Author: Anthony Waichulis

As many readers here might already know, every other Sunday, my Online Artist Roundtable brings together a group of artists to talk shop, exchange ideas, ask questions, and spend a little time among colleagues and friends. Over the years, participants have often told me how much they value the roundtable and the feeling of belonging to a larger creative “tribe,” even when much of their working life takes place alone in a studio. During COVID, the roundtable became especially important. Opportunities to meet up or gather in person disappeared almost overnight, and being able to sit down with a group…

A 2019 study from Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s School of Design in China examined an often-encountered yet relatively under-examined form of ornamentation: decorative wallpaper (Fu, Zhang, & Lin, 2019). The researchers examined two properties: regularity (the orderly repetition of motifs) and semantic decodability (how readily those motifs convey recognizable meaning). Using the Implicit Association Test, which assesses relative associations through differences in classification response times, they found evidence of implicit preferences for regular over random patterns and realistic over abstract ones. The authors interpreted their findings as consistent with enhanced processing fluency associated with translational symmetry and recognizable motifs. And…

Having a better look at one of the reasons that Johnson’s moonlit scenes look so much more convincing than paintings that are merely dark and blue. Planet of the Grapes My God, I remember the first time I was assigned to paint a nighttime plein-air painting in college. It was the absolute worst. Although the painting thankfully did not survive to this day, what does survive is the horrible memory of piling one color on top of another, hoping that some combination would somehow make the scene look like “night.” I had no idea what I was doing, and by…

How training can produce increasingly impressive performance while producing progressively less of the learning it was designed to create. A Sad Tale of Tails In 1902, French colonial authorities in Hanoi (capital city of Vietnam) faced a substantial rat problem. The issue became particularly concerning amid Hanoi’s modernization efforts, as a newly developed sewer system (intended as a conspicuous achievement of French colonial engineering) also created an extraordinarily accommodating habitat and transportation network for the city’s rodent population. With concerns about bubonic plague mounting, colonial authorities began an aggressive extermination campaign, and thousands of rats were killed. On some days,…

Thoughts on evaluating the many art “rules” and traditions that continue to thrive in the studio and classroom. (Updated 7/2026 for publication in Smartermarx Magazine) Cover: Nikolay Bogdanov-Belsky, Mental Arithmetic. In the Public School of S. A. Rachinsky, 1895. (cropped) Oil on canvas, 107.4 × 79 cm. State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. “Art ‘rules’ are often personal opinions shouted loudly with a big stick.” -Kara Castro McGee. American author Hilary Hinton “Zig” Ziglar is often credited with popularizing a clever story about blindly following tradition and dogma. The tale now exists in many versions, with numerous details changed, but the story’s…

Recently, during one of those zombie-like social-media scrolling sessions, I came across an artist discussing what she regarded as the core difference between “Photorealism” and “Academic Realism.” As many people who know me might expect, I stopped to hear what she had to say. To be fair, I found her larger point thoughtful and useful, particularly regarding the labels artists adopt and the assumptions those labels carry. “Realist,” “Academic,” and “Photorealist” are not neutral or interchangeable terms. Each points toward a different history, set of practices, and understanding of what a representational image is supposed to do. Used carefully, such…

In June 2022, I wrote a short article examining some of the claims surrounding zinc oxide in oil paint systems. The article grew out of several online “debates” about whether zinc oxide belonged in so many popular paint formulations, and whether artists were taking the associated risks seriously enough. After that, the issue largely receded from view for me until a recent discussion in one of our artist roundtables renewed my interest in the subject and raised a simple question: has the evidence changed, and what can we responsibly say now? Looking back, though, those debates seem less like the…

We are pleased to share that our good friend and colleague Oren Loloi is participating in the 2026 Summer Show at Zemack Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv. The group exhibition opened July 10 and remains on view through August 31, 2026. Loloi is represented in the exhibition by his work Microcosmos (80 × 117 centimeters (31 x 46″), Oil on Canvas). Based in Tel Aviv after periods living and working in New York City and Milan, Loloi has developed a distinctive contemporary figurative practice centered on atmosphere, scale, and the relationship between the human figure and its environment. His coastal…

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…