Laraine Armenti

student of painting

Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio

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Death & Marketing There is nothing so fatal to character as half-finished tasks.—David Lloyd George, British prime minister (1916–22). . . . . . . . . . A lot has changed in the 32 months since my last post. For one thing, I thought my hiatus was 18 months, but then did the math. Grasp of time, as others have noted, has been one of many casualties during the Covid-19 pandemic, to … [Read more...]

Summer Drawings

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Drawing means different things to different people. As a practitioner I want to make the approximate specific and say more with less. The most important thing is to draw often, in whatever way possible, to realize its potential. I went to ten extraordinary museums on art trips in New England this summer. Museums usually forbid the use of ink when drawing in sketchbooks from their art in … [Read more...]

Looking at Watteau

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Five years ago, I spent time in Madrid indulging in the feast of the city and in some of Europe's greatest museums. I carried a sketchbook with me to draw in the galleries. A few pages shown here are of Jean-Antoinne Watteau's paintings at the Thyssen-Bornemisza. Watteau was the progenitor of the 'fêtes galantes' genre, theatrical scenes of idylls and pastorals. Other visitors were kind to me, … [Read more...]

BU First Month

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Events are moving too quickly to post everything from the graduate school program on the blog. Here are highlights. The photographs are snapshots, hand held, daylight. The city paintings are influenced in part by recently reading Don DeLillo's White Noise. The story concerned an "airborne toxic event" hovering over Somerville, Mass, circa 1985. The next series of paintings use only black and … [Read more...]

DeCordova Museum

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I am extremely pleased to become a lending artist of DeCordova Museum's Corporate Loan Program. DeCordova Museum was the first museum I visited regularly as a child with my family. In my twenties, I took night classes in figure drawing for several years at the museum's school. The main building is high on a wooded hill overlooking pristine Sandy Pond, a near neighbor of Walden Pond. A former … [Read more...]