you offer me anything to compare to that joy for an artist?”

~Mary Cassatt

Harmony in White

Dan McCaw

“Broadening your perceptions creates choices, and choices create individuality. When we have options, we can then pick what best appeals to us at the time. But don't expect to develop these abilities overnight. This way of thinking is part of a lifelong journey of self-discovery.”
~ Dan McCaw

                                            

Little Girl in a Blue Armchair

Mary Cassatt

1871

"I doubt if you know the effort it is to paint! The concentration it requires, to compose your picture, the difficulty of posing the models, of choosing the color scheme, of expressing the sentiment and telling your story! The trying and trying again and again and oh, the failures, when you have to begin all over again! The long months spent in effort upon effort, making sketch after sketch. Oh, my dear! No one but those who have painted a picture know what it costs in time and strength!"

"After a time, you get keyed up and it 'goes', you paint quickly and do more in a few weeks than in the preceding weary months. When I am en train, nothing can stop me and it seems easy to paint, but I know very well it is the result of my previous efforts."

~ Mary Cassatt

Quotation reprinted from, Sixteen to Sixty: Memoirs of a Collector, by Louisine W. Havemeyer.

The Granary
Andrew Wyeth
1961

“I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape - the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show.” 

~Andrew Wyeth

Staccato Rain
Michael Flohr, 2003

“There is a flow that I try to keep in my paintings that evolves into a story of colors and movement that breathe together. A coronation of small, square strokes of premeditated color create the rhythm throughout a piece. Then I combine them with broad brush strokes that serve to ‘marry’ the elements together. I approach each canvas with ‘aggressive subtleness’. My goal as a modern impressionist is to capture a gesture and a mood, not necessarily every pore on the face of a person depicted in one of my paintings. I want my figures to be a part of the painting, not the painting itself. They work together in the environment creating the movement and emotion in a piece. I like to show light and how it travels, where it lands and how it can change color. Light alone can change the look or the mood of a place.”  ~ Michael Flohr

Permission granted by Shaffer Fine Art Gallery, Portland, Oregon

                         The Fairy Tale, William Merritt Chase, 1892

Each summer for eleven years, beginning in 1891, William Merritt Chase taught classes in outdoor painting at Shinnecock, on the eastern end of Long Island near the village of Southampton. During those summers Chase and his family lived in a large, comfortable house in the starkly beautiful Shinnecock hills.  There Chase made many of his best and most beautiful paintings, most of which were located within the house and studio or in the landscape closely surrounding it.

These paintings depict his wife and children enjoying the sun's warmth and cooling sea breezes, and engaged in the pastimes of summer, gathering flowers in the fields and shells on the beach, reading, strolling, exploring.  The mood is inescapably idyllic.  In The Fairy Tale, even the title evokes the painting's magical, enchanted ideality.

“Life is very short... but I would like to live four times and if I could, I would set out to do no other things than I am seeking now to do.”  ~William Merritt Chase

National Gallery of Art 

                            Shinnecock Hills, William Merritt Chase, 1891

“I don't believe in making pencil sketches and then painting the landscape in your studio. You must be right under the sky.   

You must try to match your colors as nearly as you can to those you see before you, and you must study the effects of light and shade on nature's own hues and tints.”

~William Merritt Chase

“Just as pedaling a bike on a cold day will warm you up, just moving your hand across a fresh canvas will get your creativity flowing.  The opinions and ideas you give voice to do not have to be revolutionary—they only need to be sincere.  Someone else out there in the world will respond to what you have to say, to how you view the world.”  ~ Dan McCaw