We hear a lot about “getting light into your painting” but there was an entire movement of American landscape painting in the nineteenth-century that made it practically the whole subject of their work.  Less a [...]

Claude Monet loved to paint the sea, and a quick study of some his best as well as some lesser-known paintings of the ocean can teach practicing artists sound fundamental skills when diving into a [...]

In a letter to Douglas Cooper in January 1955, Russian-French painter Nicolas de Staël wrote:  “True painting, always attempts to include all aspects, the impossible addition of the present, past and future.”  There’s a lot [...]

Don’t apologize for your work. Because actually, failure is good for you – and you know it!  Obviously critiques of your work are, by nature, uncomfortable. You look at everybody else’s paintings, you feel that [...]

The brilliant Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi worked over 20 years on a series celebrating the theme of a bird in flight. As we recently noted in a previous piece on wildness in art, he never sculpted [...]

This painting, with its extraordinary history, played a pivotal role in the 21st century renewal of interest in classical realism. If you’ve ever visited the website of the Art Renewal Center (ARC) , a non-profit [...]

"I can't even draw a straight line." If I’ve heard that once, I’ve heard it 1,000 times. The proper answer, of course, is “You don’t have to!” For that matter, plenty of people who become [...]

Once you master some of the technical basics of plein air painting, you might start to wonder,  how you give your work more life? One place to start is with feeling – and getting it [...]

The brilliant Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi worked over 20 years on a series celebrating the theme of a bird in flight. Yet he never sculpted the bird; he concentrated on the animal’s movement, rather than its [...]

“Paint the flying spirit of the bird rather than its feathers.” -Robert Henri   Can you combine rule-breaking wildness with a disciplined and authentic expression of the search for meaning?  A chorus of frustrated painters’ [...]