To paint like J.M.W. Turner, emphasize the rhythmic movements within your subject to create a dramatic effect. Eliminate all whites from your paper by tinting it first with diluted, pure colors. But remember to restrict yourself to a range of very light to middle values. Create the effect of luminosity by contrasting clean colors against slightly darker, more neutral colors.

• Splash 10: Passionate Brushstrokes
• "J.M.W. Turner Combined the Real and Romantic"
• Exploring Watercolor

In many instance no one knew that original paintings of some of these were ever made! The discovery of these paintings came as a surprise even to Charley's son Brett. "I felt like I was opening a buried treasure chest that had been locked up for more than 35 years."

Using thousands of dollars' worth of paint, brushes and paper shipped from New York Central Art Supply in the East Village, Mr. Bleckner, 59, worked with a group of 25 children — former abductees and ex-soldiers — for more than a week at a Roman Catholic aid center. The children made 200 paintings that will be sold at a benefit at the United Nations headquarters next month at which Mr. Bleckner will be appointed goodwill ambassador.

He said that after several days of teaching them rudimentary painting and drawing skills, many began to open up to him and to create work that powerfully expressed their experiences. ... "What this mission accomplished is what I call microcreativity," Mr. Bleckner wrote in a catalog of the children's work. "It is a personal interaction which gives someone the tools to create something that they can be proud of, and which can help them on the arduous path to restoring their dignity and sense of self-worth."

See a slideshow of the children's work here.

To paint like James Abbott McNeill Whistler, group objects into simple silhouettes over the whole page, and avoid adding too many details. Use opaque pigments and a limited palette to create a feeling of weight and mood. But more quickly, since dry opaque pigments are difficult to work with. Focus on contrasts of intensity rather than differences of light and dark, to convey the effects of reduced light.

To create a striking surface texture, Edgar Degas would steam the pastel with boiling water. Depending on the thickness of the pastel layers, the steam might produce a paste, workable with a stiff brush, or a wash that could be spread with a soft brush.

Wyeth gave America a prim and flinty view of Puritan rectitude, starchily sentimental, through parched gray and brown pictures of spooky frame houses, desiccated fields, deserted beaches, circling buzzards and craggy-faced New Englanders. A virtual Rorschach test for American culture during the better part of the last century, Wyeth split public opinion as vigorously as, and probably even more so than, any other American painter including the other modern Andy, Warhol, whose milieu was as urban as Wyeth’s was rural.

• Studio tour with New Yorker cartoonist
• William Steig, from The New Yorker to Shrek

I hope to be able to visit this awesome show, but if I can't make it, the video tour above will just have to suffice. (Not sure if the Velvet Underground soundtrack is included in the admission fee.) Andy Warhol: Other Voices, Other Rooms "sheds new light on the celebrated pop artist and focuses on the ideas at the heart of his work: embracing consumer culture, exploring sexual identity, challenging social conventions, and erasing distinctions between high and low culture."

The exhibit runs through February 15, 2009, at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. Tickets cost $8 for adults, or $5 for visitors ages 13-17 or older than 65. Free to Wexner Center and Warhol Club members, college students with ID, visitors younger than 12, and free to all visitors every Thursday evening and first Sunday of each month.

You can watch a preview below that describes Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party, an installation piece in the Brooklyn Museum.

Found via Pica + Pixel

The picture at right is from a cafe here in Cincinnati, The Coffee Shop on Madison, which has a stunning corner lined with Charley Harper prints.

Across town, there's an apartment building that must house a fairly busy artist: Every window of one first-floor unit is covered in portraits. They're not Renoirs, but who cares?

What about your town? Is it easy to stumble upon art in your neighborhood, or do you feel sometimes as if you're living in a creative desert? (If so, maybe it's time to go guerrilla...)

In the meantime, I have become totally fascinated with Harper's style and have become determined to have a print of his in my apartment by spring. (Luckily for me, a relative works at a gallery with a large Harper inventory and gets a 35 percent staff discount that I have absolutely no problem using.)

Via the Watercolor Artist blog: Gauguin's teeth found in a well

From the Chicago Tribune: How a fake Gauguin ended up in the Art Institute

Lucian Freud: The Painter's Etchings is on display at MoMa until March 10.

Some links you might find especially interesting:

• Books on Vermeer's technique and materials
• An article on lacemaking in Vermeer's time
• Images of his signatures
  
• And so you can impress your painter friends, a Dutch pronunciation guide
  

The New York Times recently reviewed David Michaelis' hefty biography of Schulz, shedding some light on the lonely life of a man who might have been America's most successful artist. (And note the wonderful illustration from the cartoonist Seth.)

Slate put up a slideshow that's a great quick-and-dirty bio accompanied by some of the existentialist strips. Slate points out that the Charlie Brown holiday specials everyone remembers (and that are probably on TV right now) make the cartoons seem much more upbeat than they are.

I feel like Peanuts is inextractable from my childhood... Have you already watched any of the TV specials this year? Looks like "A Charlie Brown Christmas" is on tomorrow...

I came across this this step-by-step pictorial on the construction of Damien Hirst's diamond skull today. Aside from feeling a little queasy from thinking too much about skulls and teeth, I was left feeling exasperated.

For the Love of God, as the skull is called, is a platinum cast encrusted with more than 8,000 diamonds—made by jewelers at Bentley and Skinner, not Hirst. Hirst claims to have sold it for 50 million pounds, but that's disputed.

So, dear readers—what's your take on Mr. Hirst and his diamond skulls, sharks floating in formaldehyde and maggots in a box?

You can get a sneak peek at the work in an online slideshow from MoMA and a slideshow from Slate.com. The MoMA slideshow (which requires Adobe Flash and Acrobat) focuses on his sketchbooks, subjects and conservation. The Slate slideshow looks at his relationship with art critic and anarchist Félix Fénéon, who championed Seurat's work and helped get it in the public eye.

Georges Seurat: The Drawings is on display at MoMA until January 7, 2008, with many related lectures and talks in the coming month.

Our sister magazine, Watercolor Magic, recently put up a video tour of Joseph Raffael's latest exhibition at the Nancy Hoffman Gallery in New York City.

Nancy Hoffman offers insight into the show she describes as "a window to new artistic terrain," and the artist opens his journals to reveal the painting process that brought the work on display into fruition. You can watch the video here.

Finster, at 60, felt he was called by God to create art and set a goal of creating 5,000 pieces. By the time he died, he had created more than 47,000. Though Finster died in 2001, his northwest Georgia home—which opened last month as a public museum—still sits in what he called a garden of paradise. There's some dispute over the state of the land, as the New York Times reports.

My first exposure to Finster was through his commissioned cover art for rock albums such as R.E.M.'s Reckoning and the Talking Heads' Little Creatures. There's just something lively and manic about his work that attracts me—and a lot of people. Have a look at this great slide show from the Times about the artist and his work here.

After three years, it came to light that the painting she found was Three People, a 1970 work by Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo that was stolen 20 years ago, the New York Times reports. She hid the painting behind a false wall in her apartment until she could get an art expert to confirm what the painting was.

Gibson will get a $15,000 finder's reward, and the original owner of the painting is putting Three People up for auction Nov. 20 at Sotheby's, where it's expected to fetch $1 million.

Van Gogh did all three, according to a researcher quoted in the Guardian. In the last year before his death, the artist worked at breakneck pace, often running out of canvas. Some of the cloth he painted on is believed to be tablecloth or tea towels, possibly from the mental hospital where he stayed in 1889. (Red accents in the cloth are visible where the paint is thin.)

And last month, an X-ray revealed a lost work, Wild Vegetation, under The Ravine, which was painted four months later while he was in the asylum. It impresses me that Van Gogh was so driven to paint that he didn't let a lack of supplies—or sales—stop him.

Until now. Last week I bought a woodblock print from Paul Roden at La Vie Gallery in Pittsburgh. The Nashville native achieves incredible detail in a difficult medium (my own experimentation with woodcuts was not nearly as pretty).

I fell in love with this 27x32 beauty, History of the World IV:

And hello, by the way -- I'm Grace, The Artist's Magazine's new assistant editor. I've got a background in printmaking and bookbinding, and you'll be seeing a lot more of me!