Over much of America around this time of the year, the familiar “v” formations of southerly migrating Canada Geese pass noisily overhead as they have for thousands of years. Their untranslatable calls make us stop [...]
A silverpoint drawing is literally a drawing done in pure silver. Its primary tool is a pen or stylus with a soft metal point that leaves a metallic trace on a pigmented ground. It’s sort of [...]
“All art is quite useless,” wrote Oscar Wilde, by which I think he meant that art is one of the few things in a society in love with “productivity” and “being practical” that can still [...]
1. The Sublime and the Picturesque (Romanticism) Understanding the Hudson River School starts with recognizing the European influence. The artist and early environmentalist Thomas Cole (1801–1848) founded the influential 19th-century art movement known as the [...]
A Rose is a Rose is …. potentially so much more. Georgia O’Keefe was a master at observing the abstract forms in nature and translating them into fascinating combinations of modernist abstraction and natural forms [...]
Oil painter Julie Davis, AIS, AWA, OPA has a favorite quote from Winston Churchill that hints at her philosophy of painting: "Obviously, then, armed with a paint-box, one cannot be bored, one cannot be left [...]
Few artists in history have had such a wide-ranging impact on art and culture as Henri Matisse. What a bold, exuberant spirit of an artist! We’re fortunate that Matisse was also a thoughtful and prolific writer who often reflected [...]
Who, with any feeling for the depths of humanity, can resist that bottomless gaze peering across the centuries from the self-portraits Rembrandt painted in old age? Great works of art, according to Susan Sontag, provide [...]
This striking painting by Georgia O’Keeffe strikes one as a near-total abstraction. It’s severe, mysterious, threatening – one thinks of the skin of some prehistoric creature, a spine and ribcage, a whale ballet, heaps and [...]
Texas artist Kyle Ma clinched this month’s PleinAir™ Salon with a 36 x 36 in. oil painting titled “Cathedral Wash.” The canvas depicts a popular riverbed trail that leads to the Colorado River and on [...]
