I’ve a confession: the title of this post is a bit deceptive. When it comes to color mixing, there’s actually no such thing as “mud.”  Don't believe me? Look at the colors that dominate the [...]

Landscape orientation tends to tempt one into stacking rectangles on top of each other. It can also lead us into the temptation of “stripes” – thin bands of horizontals that do nothing to keep the [...]

By their very nature as horizontal beasts, landscape paintings are prone to “stripey-ness.” They can become dominated by unbroken horizontal shapes stacked neatly one on top of the other. This can result in paintings that [...]

by Robert Moore After more than twenty years of doing art critiques I have found ten areas to be the most important. 1. Are the masses large, separate shapes, defined by their closely related values? [...]

On gray mornings, when a mist erases the definitions of things, the merely odd can seem monumental and the familiar strange.  Van Gogh’s ox cart lumbers out of this indeterminate between-space of mist and fog [...]

By Fine Art Today The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles is currently showing “Giacomo Ceruti: A Compassionate Eye.” The exhibition features extraordinarily sympathetic realist portraits of men, women, and children experiencing poverty by 18th-century Italian artist [...]

Carrie Curran is a professional artist living in Scottsdale, Arizona. As a teacher, she runs her own art center and demonstrates her techniques at PACE (the annual >>Plein Air Convention & Expo). The next PACE [...]

Art supplies are hard to come by on a tiny rockbound island 10 miles out at sea. Perhaps that’s one reason American Impressionist Childe Hassam used miniature cigar box lids to capture the fleeting fireworks [...]

Writer Matt Cardin calls it “creativity’s hidden paradox,” and it goes like this: “What is most private and personal in you is also what is most universal.” He means that what is deep in you [...]

When Claude Monet was in his 60s, his eyesight began to fail, the result of cataracts developing in both of his eyes. It got so bad he had to label his paint tubes - he [...]