LARAINE ARMENTI

Student of Painting

2023 Handbook

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The pencil drawings in this Handbook sketchbook are a mix of copies drawn in museums, from online images, and from life in airports and a Vivaldi rehearsal in a London church. This book took a while to fill. Some pages have been erased and redrawn on later dates. It began as a travel book on a brief trip to Amsterdam in September 2017 and ended at home in February 2024. One of the dates says 2022 … [Read more...]

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 32 months since my last post. For one thing, I thought the number was 18, then did the math. Grasp of time, as others have noted, has been a casualty during the Covid-19 pandemic, to put it mildly. It has taken … [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...]