Sometimes design is so subtle that it acts almost invisibly. Last time, we looked at Sorolla, where design was obvious. We looked at one of his plein air compositions not in terms of compositional formulas (e.g. [...]

It’s part of the contract you signed when you fell in love with art.

Without strong design, you're wrecking your paintings without realizing it.

In honor of Valentine’s Day, we’ve been looking at some art about love. In Part I we marveled at Canova’s “Cupid Awakening Psyche” in the Louvre. Canova’s sculpture depicts a god (Eros, or Cupid in Latin, [...]

Enduring works of art “tease us out of thought,” as the poet John Keats said. No matter how much we think we know about them, they’re never the same twice; every time we come to [...]

I think it's true that great, original art changes the way we see the world. I mean literally changes the visual "reality" of what the world looks and feels like to a given individual.

If you want make good art, make lots of art.

Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011) broke into the boy’s club of macho mid-century Jackson Pollock-style Abstract Expressionism (AbEx for short), but she’s still not as widely known as her peers. 

A good composition establishes dynamic relationships between the elements of a picture. Of the many compositional strategies artists have discovered, one of the simplest and most widely useful is known as the steelyard.