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To Paint is to Love Again, Part 7: Ingres’s Violin

“What kind of art do you do?” must be one of the questions artists are most frequently asked. It makes perfect sense, for “art” encompasses a great number of disciplines. In my case, this used to be: theatre design, art direction, graphic and motion design, animation, and various inter-disciplinary work. These days, my main focus …
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malwina
27th August 2020
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To Paint is to Love Again, Part 6: Living with Paintings

When you are an artist, paintings are your children. You give birth to them, you shape them, you look after them, and there comes a day when they leave your studio. “The pity of it is that so few of us are privileged to live with our paintings”, wrote Henry Miller. Personally, I’m not sure …
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malwina
1st August 2020
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To Paint is to Love Again, Part 5: The Wonder of Colour

One of the bigger frustrations painters experience is not getting things ‘right’ — this will often mean struggling to depict something in correct scale and proportions. ‘My eyes often resemble the eyes one sees in an optician’s window. (…) As for hands and feet, generally it is impossible to tell whether they are those of …
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malwina
6th July 2020
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To Paint is to Love Again, Part 4: To Paint Like a Child

There’s a popular meme on the internet which says ‘Your only two emotions when you’re an artists’, and shows Bart Simpson in two states: 1) screaming ‘I am so great! I am so great!’, 2) lying in bed depressed. I’m not sure if there’s an artist who can’t relate to that. The elation however, as …
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malwina
23rd June 2020
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To Paint is to Love Again, Part 3: Through Painter’s Eyes

One of the things which particularly resonate with me in Henry Miller’s “To Paint is to Love Again” book is the idea of appreciating the everyday and familiar by viewing the world through painter’s eyes. We marvel at the beauty of places we visit when travelling: ancient ruins, neoclassical palaces, botanic gardens, charming little streets …
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malwina
24th May 2020
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To Paint is to Love Again, Part 2: What is a Picture?

What I like so much about Henry Miller’s “To Paint is to Love Again” book is the joy of discovering a new way of looking at things — everyday objects and views which one is attempting to transfer onto canvas or paper. And the same with viewing artworks — when Miller asks “What is a …
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malwina
26th April 2020
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To Paint is to Love Again, Part 1: Maybe You, Too, Can Paint?

A few months ago, I came across a magnificent text by Henry Miller, “To Paint is to Love Again”. It was originally published in 1960 by Cambria Books, but unfortunately the book seems to have been out of print for a while now, and besides a handful of copies available in selected libraries, there are …
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malwina
15th April 2020