Art historians use the term Tonalism to describe an American artistic movement spanning from about 1880 to approximately 1920. More generally, the term (tonalism or tonalist with a lower case “t”) describes a style of [...]

At five and a half feet wide by seven and a half feet long, Zaria Forman’s pastel paintings are hard to ignore. Within them, art, science, and beauty mingle in equal measure.  For two decades, [...]

Pastel drawings and paintings glow with an intensely luminous color and rich velvety texture. This is because pastel powder is pure pigment. Many pastel lovers favor the mediums for its sensitive quality that aligns with [...]

Winner of the “Best Animals & Birds” category of the December 2023 PleinAir Salon, Biruta Hansen’s Who’s Hiding? depicts a partly camouflaged rabbit (our family calls the abundant critters “bunnies”) peeking out from a profusion [...]

Artist Terri Ford’s Canyon Dusk, a 24” x 28” pastel (above), won first place overall in the December 2023 PleinAir Salon, judged by California oil painter Camille Przewodek. Ford is an accomplished pastel painter (IAPS [...]

It is a puzzlement: the larger your painting is, the more concentrated you feel you have to work. That’s because a patch of blue sky in a 40” x 36” landscape feels a lot emptier [...]

Ginevra de’ Benci is the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in North or South America. It’s a small portrait (it was once a larger one though), painted when Leonardo was still in his early twenties [...]

Today, artist Pat Fiorello gives us an insider’s view of her thoughtful creative process. It’s a step-by-step guide to how one contemporary artist goes beyond “merely reporting and describing the details” to render a captivating [...]

By Art Namarilnam There must be as many ways to paint a landscape as artists to paint them. Here is one way (not THE way) that I use to paint a landscape with a limited [...]