The sunset is brilliant! The colors are spectacular! The sky is filled with the dance of so many colors. You quickly snap some photos to capture the moment, thinking to yourself about how you are going to create a painting to memorialize this moment. But when you look at the photo, you realize this is not how it looked. The colors are all wrong. And where are all the nuances that made this moment beg to be painted?

Admit it. We’ve all done it. We painted that dramatic sunset sky, capturing all its glory. And silhouetted against the sky was a tree.

I feel that the artists’ journey is one of exploring who they are and finding the best way to express their unique vision.

Halation is the spreading of light beyond its proper boundaries to form a fog around the edges of a bright image (Source:  Oxford Languages Dictionary).   It is a term commonly used in photography.  But it is a term and a practice with which, as artists, we need to be familiar. 

Nyle Gordon shares what he loves about oil painting, and what he sees as the main value of working directly from life.

Spencer shares his thoughts on the value of plein air painting, why he enjoys teaching, and the importance of striking a balance between working and relationships in creative life.

From our earliest days of cracking open our first box of crayons, our color of choice for the sun was always yellow. But now as we try to capture that intense glow of the sun in our paintings, at best yellow falls flat, at worst looks garish.