“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 [...]

The following is part of a series featuring a leader in the art community who will be on the faculty of Pastel Live, September 18-20, 2024, with an Essential Techniques Day on September 17. Learn [...]

“The sole purpose of your life from birth to death is to become a part of that endless and timeless cosmic creativity.” –David Anderson Among artists, JMW Turner (British, (1775–1851) is especially revered for his [...]

Among the 20+ category winners and runners up in the July 2024 PleinAir Salon, artists showed strong skill in air, earth, fire, and water, with landscapes, sunsets, waterfalls… and bugles. New Hampshire pastel artist Lisa [...]

One of the touchstones of inspiration and creative activity in general that I see dedicated and professional artists affirming again and again is this: If you want make good art, make lots of art. There’s [...]

The winners have been announced in the monthly PleinAir Salon. Judge Michelle Dunaway chose two oils and a graphite drawing for the top first, second, and third place prizes.  The winning paintings will be featured [...]

Abstract landscape painter Brian Rutenberg names as one of his favorite strategies what French painter Pierre Bonnard called the “void in the middle.” Though as a compositional approach it seems counter-intuitive not to center a [...]

Good artists imitate; great artists steal.  This phrase is variously attributed to Steve Jobs (who misattributed it to Pablo Picasso - we'll get to that), and to Lionel Trilling, Igor Stravinsky, T.S. Eliot, and William [...]

Like many of the Impressionists, Claude Monet loved to paint along the Normandy Coast. Monet produced more than 90 paintings of Étretat, one of the coast’s fishing village/resort towns. Now scattered among private and public collections around [...]

Why are you painting?  Correct answer: Why not?! We tend to focus on technical stuff – draftsmanship, composition, color, values but not the human stuff – emotions, moods, meaning, energy, joy. But painting is all that [...]