"The Brilliant Line", Following the Early Modern Engraver - Andrew Raftery, RISD Museum of Art

Madonna with the Pear, Albrecht Durer, Engraving, 1511, RISD.

"Engravings are objects of exquisite beauty and incomparable intricacy whose visual language is composed entirely of lines...Andrew Raftery, an accomplished engraver and Associate Professor of Printmaking at the Rhode Island School of Design, analyzed how Early Modern engravers worked within established line systems and also diverged from them." - source: http://risdmuseum.org/thebrilliantline/

A Webby Award nominee for Best Art Website and highly interactive, the visitor can selectively view different stages of the process, from first ideas to final statements, to better understand the printmakers' art and craft.

Link The Brilliant Line, RISD Museum of Art, online exhibit, Andrew Raftery

"Portraits help bring closure to fallen troops' loved ones." - CNN

For 12 hours a day, Michael Reagan works on portraits of fallen military personnel. So far, he's done more than 2,000.

Edmonds, Washington (CNN) -- For Michael Reagan, the portraits always start the same way.

"I do the eyes first so I get this connection with the face," he said. "I am pretty exhausted after a picture. Just try staring at a photograph for five hours without any distractions."

Reagan, a professional artist for 40 years, is known for his vivid etchings of politicians, celebrities and athletes.

Today, he has a new subject: fallen members of the military.

It all started three years ago when the wife of a Navy corpsman who was killed in Iraq asked Reagan to draw her late husband.

Reagan insisted on doing the portrait for free. Then he had a realization.

"I looked at my wife and told her what happened and said, 'Now we need to do them all,' " Reagan remembered..."   - CNN web site

Link CNN web site, Full Text and Video

Matisse: Radical Invention 1913-1917 - Art Institute of Chicago Exhibit

Henri Matisse. Bathers by a River 1909–10, 1913, 1916–17. Charles H. and Mary F. S. Worcester Collection, 1953.158. © 2010 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

"It has bothered me all my life that I don't paint like anyone else." 
 - Henri Matisse

"Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913–1917 examines what is without question the most innovative, momentous, and yet little-studied time in the artist’s long career. Nearly 120 of his most ambitious and experimental paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints from the period are on view. Matisse himself acknowledged the significance of these years when he identified two paintings, Bathers by a River and The Moroccans, as among his most pivotal. These monumental canvases from the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, inspired the collaborative work of this exhibition and serve as major touchstones within it. This is the first exhibition to offer an in-depth investigation of Matisse’s art from this time, revealing information uncovered through extensive new art-historical, archival, and technical research."  - Art Institute of Chicago web site.

Link Matisse, Radical Invention 1913-1917, Art Institute of Chicago, March 20 - June 20, 2010