“My decorations belong to the poetic and imaginative world where a few choice spirits live.” - Thomas Wilmer Dewing, from a letter to Charles Lang Freer dated February 16, 1901. Inspired by his summers in [...]

Recent psychological studies about creativity identify mindset as a helpful way of understanding why some artists have long, fruitful careers and others give up. A poll of 140 creativity researchers identified the most important ingredients [...]

“Is Mr. Sargent in very fact an American painter?” asked American novelist Henry James in the pages of Harper’s Bazaar in October, 1887. Sargent had recently moved to Britain from France and was scouting Boston [...]

“My father wasn’t a religious man, but he found in the woods a sense of the divine in the beauty of nature. It was a place for solace and contemplation.” – Elaine Hibbard Clark, daughter [...]

Catherine Hillis’s paintings are visually compelling – they also “say something,” albeit in the language of line, texture, and color.  Hillis is an artist who paints from close observation of life. Her watercolor Morning Hustle [...]

Lit by the moon, it looms like a phantom, the hoary captain of an unsinkable ghost-ship maybe, surveying the gray expanse of Northern Wilderness rolling endlessly into the horizon.  Standing 5 feet tall by nearly [...]

“The longer I live, the more I have come to believe that everything in the universe is connected.” – Steven DaLuz   Steven DaLuz won PleinAir Magazine’s November salon award for best painting by an artist [...]

“Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.” ― Gustav Mahler Art has a long history (to say the least) of practice, tradition, and training. And yet, art remains forever fresh and [...]

Poetry and painting share some DNA. To feel what’s in a painting, you must “read” it first – which means you must look closely with an emotional and imaginative eye at what the artist gives [...]

#1. Look Close, See Big “I wish you could see what I see out the window,” wrote Georgia O’Keeffe to her friend, the painter Arthur Dove in 1942. At 55 years old, she was writing [...]