“My decorations belong to the poetic and imaginative world where a few choice spirits live.” - Thomas Wilmer Dewing, from a letter to Charles Lang Freer dated February 16, 1901. Inspired by his summers in [...]

Well-handled color has emotional impact.  In Karen Margulis’s pastel painting “Frozen in Time” (above), the artist takes a composition of predominantly cool hues (a wintry sky and snowy foreground) and shoots it through with a [...]

Great sky paintings lift us with a sense of the vastness and space that daily moves above our heads. A strong sky in a landscape painting, oil, watercolor, or acrylic, expresses airy light, motion, and [...]

The word inspiration has roots in the Latin word for breath, spiritus, which of course also gives us spirit. To be in-spired is to be breathed into, filled with the breath of a god, a [...]

“Art is probably one of the only true things left which exist for its own sake and nothing else…..It has alchemy with those that take part in looking at it, at the gaze of it.” [...]

Color, the Very Life of Painting Color depicts and describes your subject, but it also conveys mood and portrays light, depth, and perspective. In many ways it’s the lifeblood of the art; even those painters [...]

“You’re glowing!” When’s the last time you heard those words?  Yeah, me too. 😏 But thankfully, making your paintings glow is less a matter of accumulating poor life choices than knowing how to control value [...]

It looks wrestled and wrought into existence, chiseled out of stone from the primal bedrock of life, death, and eternity. The “bearded old man” in the painting by Rembrandt of the same name (above) might [...]

Jay Hambridge, “The Century Run,” lithograph, 1897, 12.5 x 19.5 in. By Christopher Volpe Compare the two images above. Note how the bicycle wheels arrange themselves precisely at and around axis points and [...]

Our previous post on water-painter-extraordinaire Frits Thaulow (which you can read here)inspired a flood of emails from readers appreciating the Norwegian Impressionist’s work. A recent visit to the Saint Louis Art Museum gave me a [...]