Celebrated early 20th century American artist and teacher Charles Hawthorne valued sound academic principles, but he forbade his students to make underpaintings and then paint color on top of them (as most of the world’s [...]
When Camile Pissarro painting this landscape of the Normandy countryside about 40 miles north of Paris, he was briefly yet deeply under the spell of pointillism. Pissarro is most often associated with the fluid Impressionism [...]
A pioneering study commissioned by the Mauritshuis museum in the Netherlands used brain scanning and eye-tracking technology to test how our brains react when seeing a great painting in person versus in a photo. The [...]
England-born artist Thomas Cole (1801-1848) is considered the first great American landscape painter. His painting (above) titled “View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm,” popularly known as “The Oxbow,” is probably the most [...]
A remarkable body of never-exhibited abstract watercolors by Andrew Wyeth has revealed that the methods of 1950s abstract expressionism lay at the heart of Andrew Wyeth’s meticulous realism all along. The revelation has surprised painters [...]
Artist Kathie Odom judged the latest entries. The Salon is sponsored by PleinAir™ Magazine but open to all painting styles and mediums. Below we highlight the top winners along with the judge’s comments about why [...]
It's easy to mistake the intensions of numerous “challenging” or "edgy" artists for obnoxiousness or obscurity. But keep looking and thinking, and what at first seems like a childish flip-off to aesthetic conventions may gradually [...]
Happy National Cat Day! Nobel prize-winning author, philosopher and physician held that there are but “two means of refuge from the misery of life – music and cats.” Perhaps we could agree to add a [...]
When we say an artist, musician, or high-caliber entertainer “works their magic,” we’re acknowledging there’s something extra-ordinary about the creation and experience of art. We go to art because there is something immaterial there; that [...]
One of the “spookier” American paintings must be Albert Pinkham Ryder’s “The Race Track,” popularly known as “Death on a Pale Horse.” Like many a Ryder painting, it’s a strange, stricken-looking gem created at the [...]
