Art Articles

How long have you been telling yourself that one day you will learn to draw or paint? If the answer is years rather than months, perhaps the problem is no longer finding the right moment. Perhaps it is simply deciding to begin.

Many people want to become better at art.

They save paintings they admire.

They watch artists working.

They buy beautiful sketchbooks, pencils, brushes, or paints.

They think about taking lessons.

And then they wait. …

How a dark preparation became an active part of the image and made light feel startlingly real

What if some of Caravaggio’s shadows are not dark paint at all?

Technical examination shows that he sometimes allowed the prepared surface beneath the painting to remain visible. Instead of covering the entire canvas and then painting shadows over it, he added the illuminated parts of a figure while letting the dark preparation supply many of the middle and darkest values.

A ground is the prepared layer placed on canvas before the image is painted. It helps seal the fabric and creates a stable surface for the paint. …

The hidden dot map beneath The Dream of a Knight shows how exact transfer and free invention worked together.

A painting less than seven inches square began with a pin, paper, and powdered charcoal. Raphael’s The Dream of a Knight, made about 1504, is painted on a single poplar panel. Infrared imaging shows that its design came from a pricked full-size drawing now in the British Museum. That cartoon has numerous closely spaced holes along its outlines, although the National Gallery catalogue publishes no exact count. …

The hidden orange foundation and crimson glazes inside The Ambassadors

In Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Ambassadors of 1533, Jean de Dinteville’s pink satin doublet flashes between pale rose and deep crimson. Yet its brilliance did not begin with pink. Technical examination found a strong orange-red underpainting beneath the visible modeling. Holbein assigned different jobs to successive paint layers instead of mixing the final color in one pass. …

Imagine looking around your home and realizing that the paintings on the walls are not simply decoration. They are yours. You created them. They carry your ideas, your memories, your taste, and a part of your life.

There is a very special kind of satisfaction in being able to express yourself through visual art.

You may see something beautiful, remember a place, imagine a face, become fascinated by a certain color, light, or atmosphere – and instead of simply admiring it, you can turn that feeling into a painting. …

Varnish Inside the Painting: Why Did Van Eyck Place a Clear Layer Between Glazes?

Jan van Eyck’s 1439 Portrait of Margareta van Eyck, also known as Margaret, the Artist’s Wife, contains a surprising secret. Conservators found varnish not only on the surface, but also between two of the final layers of red paint.

Van Eyck may have considered the portrait nearly finished, applied varnish to make the colors richer, and then changed his mind. After seeing the colors fully revealed, he appears to have added one more transparent red glaze to deepen the shadows of the dress.

A glaze is a thin, transparent or semi-transparent layer of paint. Instead of hiding the paint below, it modifies its color. Glazes can deepen reds, soften transitions, and create rich shadows without making them opaque. …

Think It Is Too Late to Learn Art?

For most of history, becoming an artist depended greatly on where, when and to whom you were born.

In the time of the Old Masters, training usually began at a young age. A boy might enter a master’s workshop and spend years preparing panels, grinding pigments, copying drawings and assisting with commissions. Access depended on family connections, money, social position and geography. Women faced even greater restrictions. …

The Invention Jan van Eyck Never Made

Oil paint already existed. Van Eyck’s achievement was controlling how light behaved inside each painted surface.

The invention most often credited to Jan van Eyck was not his. Drying oils had bound pigments for centuries before he began painting. The Metropolitan Museum of Art traces oil painting in Northern Europe to at least the twelfth century. The turning point was the extraordinary control achieved by Van Eyck and other fifteenth-century Netherlandish painters. …

Did Leonardo Really Invent Sfumato?

Soft transitions came first. Leonardo turned them into a science of seeing.

What if Leonardo’s most famous technique was not actually his invention? Sfumato has no provable single inventor. Soft transitions predated him, and Italian painters were already exploring thin, translucent oil glazes associated with Netherlandish practice. Technical research also traces Leonardo’s underdrawing and monochrome undermodeling to the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio.

Leonardo’s achievement was not a single recipe. He turned inherited methods into a system for representing how people see. Sfumato is a smoky transition in which hard outlines disappear and form emerges through small changes of light, darkness, color, and focus. …