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 [...]

A three-time cancer survivor, artist Suzi Long’s motto is Only those who risk going too far know how far it is possible to go. “You could say I went rogue when I moved into the [...]

Among many other accomplishments, Canadian artist Claude Cormier made “paintings” with stuffed animals. From across the room, Cormier’s massive work Stuffed Animals, installed at the Montreal Museum of Fine Art, reads like a colorful abstraction. [...]

Realist painter David Leffel’s work has been popular for decades, and he’s been teaching students his technique for just as long. Using an “all-in-one-go” style of direct painting called “alla prima,” Leffel combined the look [...]

It is recognized as one of the greatest American paintings ever made. The painting is by Thomas Eakins (American, 1844–1916) and it is known as The Gross Clinic (or Portrait of Dr. Samuel D. Gross, as [...]