Matthew Bates is proud to announce that his paintings are now available as full sized tile murals! Thanks to the good people at Pacific Tile Art Studio Matthew's paintings are now transformed like magic into a room decoration for all seasons. Here is an example:http://www.pacificatileart.com/Art/bates_Tuscan_Summer_Road_4X4_sm.jpg

by Stephen Bates

(Stephen Bates is an artist an philosopher. for 30 years he has played clarinet and bass clarinet for the Opera House Orchestra at the Kennedy Center for the Perfoming Arts in Washington, D.C. and is an accomplished abstract painter.)

There is a new malady which I call Exponentially Expanding Knowledge Syndrome, or EEKS. This condition is the product of the internet. The current thirst for knowledge generated by the internet is categorically different from information sources of the past: books, libraries, encyclopedias, newspapers, and phone books. All of these are contained in the internet, however, the addition of new categories of information increasing at a constantly accelerating speed, has created an entirely new concept of the nature of knowledge.

Lovers in Santa Croce is now a high quality poster available for only $29,99. Order your's today!

Check out Matthew Bates new blog at Blogger.com. Her are all of the best articles from the creation of an idea to crop circles on the duomo in Firenze. What was that? Click on the link to find out more.

[img_assist|fid=566|thumb=0|alt=Tuscan Summer Road]

Here is my new painting which depicts a beautiful Summer day last year in a little town south of Siena in Tuscany. The road asks us to wind down it to find what pastoral delights await us arounf the bend. I look forward to your feedback about this painting.

One of the most important things that an artist must provide on their website is accurate and beautiful images of their artwork. It has to be the next best thing to actually seeing the artwork itself. To do this I use digital technology. First, I take a digital photo of the painting. Then I open the digital file in Paint Shop Pro:

I grew up in an artistic family. For many years my parents never had financial stability and I was always concerned about the life they were leading. The fact that they were living the life that they had chosen, and loving it was lost on me when I was a child. I guess that because of my unusual parents I was very wary about following in their footsteps and living the artistic life. I thought that it would be better to become an advertising executive and make a bundle of cash. I even went to New York with an AD Exec. when I was sixteen to see how it was. It was very glamorous, but I saw right away that the amount of stress involved was higher than I had expected. At eighteen I got into college at the University of San Francisco and I signed up as an Advertising Major. That put me in their art department, which was actually not at USF, but at the Academy of Art College, in downtown San Francisco. All of a sudden I was taking drawing and painting classes in a real art school. Meanwhile in my Advertising 101 class we were already at each other’s throats in the faux stress environment of our classroom which made our teacher laugh at us, a knowing laugh that spoke volumes, it said: “If you think that this is rough, try it out for real!

I have been painting for 22 years and in that time I have come across many different ways to create a piece of art. In art school we drew from the model almost every day until our fingers hurt. I was always covered in chalk and personally I didn’t like to look like a bum all of the time. Our teachers would describe to us the beauty of sitting in front of a subject to understand it’s qualities while we searched out for the contours and prayed that we would get better at drawing. Looking back at my time in the academy, I realize now that we were just trying to master the skills involved, with a sense of competition that really had nothing to do with art at all. We rarely talked about ideas, it was mostly about how the art would look as a finished product, something to present, something to sell. We talked a lot about styles and design, but I was not asked about inspiration, and it is of this that I will talk today.