The above painting by Ivan Fedorovich Choulste, Nuit de Mars, Russie, is a reprisal from our previous edition. It’s a remarkable painting that bears a closer look.  The black pond mirrors the night sky, a [...]

After you’ve been painting a while, you might reach a point where you begin to suspect that you lack a “style” - your work seems all over the place, your processes somewhat random, your paintings, [...]

Good artists imitate; great artists steal. This phrase is variously attributed to Steve Jobs (who misattributed it to Pablo Picasso), and to Lionel Trilling, Igor Stravinsky, T.S. Eliot, and William Faulkner. (Oh, and the less well-known [...]

“My decorations belong to the poetic and imaginative world where a few choice spirits live.” - Thomas Wilmer Dewing, from a letter to Charles Lang Freer dated February 16, 1901. Inspired by his summers in [...]

Recent psychological studies about creativity identify mindset as a helpful way of understanding why some artists have long, fruitful careers and others give up. A poll of 140 creativity researchers identified the most important ingredients [...]

“Is Mr. Sargent in very fact an American painter?” asked American novelist Henry James in the pages of Harper’s Bazaar in October, 1887. Sargent had recently moved to Britain from France and was scouting Boston [...]

“My father wasn’t a religious man, but he found in the woods a sense of the divine in the beauty of nature. It was a place for solace and contemplation.” – Elaine Hibbard Clark, daughter [...]

Catherine Hillis’s paintings are visually compelling – they also “say something,” albeit in the language of line, texture, and color.  Hillis is an artist who paints from close observation of life. Her watercolor Morning Hustle [...]

Lit by the moon, it looms like a phantom, the hoary captain of an unsinkable ghost-ship maybe, surveying the gray expanse of Northern Wilderness rolling endlessly into the horizon.  Standing 5 feet tall by nearly [...]