Considered among the most important American paintings, Thomas Cole’s 1836 "The Oxbow" is a manifesto, not just of nineteenth-century American art but for the social role that American art can still play.  England-born artist Thomas [...]

Sanford Robinson Gifford (July 10, 1823 – August 29, 1880) was an American landscape painter and a leading member of the second generation of Hudson River School artists. A highly regarded pioneer of what’s now known as Luminism, [...]

“Being an artist is a true blessing. It’s a reason to get up in the morning,” says pastel painter Judith Kazdym Leeds. “The Color Purple” by Alice Walker, cover art by Judith Kazdym Leeds [...]

Artist Grace Hartigan (1922-2008) was an important figure in the “New York School” of painters born of the excitement of the Abstract Expressionist movement of the 1940s and ‘50s. Her large painting titled “Giftwares” shows [...]

There’s no doubt being part of a community has incredible benefits. We often hear of successful plein air painting societies and associations, but what if you don’t live anywhere near an existing group that meets [...]

With a certain slant of early morning light, as a critic recently wrote, Edward Hopper “captured the anxious stillness of twentieth-century American life.”  Tightly cropped like a photo or a scene glimpsed through a shopwindow, [...]

Hot enough for you? What color is “hot” – or “too hot”? If winter’s colors are cool blues and violet-grays, then summer’s are scorching orange, flame-yellow, and fire-engine red. Or so it seems, but not [...]

Of all the moderns, Matisse is the most lighthearted, the least angst-ridden, the most, well.. summery. His mission was to paint the exuberance of life – the best of us, our “best side” as human [...]

Lots of artists aspire to painting more loosely, with more freedom, avoiding the look of a fussy, uptight, overworked canvas. However, there’s two aspects of this – the how and the why. As Nancy Tankersley [...]

The quote is innocent enough: Art’s true purpose is not to portray but to evoke. If you think about what that means though, it’s saying that essentially, art is not about depicting the observable world. [...]