Kateryna Bilokur was a Ukrainian folk artist whose work became known in the 1930s and '40s.

You can waste a lot of mental energy worrying over whether your work is too abstract or too representational...

The sources of our own creativity are so organic and so close to us we often ignore or don't even notice when they knock.

Plein air painters may well want to borrow a page or two from the Tonalist playbook.

I believe with Charles Herbert Woodbury (1864-1940) that “a picture is a thought or feeling expressed in terms of Nature.”

Painting from life, whether it’s a portrait or a landscape en plein air, offers the artist certain qualities of experience and knowledge that painting from photos does not.

The Hudson River painters sketched outdoors constantly, and they considered their plein air work rather like notes for larger paintings than finished work. From a contemporary plein-air perspective, you could say that what they gained in grand, cinematic depictions of composite scenery they lost in spontaneity, freshness, and immediacy.

Education is key, but learning by doing is the only way to discover what works for you and what doesn’t.

The human need to examine itself in the mirror of art begins with early civilization, and portraiture is one of its classic and oldest forms. 

A strong notan design can serve you well as a framework for building the rest of the design of any painting.