Pastel drawings and paintings glow with an intensely luminous color and rich velvety texture. This is because pastel powder is pure pigment. Many pastel lovers favor the mediums for its sensitive quality that aligns with [...]
Winner of the “Best Animals & Birds” category of the December 2023 PleinAir Salon, Biruta Hansen’s Who’s Hiding? depicts a partly camouflaged rabbit (our family calls the abundant critters “bunnies”) peeking out from a profusion [...]
Artist Terri Ford’s Canyon Dusk, a 24” x 28” pastel (above), won first place overall in the December 2023 PleinAir Salon, judged by California oil painter Camille Przewodek. Ford is an accomplished pastel painter (IAPS [...]
It is a puzzlement: the larger your painting is, the more concentrated you feel you have to work. That’s because a patch of blue sky in a 40” x 36” landscape feels a lot emptier [...]
Ginevra de’ Benci is the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in North or South America. It’s a small portrait (it was once a larger one though), painted when Leonardo was still in his early twenties [...]
Passion and beauty intertwine in many ways throughout the history of Western art. At times the heart-melting effects of love take center stage, and a fleeting moment of human tenderness remains preserved for the ages [...]
Today we view some beautiful examples of “luminism” in American art. What to Know Luminism refers to a tendency in later nineteenth-century landscapes toward images of nature suffused with light suggesting a kind of Divine [...]
Today we look at paintings by oil painter and pastelist Wolf Kahn (1927–2020). What You Should Know Wolf Kahn began creating intensely colorful American landscapes in the 1950s, when abstraction was all anyone wanted to [...]
What You Should Know The legend of the “lover’s leap” is found all over the Americas and the world. It was a particularly popular motif in one form or another during the Victorian period, peaking [...]
What You Should Know Frida Kahlo is one of the best known 20th century female realists to be rescued from potentially being lost to history. A lengthy series of shows, books, plays, movies, and relentless [...]
