“Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.” ― Gustav Mahler As an artist, it's a given that you’ll spend many hours learning, both through study and through trial and error, the [...]

Classical tales of Greek and Roman mythology have brought color, drama, and magic to Western art throughout its entire history and right up to the present day.  The gods and goddesses of antiquity, dwelling eternally [...]

Science tells us what's "objectively real." However it has little or nothing to say to us about what anything actually feels like or means to us.  “It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but [...]

For anyone building an art career, individual successes and failures often feel like “live or die” moments. Setbacks, defeatist self-criticism, toxic comparisons with others? All part of the job description. So how to deal? It [...]

Many beginning artists struggle with making their paintings look professional. In a recent episode of Art School Live with Eric Rhoads, Lon Brauer shared techniques that can help you become a better painter, mainly through [...]

Celebrated early 20th century American artist and teacher Charles Hawthorne valued sound academic principles, but he forbade his students to make underpaintings and then paint color on top of them (as most of the world’s [...]

When Camile Pissarro painting this landscape of the Normandy countryside about 40 miles north of Paris, he was briefly yet deeply under the spell of pointillism.  Pissarro is most often associated with the fluid Impressionism [...]

A pioneering study commissioned by the Mauritshuis museum in the Netherlands used brain scanning and eye-tracking technology to test how our brains react when seeing a great painting in person versus in a photo.  The [...]

England-born artist Thomas Cole (1801-1848) is considered the first great American landscape painter. His painting (above) titled “View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm,” popularly known as “The Oxbow,” is probably the most [...]

A remarkable body of never-exhibited abstract watercolors by Andrew Wyeth has revealed that the methods of 1950s abstract expressionism lay at the heart of Andrew Wyeth’s meticulous realism all along. The revelation has surprised painters [...]