cd sketches

     When you go out for a Plein Air painting session, you might intuitively be inclined to look for the most 'classically beautiful' scene you can find. You'll look for mountain ranges, flowing creeks, and fields of flowers. But what you're more likely to find is grocery stores, littered streets, and park benches. Although you might be disappointed to see that the world around you isn't as pretty as what you see in master's paintings, there is another way to look at it. Is it possible to make the average world that surrounds you beautiful? Enter James Gurney's Idea of the 'Non-Motif'. In issue #149 of the International Artist Magazine he defines the 'Non-Motif' as "...a scene from our everyday world that is familiar but rarely interpreted by artists. Unlike a picturesque motif, a non-motif us unconventional, unexpected, but also commonplace and recognizable." By painting what you see in your everyday life, you gain a new appreciati...

In every community, across all time, there exists a trait or a set of traits that  that  community holds to high regard. Aside from these traits being a point of social credibility, they also served as a mechanism to create a society that was better specialized for a certain task. These traits are what are known as virtues. Whether it be the Ancient Spartans and the virtue of courage making them better warriors or modern-day Architects and the virtue of abstract thinking that allows them to create wonderfully beautiful buildings, one's adherence to these virtues is an easy metric to predict how successful one will be in any given group. I am here to say that being an artist is no different, Artists, as a community, have virtues that are well respected and stand to make anyone who lives up to them, a more successful artist. In this articl,e I will list multiple, the first of which is... 1. Conviction Conviction is the ability to hold a belief to not be easily swayed, dismissed,...