“Bizarre!”
There’s more than meets the eye in James McNeil Whistler’s painting originally titled The Woman in White after a popular mystery novel of the day by Willkie Collins. “This is modeling as performance art,” wrote [...]
The Open Boat
Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009), drew inspiration from wells of emotion. Wyeth called Spindrift (1950) a “portrait” of one of his Maine acquaintances. It’s done in tempera on panel, and the colors are opaque and muted and the surface is matte. [...]
Dangerous Waters
What is the role of the political dimension in art? That question is at the heart of a provocative, long-running exhibition opening this week in Washington D.C. The National Gallery of Art’s Conversations: Kerry James [...]
Frankenstein and The Wreck of the Hope
Casper David Friedrich’s 1818 painting, Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog epitomizes the awe-inspiring sublime in Romantic art. The sublime is an offshoot of Romanticism referring to a "realm of experience beyond the measurable." It’s often [...]
How Impressionism Came to California
Founded in Los Angeles in 1909 and headquartered in Pasadena, the California Art Club is one of the oldest and largest art associations in the western United States. Its roots reach back to Southern California’s [...]
How to Paint Trees like Corot
Britain’s National Gallery has a nice collection of Corots digitized in high resolution on their website. You can’t beat it as a learning tool – you can zoom in and crawl all over these masterworks [...]
What’s Wrong with this Painting?
How do you critique a landscape painting? It helps to start with composition, value, and color, in that order. This painting has a lot going for it: The composition is pretty solid; the high horizon [...]
The Story Behind Sargent’s ‘Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose’
Reeling from a front-page scandal threatening to derail his career, the American painter John Singer Sargent spent the summer of 1885 healing his emotional wounds at a country estate in England. Though he was fantasizing about [...]
The #1 Thing You Need to Paint Better Trees
The Number One Thing you need to paint better trees is to understand trees better. That’s the surprising verdict of 20th century landscapist and author John Carlson. Carlson literally wrote the book on landscape painting [...]
Andrew Wyeth, November First
“I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape – the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show.” -Andrew Wyeth [...]