by Devin Cecil-Wishing  This painting of an egret was done from a taxidermy bird which I purchased for use in a larger composition I intend to paint soon. Before starting work on the larger painting, [...]

Can a landscape be epic?  That’s the question RISD professor and artist-printmaker Nancy Friese asks in a brief essay on the painting titled “Rain on the River,” created in 1908 by a young American “Ashcan [...]

“We do what we must, and call it the best names we can, and would fain have the praise of having intended the result which ensues.” – Emerson (Experience) The key is to be wild but [...]

Caravaggio’s masterful “The Inspiration of Saint Matthew” remains a priceless treasure of European art. However, it wasn’t universally admired and almost didn’t get hung – or painted – at all.  As you can see from [...]

A Guest Post By John Hughes What’s Holding You Back in your Quest to Become a Better Painter? Probably the same thing that challenged my progress as an aspiring artist many years ago, and the [...]

Don’t let a lack of knowledge of composition hold you back from making better paintings. The key to developing an intuitive understanding of composition is not to memorize individual compositions but to internalize dynamic design.  [...]

In an article published not too long ago in The Atlantic, Arthur C. Brooks argued that art is as important to human helath as exercise and good nutrition. Art needn’t be primarily an escapist activity [...]

When artists refer to “quality of line,” part of what’s meant is sensitivity to the subject as well as how the line is drawn. The heaviness or lightness of pressure, the varied thickness or thinness, [...]

There are three main things to know about the main center of interest or “focal point” that every painting is supposed to have (four if you count the one that says actually not every painting [...]

An important engraving by one of the world’s most renowned draftsmen, Albrecht Dürer, fetched $44K at auction last week after being rescued from a garbage dump by an eleven-year-old boy. The work is a rare [...]