Yesterday, I visited the studio of Philadelphia painter Laura Acton, all spanking clean for her May Day open house and sporting a fresh coat of gray floor paint. Laura paints vivid still lifes, landscapes and figures, and she had several years' paintings hanging on the four...

Ever since Plato, Western philosophers have studied art. So much so that in the 17th century, German philosophers, big on classification, saw fit to create a separate branch of philosophy they called aesthetics, a term derived from the Greek aisthetikos, meaning "about perception." The German philosopher, Georg...

I'm ready to pack off to Ireland, home of my ancestors. Ireland's government has announced it will begin to pay 2,000 Irish artists $355 a week under a new universal basic income (UBI) program. There are no restrictions on how artists may spend the money. I'm guessing Guinness...

Yours truly was interviewed by the UK creativity magazine, The Table Read. Enjoy!...

Nine days out of ten all he saw around him was the wretchedness of his unsuccessful attempts. — Maurice Merleau-Ponty Professor Matt Saunders offers Harvard undergrads an unusual studio course he titles "Painting's Doubt." "Painting is an engagement between the self and the world," his course description reads....

Hurry up and make mistakes! — Lennart Anderson Bob Ross famously said of painters, "We don't make mistakes, just happy little accidents." I might dampen that to say, "We don't learn, unless we make mistakes." With learning to paint come countless mundane mistakes. Rookie mistakes. Stupid mistakes. Messy mistakes. They're aggravating. But then, upon...

At the core of all well-founded belief lies belief that is unfounded. ― Ludwig Wittgenstein Alberto Giacometti's painstakingly tentative figurative paintings, influenced by the theories of French phenomenologists, captivate me. They always have. Like perception itself, they're precarious (the phenomenologists held that "it is the essence of certainty to...

Every painting, no matter how successful, leaves the artist with another chance to paint what she had in mind. — Robert Brault "Blessed is he who expects nothing," goes Alexander Pope's Ninth Beatitude, "for he shall never be disappointed." Painters who've worked in industry seem to know when to...

Hold onto your taste, even when you're embarrassed by it. — Jerry Saltz Connoisseurs and critics often look down on art that's driven by pop culture (the source of the "pop" in the term "pop art"). Not me. I guess I'm a child of the '60s, because I love pop...

When art critics get together, they talk about content, style, trend and meaning, but when painters get together, they talk about where you can get the best turpentine. — Picasso Painter Liz Floyd told me during a recent interview that she uses empty cat food tins as...