Eugène Carrière’s painting “The Sleep” (above) represents a woman and her infant sleeping side by side. Yet despite the close-up view, the blurry and sweeping mode of representation eludes the onlooker. The outlines of both [...]
“Form is never more than a revelation of content.” -Denise Levertov The American poet Denise Levertov used the term “organic form” to describe how all the parts of a work of art relate to the [...]
What Makes This Painting Great? An occasional series all about analyzing what makes paintings beautiful, iconic, memorable, or effective. Painters, beginners and masters alike, make leaps and bounds by studying creative triumphs of the art. [...]
The painting above is by John Singer Sargent. It’s titled simply “Moraine” or “The Moraine,” which is so blunt and literal that we can assume the artist was more interested in the lights, shadows, and [...]
Ten Ways I Recharge My Creative Batteries By PAT FIORELLO If you’ve been painting for any length of time, you know it’s natural to go through periods of great energy and inspiration and other times where [...]
The Salon Springs Eternal! Every month the judges of the PleinAir Magazine Salon art competition select 100 of the best entries, from which the celebrity judge chooses the top winners overall as well as the [...]
The Dutch artist Annemarie Busschers (b. 1970) is a master at painting portraits and depicting ordinary people by capturing their marks of life — by “recording their layers of skin,” as she describes her method. Trained in [...]
Kathryn Stats has developed a keen eye for the landscape and nature. She wandered the Utah countryside on her horse until her early twenties and later studied with artists in the Salt Lake City area [...]
“Spring is nature’s way of saying, ‘Let’s party!’” - Robin Williams In Western art, the depiction of the Biblical account of Jesus’ Resurrection is an archetype filled with meaning and a sense of hope and [...]
The sooner a painting is “good” the better, right? “A painting lives or dies in the first 15 minutes,” an artist I know is fond of saying. That’s not necessarily how it is for everyone [...]
