At the Blued Trees Intersection

Sea Smoke, A Beautiful View” 6”x6” oil on wood panel 2009. At the winter intersection of air and water.

Some years ago, I taught a drawing foundations class in the Art Department at Stonybrook University about how to draw on a surface. The first day, I took my students through a number of art historical slides that illustrated all the ways around the world that we recognize as aesthetic expressions of formal ideas like line, shape and texture. We spanned a range of American, Asian and African tropes from court imagery to animal art (animals that make deliberately creative objects and events we recognize as beautiful).…