The Blank Canvas

The Blank Canvas offers solid advice for everyone who struggles with artist's block or other problems of creative expression, including: drawing subject matter from unexpected sources, mining one's daily visual responses for images, overcoming self-doubt and criticism, making choices when torn between several ideas, and getting started on assignments."As a painter and an art educator, I found Professor Audette's The Blank Canvas to be both compelling and useful. The writer makes no apologies for honoring the history of art. She supports her views with apt quotations from artists and provides many suggestions that art teachers should find useful. She knows more than anyone I know about how to cope with 'creative dry spells,' and her treatment of the artist's studio should impel anyone to view the private work space with a fresh eye. I loved the book and wish it were twice its modest size."—Al Hurwitz, author of Gifted and Talented in Art



"The Blank Canvas unlocks, unblocks and stimulates the creative mind. Anna Held Audette offers a supermarket of ideas from the history of art, presenting the wisdom of—and anecdotes about—artists from centuries past up to the present day. It is comprehensive, honest, and inclusive, offering comments and views both psychological and intellectual, aesthetic and practical."—Audrey Flack, author of Art and Soul Anna Held Audette is a painter, printmaker, and photographer with works in numerous collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery. She is Professor of Art at Southern Connecticut State University.