“It looks flat” is something you hear sometimes during a critique, but what exactly does that mean? I think there are two main criticisms wrapped up in “flatness.” One has to do with depth (how [...]

Precision. Design. Mastery of light and color. These are the qualities you notice right away in the watercolors of Richard Russell Sneary.  Richard Sneary was born in Baltimore, raised in Kansas City, and educated at the University of Kansas. Sneary has been [...]

Claude Monet loved to paint the sea, and a quick study of some his best as well as some lesser-known paintings of the ocean can teach practicing artists sound fundamental skills when diving into a [...]

Artist Larry Moore has revealed his selections for the June 2025 PleinAir Salonart competition. Larry, who embraces all forms of creative expression, said judging an art show is somewhat of a juggling act, and it’s never easy. [...]

Considered among the most important American paintings, Thomas Cole’s 1836 "The Oxbow" is a manifesto, not just of nineteenth-century American art but for the social role that American art can still play.  England-born artist Thomas [...]

Sanford Robinson Gifford (July 10, 1823 – August 29, 1880) was an American landscape painter and a leading member of the second generation of Hudson River School artists. A highly regarded pioneer of what’s now known as Luminism, [...]

“Being an artist is a true blessing. It’s a reason to get up in the morning,” says pastel painter Judith Kazdym Leeds. “The Color Purple” by Alice Walker, cover art by Judith Kazdym Leeds [...]

Artist Grace Hartigan (1922-2008) was an important figure in the “New York School” of painters born of the excitement of the Abstract Expressionist movement of the 1940s and ‘50s. Her large painting titled “Giftwares” shows [...]

There’s no doubt being part of a community has incredible benefits. We often hear of successful plein air painting societies and associations, but what if you don’t live anywhere near an existing group that meets [...]

With a certain slant of early morning light, as a critic recently wrote, Edward Hopper “captured the anxious stillness of twentieth-century American life.”  Tightly cropped like a photo or a scene glimpsed through a shopwindow, [...]