Artistic inspiration is a powerful force that drives creativity and fuels the passion of artists. It can come from all over the place – your experiences of life, the world, and the work of other [...]

French Impressionism was officially born in Paris during the autumn salon season of 1874. Lambasting a pop-up exhibition by a bunch of rogue bohemian artists, a critic scoffing at Claude Monet’s painting, an “Impression” of [...]

Painting water in motion has to be one of the most intimidating aspects of landscape painting for beginners and intermediate painters alike. How do you alternate foam, reflections, and transparency without making it look like [...]

I was in my element, but I had no idea what was coming. We were on vacation in Rome, walking through the Vatican Museum because we couldn’t see the Sistine Chapel that day. And there [...]

By Bryce Cameron Liston Painting, at least for me, is a very demanding discipline. It’s difficult and exhausting, but at the same time very exhilarating—and certainly rewarding. It’s been a lifetime endeavor of constant striving [...]

“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 [...]

Well-handled color has emotional impact.  In Karen Margulis’s pastel painting “Frozen in Time” (above), the artist takes a composition of predominantly cool hues (a wintry sky and snowy foreground) and shoots it through with a [...]

Great sky paintings lift us with a sense of the vastness and space that daily moves above our heads. A strong sky in a landscape painting, oil, watercolor, or acrylic, expresses airy light, motion, and [...]

The word inspiration has roots in the Latin word for breath, spiritus, which of course also gives us spirit. To be in-spired is to be breathed into, filled with the breath of a god, a [...]

“Art is probably one of the only true things left which exist for its own sake and nothing else…..It has alchemy with those that take part in looking at it, at the gaze of it.” [...]