By Peter Trippi, Editor of Fine Art Connoisseur From the Fine Art Connoisseur September/October 2023 Editor’s Note: “The Ancients Stole All Our Great Ideas. And I want them back, thank you very much.” Mark Twain wrote [...]

Recognized as one of America’s most accomplished impressionistic plein air painters, New Mexico artist Kevin Macpherson judged PleinAir™ Magazine’s monthly Salon for July.  Kevin wrote about his thought process as he sifted through more than [...]

Painting is about feeling, evocation, and “stories,” insights into life on this planet, transporting viewers into realms of mind and emotion. Feeling or “mood” comes not from what you paint but how you paint it. [...]

By Jill Stefani Wagner When I first dipped my toes into the world of becoming a professional artist, I must admit I was a bit naive. Looking back I realize I had the silly notion [...]

Painting from life, whether it’s a portrait, the figure, or a plein air landscape, offers certain advantages over working from photos. However, using photo references makes it a lot easier to “make things look right.” [...]

If you spend much time in any museum’s European painting section, you’ll encounter exquisitely rendered images of gods and goddesses, mighty heroes and hapless mortals and fantastical creatures both beautiful and grotesque. One such mythological [...]

Inspiration comes in many forms, and creativity is its currency. But where does creativity come from – and what even is it? It’s thought that childhood play and adult creativity originate in similar processes in [...]

There’s a true-to-life scene in the 2014 movie Mr.Turner, where the Royal Academician John Constable is drawing a crowd for a colorful painting with a middle-ground full of dynamic red paint. In reaction, Turner adds [...]

“Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.” ― Gustav Mahler Visual art has a long history (to say the least) of practice, tradition, and training. And yet, art remains forever fresh [...]