Author: Anthony Waichulis

Dogs, Tricks, and some Grand Claims Despite the old adage about dogs and tricks, nearly thirty years of teaching representational, skill-based drawing and painting has given me little reason to believe that age is a make-or-break factor in either learning or the performance that may follow. Students differ enormously, of course, but those differences do not sort themselves neatly by age. Some younger students learn quickly and well–some do not. Some older students arrive with reinforced habits and deeply embedded assumptions that must be examined and revised. Yet their more extensive life experience may also bring patience, discipline, accumulated knowledge,…

One claim I often find myself resisting is the familiar maxim, “learning to draw is learning to see.” The phrase has considerable cachet, and once upon a time, I found myself using it in a loose, colloquial sense. Over time, however, I stopped using it—and now go so far as to address it when it is brought up in discussions about education—because it tends to encourage the mistaken expectation that training in drawing makes vision itself more “accurate.” Drawing practice can certainly refine attention, discrimination, and the coordination of perception with mark-making, but it does not transform the visual system…

Abstraction, Recognition, and the Visual Brain A few years ago, I created a social media post to see just how little visual information people needed to identify a famous work of art. To my delight, Realism Today picked it up and adapted it for their digital magazine. For this issue of Smartermarx Magazine, I’d like to revisit that original exercise—not simply as a game of recognition, but as a way to examine one of the most fascinating features of human perception: our ability to recognize images, objects, and compositions despite dramatic changes in detail, scale, orientation, and abstraction.One fascinating aspect…

Most people tend to think of an artwork as a relatively stable object: paper, paint, canvas, panel, frame. The reality, though, is that many artworks are dynamic, more akin to small weather systems. They are constantly exchanging moisture, heat, and stress with the surrounding air. This is especially true for traditional materials such as paper, canvas, wood, hide glue, starch paste, hardboard, and many grounds and adhesives. These materials are hygroscopic, meaning they absorb and release water vapor from the surrounding air. They do not need to be visibly wet to be changing. They can swell, shrink, soften, tighten, slacken,…

The Creative Spark: A Tradition of Contemporary Visions arrives at Meyer Gallery in Santa Fe in 2026. Co-curated by Natalie Featherston and Anthony Waichulis, this special exhibition explores the living relationship between tradition and innovation, celebrating artists who engage historical forms, genres, and techniques not as fixed boundaries, but as foundations for contemporary invention. Opening November 20, 2026, The Creative Spark invites viewers to consider how the past continues to ignite fresh visual languages, new meanings, and unmistakably contemporary visions. The exhibition arrives at a moment when both the validity of the tool and the role of tradition in contemporary…

Navigating the landscape of learning, where multiple routes can deepen rather than dilute understanding. A Clearing In the foyer of the ÀNI Art Academies Waichulis, there is a poster that I am quite fond of, titled “Navigating the Learning Process.” It illustrates mechanisms of learning within two broad categories: those often associated with rote learning (repetition, chunking, fluency, acronyms) and those associated with meaningful learning (metaphor, representation, communication, and problem-solving). The background for this poster is a graphic depicting layers of trees, intended to suggest a forest. That background is not simply an aesthetic choice; rather, it is a nod…

It’s not uncommon today to find critique practices that proceed as though evaluation can meaningfully precede criteria. A work is shown, reactions are offered, preferences are circulated, and the resulting exchange is treated as though it were pedagogically informative. Yet much of what passes for critique (in its common open-ended form) is better understood not as rigorous educational critique than as taste-reporting: a record of what particular viewers happen to like, dislike, prefer, or associate with. I would absolutely argue that such exercises indeed have social value and, in some contexts, even commercial value, but their instructional value is often…

Piero della Francesca’s The Resurrection serves as a profound lesson in reverence, restraint, and human dignity. Respect extends beyond manners, agreement, or civility. At its core, respect involves recognizing value beyond oneself: the worth of human life, the inheritance of culture, and the obligation to pause before destroying what cannot be replaced. The history of Piero della Francesca’s The Resurrection exemplifies this concept with particular power. Painted in the 1460s in Sansepolcro, Tuscany, The Resurrection was commissioned for the Palazzo della Residenza, the town’s communal meeting hall. Piero, a native of Sansepolcro and a prominent figure of the Italian Renaissance,…

Why “Medium” Is So Often Confusing Few terms in painting are used with greater broad-stroke ambiguity than “medium”. In common art-related conversations, some may use the word to refer to the binder in a paint system, a liquid additive mixed into a paint system, a solvent-rich thinning mixture, or even the entire material category in which an artwork is made. An artist may say “oil is the medium,” “add some medium,” or “the painting is done in mixed media,” and each statement uses the same word to communicate very different, but sometimes related, concepts. This confusion is not merely sloppy…

I. The Fear It is difficult for me to believe that I am coming up on thirty years of teaching skill-based art. While my memory may now struggle with the many names and dates involved in that journey, nearly every struggle and victory that unfolded in the studio under my watch, whether in a college classroom, a private academy, or an open workshop, remains remarkably clear. Just as vivid are the memories of the many stresses and apprehensions I faced in developing an effective visual arts curriculum to serve countless aspiring creatives worldwide. There was quite a bit to navigate,…