by John Dalton | Feb 22, 2023 | blog
Essay on which the forward for Alessandro Tomassetti’s book Instant Gratification was based. The medium is fast. The effect long lasting. And sublime. Painters feel time differently. They feel the weight of it. The old masters lean on them with a constant...
by John Dalton | Jun 20, 2019 | blog, Consciousness
Who wants to be a Taoist sage? I do . . . don’t. Ali Cavanaugh’s brilliant watercolor of Taylor Swift. Click through for my podcast with Ali. While Taylor Swift was being born in 1989 I was discovering the Taoist approach to life. She has since made an...
by John Dalton | Mar 28, 2019 | blog
Being a Millennial has nothing to do with age. It is a state of mind. Read on, you may discover you’ve been a Millennial your whole life. I’m 54. I have a grey beard and long grey hair. Old friends like to call me Gandalf for a laugh. Depending on your own age I’m...
by John Dalton | Feb 19, 2019 | blog
While the art world went coocoobeans over DaVinci’s $450m painting sale, current renaissance painters are selling for under $20k a painting. In case you’ve been living under a rock, Salvator Mundi, what Christie’s billed as, “the last DaVinci,” recently sold for...
by John Dalton | Jan 6, 2019 | blog
I never had a dog before. Animals were fine but I never really, “got,” them, at least not in the way other people seemed to. I’d met some Scottish terriers in South Africa and thought they were great but owning one, no, not really me. My wife...
by John Dalton | Dec 4, 2018 | blog
“I didn’t know people still painted like that.” There has been a quiet return to an older way of painting. To standards from the past. To a time when drawing mattered. When shock value wasn’t so highly regarded. A time when art and...
by John Dalton | Nov 21, 2018 | blog
I wandered lonely as a cloud . . . something, something, something… In praise of the half-remembered gems of poetry. I’d like to think of myself as someone who remembers complete poems. Someone who can recite them at significant moments in life, preferably looking...
by John Dalton | Nov 21, 2018 | blog
In the early hours of Friday morning RJD gallery in Sag Harbor was destroyed by fire. All the artwork on the premises was lost. Hundreds of original paintings gone. Millions of considered brush strokes no more to be seen. With everything else that is going on in the...
by John Dalton | Nov 5, 2018 | blog, Governance
If I can handle my banking online why can’t I run my country online? Wouldn’t that be better, more responsive democracy? Why do I need politicians to represent me? I can see why they were necessary in the past but why do I need them now? If I can access my online bank...
by John Dalton | Oct 7, 2018 | blog
I’m sitting with my eyes closed in a school hall in Dublin. Forty people I met only yesterday surround me. John Denver strums over the sound system and we’re encouraged to sing along. This is the 80’s. This is personal development. “Sweet, sweet surrender. Live, live...