Great works of art don’t make us think; they return us to a place where thinking and feeling are the same.

Who says you can’t start breaking the rules at the same time you’re learning them?

Vermeer stands out because he put impeccable technique at the service of a timeless humanism you must read his paintings carefully to enjoy. 

In a pyramidal or triangular arrangement, either forms assume the shape of a three-sided figure or visual weight is more or less evenly distributed among various elements that definitely relate to one another in a triangular, or triadic, arrangement. 

If Hopper is a realist, it’s not because of his hard-won draftsmanship, but because of how he captures aspects of our experience so authentically that, in Berman’s words, “we can hardly see a tumbledown house near a deserted road or a shadow slipping across a brownstone facade except through his eyes.” 

Sometimes design is so subtle that it acts almost invisibly. Last time, we looked at Sorolla, where design was obvious. We looked at one of his plein air compositions not in terms of compositional formulas (e.g. [...]

It’s part of the contract you signed when you fell in love with art.

Without strong design, you're wrecking your paintings without realizing it.

In honor of Valentine’s Day, we’ve been looking at some art about love. In Part I we marveled at Canova’s “Cupid Awakening Psyche” in the Louvre. Canova’s sculpture depicts a god (Eros, or Cupid in Latin, [...]

Enduring works of art “tease us out of thought,” as the poet John Keats said. No matter how much we think we know about them, they’re never the same twice; every time we come to [...]