by Robert Moore After more than 20 years of doing art critiques, I have found 10 areas to be the most important to the creation of a strong painting.  Look for 3 to 6 clearly [...]

“The longer I live, the more I have come to believe that everything in the universe is connected.” – Steven DaLuz   Steven DaLuz won PleinAir Magazine’s November salon award for best painting by an artist [...]

“Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.” ― Gustav Mahler Art has a long history (to say the least) of practice, tradition, and training. And yet, art remains forever fresh and [...]

Poetry and painting share some DNA. To feel what’s in a painting, you must “read” it first – which means you must look closely with an emotional and imaginative eye at what the artist gives [...]

#1. Look Close, See Big “I wish you could see what I see out the window,” wrote Georgia O’Keeffe to her friend, the painter Arthur Dove in 1942. At 55 years old, she was writing [...]

Have you ever stood listening in the winter night air for an owl somewhere off in the distance, surprised by the sound of your breathing, feeling the cold seeping into your feet? Why does that [...]

by Nancy Macdonald On site, I make a number of sketches and color studies, which I use as reference for larger paintings in my studio. I try to capture the harmony in the scene as [...]

A brilliant and prolific artist, Tom Thomson (1877–1917) painted lush, modernist celebrations of the Canadian wilderness en plein air. Thomson hiked and canoed to his locations, but his work doesn’t match up with what we [...]

"It has always seemed to me that a picture does not rest upon beauty alone." - John Carlson Paintings, like people, have an outer surface that they present to the world and an "inner life" [...]