“The Quiet of the Landscape”
Oil painter Julie Davis, AIS, AWA, OPA has a favorite quote from Winston Churchill that hints at her philosophy of painting: "Obviously, then, armed with a paint-box, one cannot be bored, one cannot be left [...]
Exuberance and Honesty
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 [...]
Beauty in the Abandoned
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, [...]
Art is Good for You
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 [...]
The Poetry of Rembrandt’s Late Self Portraits
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 [...]
On Another Planet with Georgia O’Keeffe
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 [...]
Majestic Landscape Sweeps Monthly Salon
Texas artist Kyle Ma clinched this month’s PleinAir™ Salon with a 36 x 36 in. oil painting titled “Cathedral Wash.” The canvas depicts a popular riverbed trail that leads to the Colorado River and on [...]
A Windfall of Gorgeous American Paintings
The Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, NY has acquired an impressive trove of 27 oil paintings by a stellar collection of well-known classic American artists: Albert Bierstadt, Theodore Earl Butler, Mary Cassatt, William Merritt Chase, [...]
Lessons from Delacroix
French painter Eugene Delacroix’s (1798 – 1863) work epitomizes the setting-free of painting from the strict classical ideals of the Academy that had come before. From an artist’s inside view, we can see Delacroix’s technique [...]
The “Perpetual Fountain of Life”
During the golden age of American landscape painting, no one painted trees quite like George Inness. Inness created elegant, often backlit trees with a gauzy, permeable character, as though emerging and dissolving back and forth [...]