Bring Your Still Lifes to Life!
Q – When is an apple not an apple? A – When it’s painted with the intention of turning something ordinary into something extraordinary. We love paintings that surprise us a little, that catch our [...]
Painting Under Pressure
When I was an art director in the advertising field, panic deadlines seemed to squeeze out the best creative ideas from myself and my other advertising coworkers. The best ideas often got going sometime after [...]
A Major Maine Art Colony Reborn
Think plein air in Maine, and chances are you’ll think “Monhegan.” But before that rock-bound island community took the crown, another and more accessible locale was king – the southern Maine town of Ogunquit, which [...]
From Obsession to Fields in Bloom
What makes an award-winning painting? Lots of things, but subject matter, at least, can be as varied as you can imagine. Among the winning paintings that Master Artist Kathleen Dunphy selected for the June 2024 PleinAir Salon [...]
How to Read Color
In Karen Margulis’s pastel painting “Color by the Sea,” above, the artist composes an eclectic (and potentially clashing) mix of hues. At a glance, we get a playful jumble of colors, a combination of cool [...]
The Luster Bowl
What is it about William Nicholson’s painting The Lustre Bowl with Green Peas that impresses itself on the imagination and memory? Somehow Sir William Nicholson’s “simple” still life transforms just three everyday items – a [...]
Salon Winners in the Spotlight
This edition of Inside Art corrects an error in the previous Salon spotlight edition. “Inchoate” (in-KO-ate) is an unusual word that means something just started, not yet fully formed. Annie Murphy-Robinson used the descriptor in [...]
In the Dark and the Light
“Inchoate” (in-KO-ate) is an unusual word that means something just started, not yet fully formed. Annie Murphy-Robinson used the descriptor in the title of her salon-winning charcoal “Emily ‘Inchoate.’” There was nothing in the least [...]
Making It Right
By Jessica L. Bryant A step-by-step demonstration of how Jessica L. Bryant turns a plein air painting into a studio piece. A signature member of the American Watercolor Society, National Watercolor Society, Northwest Watercolor Society, [...]
Let There Be Light!
We hear a lot about “getting light into your painting” but there was an entire movement of American landscape painting in the nineteenth-century that made it practically the whole subject of their work. Less a [...]