We hear a lot about “getting light into your painting” but there was an entire movement of American landscape painting in the nineteenth-century that made it practically the whole subject of their work.  Less a [...]

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 [...]

In a letter to Douglas Cooper in January 1955, Russian-French painter Nicolas de Staël wrote:  “True painting, always attempts to include all aspects, the impossible addition of the present, past and future.”  There’s a lot [...]

By Barb Walker Barbwalkerpaintings.com I grew up in the ‘60s. Now much later in my life I often take a journey back to those sweetest of voices and some of the best music that was [...]

By Jill Stefani Wagner https://www.jillwagnerart.com  I have a confession to make. For a good part of my life, I was often terrified of new challenges and the possibility of failure. Whether in my advertising career [...]

Don’t apologize for your work. Because actually, failure is good for you – and you know it!  Obviously critiques of your work are, by nature, uncomfortable. You look at everybody else’s paintings, you feel that [...]

The brilliant Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi worked over 20 years on a series celebrating the theme of a bird in flight. As we recently noted in a previous piece on wildness in art, he never sculpted [...]

This painting, with its extraordinary history, played a pivotal role in the 21st century renewal of interest in classical realism. If you’ve ever visited the website of the Art Renewal Center (ARC) , a non-profit [...]

"I can't even draw a straight line." If I’ve heard that once, I’ve heard it 1,000 times. The proper answer, of course, is “You don’t have to!” For that matter, plenty of people who become [...]

By Jeremy Caniglia jeremycaniglia.com Mimesis — the copying of a masterwork — has been a key part of painters’ training since classical antiquity. As musicians must learn basic instrumental techniques before developing their own styles, [...]