By Fine Art Connoisseur  There is a beauty in abandoned places: boarded houses dismantled by wind and rain, rusted millwheels, collapsing barns and sealed grain silos the color of dust. These are lonely places, sure, [...]

By Kelly Kane A growing body of evidence proves something the readers of PleinAir™ Magazine (and Inside Art) have long understood: Art makes us feel better.  Whether we’re making it or simply looking at it, art can [...]

Who, with any feeling for the depths of humanity, can resist that bottomless gaze peering across the centuries from the self-portraits Rembrandt painted in old age?  Great works of art, according to Susan Sontag, provide [...]

This striking painting by Georgia O’Keeffe strikes one as a near-total abstraction. It’s severe, mysterious, threatening – one thinks of the skin of some prehistoric creature, a spine and ribcage, a whale ballet, heaps and [...]

Texas artist Kyle Ma clinched this month’s PleinAir™ Salon with a 36 x 36 in. oil painting titled “Cathedral Wash.” The canvas depicts a popular riverbed trail that leads to the Colorado River and on [...]

The Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, NY has acquired an impressive trove of 27 oil paintings by a stellar collection of well-known classic American artists: Albert Bierstadt, Theodore Earl Butler, Mary Cassatt, William Merritt Chase, [...]

French painter Eugene Delacroix’s (1798 – 1863) work epitomizes the setting-free of painting from the strict classical ideals of the Academy that had come before. From an artist’s inside view, we can see Delacroix’s technique [...]

During the golden age of American landscape painting, no one painted trees quite like George Inness. Inness created elegant, often backlit trees with a gauzy, permeable character, as though emerging and dissolving back and forth [...]

Virgil Elliott has earned a stellar reputation as an expert practitioner – and teacher – of contemporary traditional representational oil painting. His book, “Traditional Oil Painting,”  has been continuously in print since 2007. In its pages [...]

“My way of seeing the world and painting it in simplicity and purity is my way of honoring ‘a country girl’s eccentricity,'” says artist Mary Pettis. Characterized from an early age by a deep curiosity [...]