Posts by Dave Kaminski

Seeing a painting from across the room shows you what it needs, but changing it from over there is hard. Tools that let you draw and paint from a distance, like rollers, a longer-handled brush, or a canvas laid on the floor, let you work and step back at the same time. It keeps you…

The best paintings never say the same thing twice. There’s a conversation happening between the marks on a canvas, a call and a response, the same dynamic that makes real relationships feel alive. Learning to offset color, shape, and value so one mark answers another is what gives art its pulse.  ______________________________________     The…

I spent years thinking my work wasn’t good enough for a gallery. Then one day I got a bit of courage, drove to Santa Fe, mailed prints of my best work to four galleries, and showed up on a long weekend hoping for a miracle. What happened in the last gallery I visited, the one…

I just got back from three days in the wilderness with my daughter, no phone, no notebook, no paintings, following a river up into the Trinity Alps. I didn’t go to think about art. But something found me anyway. What I saw sitting on the bank of that river taught me something about the work…

A few weeks ago I drove a thousand miles into Baja Mexico alone. Late at night, deep in the desert with no cell signal, I asked AI one simple question on impulse. A question that every person has an answer to. Especially artists. And it couldn’t answer it. What I realized in that moment on…

Have you ever lain awake in the middle of the night wondering if you’re really qualified to call yourself an artist? You’re not alone. In this post I share a conversation I had recently with a group of advanced artists, where one of them asked something so vulnerable it stopped the entire room. What followed…