For anyone building an art career, individual successes and failures often feel like “live or die” moments. Setbacks, defeatist self-criticism, toxic comparisons with others? All part of the job description. So how to deal? It [...]
Many beginning artists struggle with making their paintings look professional. In a recent episode of Art School Live with Eric Rhoads, Lon Brauer shared techniques that can help you become a better painter, mainly through [...]
Celebrated early 20th century American artist and teacher Charles Hawthorne valued sound academic principles, but he forbade his students to make underpaintings and then paint color on top of them (as most of the world’s [...]
When Camile Pissarro painting this landscape of the Normandy countryside about 40 miles north of Paris, he was briefly yet deeply under the spell of pointillism. Pissarro is most often associated with the fluid Impressionism [...]
A pioneering study commissioned by the Mauritshuis museum in the Netherlands used brain scanning and eye-tracking technology to test how our brains react when seeing a great painting in person versus in a photo. The [...]
England-born artist Thomas Cole (1801-1848) is considered the first great American landscape painter. His painting (above) titled “View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm,” popularly known as “The Oxbow,” is probably the most [...]
A remarkable body of never-exhibited abstract watercolors by Andrew Wyeth has revealed that the methods of 1950s abstract expressionism lay at the heart of Andrew Wyeth’s meticulous realism all along. The revelation has surprised painters [...]
Artist Kathie Odom judged the latest entries. The Salon is sponsored by PleinAir™ Magazine but open to all painting styles and mediums. Below we highlight the top winners along with the judge’s comments about why [...]
It's easy to mistake the intensions of numerous “challenging” or "edgy" artists for obnoxiousness or obscurity. But keep looking and thinking, and what at first seems like a childish flip-off to aesthetic conventions may gradually [...]
Happy National Cat Day! Nobel prize-winning author, philosopher and physician held that there are but “two means of refuge from the misery of life – music and cats.” Perhaps we could agree to add a [...]
