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. [...]

Johannes Vermeer’s The Art of Painting (c.1668) invites us to see in his work much more than consummate skill and flawless technique for capturing diffuse light from an unseen window (though … THERE’S THAT!). Johannes Vermeer, The [...]

Almost literally luminous, the seascapes of 19th century American artist William Trost Richards (1833 – 1905) have earned an honored place in the history of American landscape painting.  William Trost Richards’ seascapes are introspective paintings, emotionally [...]

“The artist must work so hard, so long, that a brain develops and lives, all of itself, in his fingers …. The artist must not think of critical rewards or money he will get for [...]

Above image licensed under  CC BY-NC-ND. An endless dream of timeless summer days hums in the warm greens and hazy distances that we inhabit as we gaze at the painting by JMW Turner above. It’s [...]