In 1911, the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky produced what was considered the first abstract painting, titled Bild Mit Kries (Picture With a Circle). The painting was, no doubt, a seminal milestone in the evolution of modern art. But what Kandinsky, and Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse, were doing at the…

Watercolor painting has been a mainstay of the visual art palette since the Paleolithic age. The nature of watercolor paint lends the medium unique qualities. Its absence of white pigment (unless added), gives watercolor painting a translucence, and therefore a radiance, which is unique to the medium. The whiteness of…

Collage was invented in 1912. It’s not exactly clear who invented collage, which later came to be also known as mixed media. But we can narrow the inventor down to two suspects: Pablo Picasso, and Georges Braque. It hardly matters who did it first, because the other would have adapted…

Ancient Egyptian sandstone reliefs of Cleopatra depict the pharaonic queen wearing a distinctive piece of jewelry. The piece has since become an iconically recognizable fashion element: the Pharaoh-style gorgerine necklace, made of a radial array of interlocking metallic plates and precious stones. An Egyptian of the day had to design…

The criteria for what one can place on a wall and deem it Wall Art, is really only limited to what one can get to stay on the wall. In 1925, when Albert Barnes mounted iron door hinges between and around paintings by Matisse, Picasso, Van Gogh, Modigliani, et al…

Sculpture is such a pervasive facet of public life, we tend to take it for granted. Just as the statue Christ the Redeemer stands atop the Corcovado mountain, looking over Rio de Janeiro, Milne Calder’s bronze statue William Penn stands atop Philadelphia City Hall, looking over the Delaware Valley. …

There has been a natural tendency for figurative art to be stereotyped by its representational nature into a homogeneous category. But in fact there is a vast diversity of abstraction inherent in figurative art. One could even go so far as to play the devil’s advocate, and suggest that purely…

The uniquely diverse flexibility of the medium of oil painting on canvas is of course legendary, and great original oils on canvas are still revered today, probably over all other static visual artistic media. Likewise, the unique endurance and resiliency of the original oil painting on canvas is a thing…

As this artist sits at his typewriter to write about folk art, he wishes Keith Haring were still alive today. This artist writing this missive about folk art would love to be able to email Haring for the purpose of soliciting his thoughts concerning the role of contemporary folk art…