A silverpoint drawing is literally a drawing done in pure silver. Its primary tool is a pen or stylus with a soft metal point that leaves a metallic trace on a pigmented ground. It’s sort of [...]

“All art is quite useless,” wrote Oscar Wilde, by which I think he meant that art is one of the few things in a society in love with “productivity” and “being practical” that can still [...]

1. The Sublime and the Picturesque (Romanticism) Understanding the Hudson River School starts with recognizing the European influence. The artist and early environmentalist Thomas Cole (1801–1848) founded the influential 19th-century art movement known as the [...]

A Rose is a Rose is …. potentially so much more. Georgia O’Keefe was a master at observing the abstract forms in nature and translating them into fascinating combinations of modernist abstraction and natural forms [...]

Few artists in history have had such a wide-ranging impact on art and culture as Henri Matisse. What a bold, exuberant spirit of an artist! We’re fortunate that Matisse was also a thoughtful and prolific writer who often reflected [...]

By Fine Art Connoisseur  There is a beauty in abandoned places: boarded houses dismantled by wind and rain, rusted millwheels, collapsing barns and sealed grain silos the color of dust. These are lonely places, sure, [...]

By Kelly Kane A growing body of evidence proves something the readers of PleinAir™ Magazine (and Inside Art) have long understood: Art makes us feel better.  Whether we’re making it or simply looking at it, art can [...]

Who, with any feeling for the depths of humanity, can resist that bottomless gaze peering across the centuries from the self-portraits Rembrandt painted in old age?  Great works of art, according to Susan Sontag, provide [...]

This striking painting by Georgia O’Keeffe strikes one as a near-total abstraction. It’s severe, mysterious, threatening – one thinks of the skin of some prehistoric creature, a spine and ribcage, a whale ballet, heaps and [...]