What's the difference between one painting that mesmerizes and captivates, and another that barely catches a glance? Some say it's skill or technique, but if that were all that mattered, why would so many technically [...]

“I have learned more about painting through abstraction than I have in all my years as a realist painter,” says artist Larry Moore. “One method informs the other. It’s like a story with no ending.” [...]

"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn [...]

California Impressionist Brian Blood, a resident of Pebble Beach, California, is one of California’s most successful plein air artists and a master of composition and design. There are two devices in particular at work in his [...]

Join art publisher Eric Rhoads on Art School Live as he gives you free art instruction in pastel painting with artist Lyn Diefenbach. Lyn is on the faculty of our upcominbg online art conference, Pastel Live, [...]

I find it strange that people who make art hesitate to call themselves artists. I know lots of “people who paint” or “just mess around,” or worse, “used to be” artists but now just “paint [...]

When Monet’s early seascape, “The Green Wave,” debuted at the 1879 Impressionist exhibition, a critic called out Monet for being "directly influenced by Manet." He had a point. Eduard Manet pioneered the same flattening of [...]

Nineteenth-century American painter Martin Johnson Heade achieved popular success with paintings of the flat salt marsh regions along the East Coast. His humble landscape subjects set him apart from those contemporaries who pursued more dramatic [...]

“Ripeness is all” is a line in Shakespeare's King Lear:  "Men must endure their going hence, even as their coming hither: Ripeness is all." It’s a timeless insight: the biological facts of birth and death are [...]