WE DON’T HEAR MUCH about the Mediterranean anymore, at least in terms of the art world of painters. The glossy Cannes Film Festival still gets annual media play, French wine is a mainstay, the Grand Prix comes along, and there’s all those old James Bond movies. This apparent demise of Mediterranean glory is a stark contrast to what happened with modern painting in southern France a century ago. The roll call is impressive: Cezanne, Picasso, Matisse, Van Gogh, Gaugin, and Bonnard. . . .

THE SWASHBUCKLING CHARACTER is well known. He engages in sword fights on the prow of a ship, then leaps to make the fatal blow. He scales castle walls or rock faces. We are on his side. In sum, he is fearless in the face of hardship and Nature. And so it is with a new kind of character on the American art scene: the swashbuckling plein air painter. . . .

THEORIES ABOUT BEAUTY, and therefore about art, have always fluctuated. Yet a major divide may be seen between the classical and the modern. In short, the classical viewed beauty as the mind making contact with something transcendent. The modern, in contrast, attributed beauty to functions of the brain, custom, and individual judgement. The good news, I suppose, is that neither side has won out on this endlessly debated topic, which also means the classical view is not dead by any means. . . .

TWO YEARS AGO, the famed Boston gangster James “Whitey” Bulger was murdered by prison inmates after his arrival to serve a life sentence. And with him died, probably, the answer to the largest art theft in the world—19 artworks taken from the Isabella Steward Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990, a heist worth $500 million. Few if any art thefts of similar magnitude have taken place since the spring 1990 event. This year, the 30th anniversary, spawned some new fascination, and yet another futile review of the convoluted “facts” and “leads” in the case. . . .

LINEAGES, THOSE TREE-LIKE maps of ancestry, have been a mainstay of royal families of the past and of the biological theory of evolution. They also apply to art, though attempts to create, and publish, a branching tree of art influences and style only came of age in the mid-twentieth century. African American visual artists have their own branching tree of influence and innovation. Its founders emerged early in the twentieth century, and the significant branching began during the New Deal and the Second World War. . . .

FINDING NEW MOTIFS IS always a painter’s challenge. There’s still life, the sunset, and the portrait in repose, tried and true. The painter takes the ordinary and tries to make it extraordinary. Occasionally, new motifs appears, and two modern cases are graffiti and tattoos. Both ancient, graffiti has been found on Greco-Roman ruins and tattoos go back to ancient tribal societies. Since the 1980s, these two motifs have had d a dramatic rise and fall. For a time they were new topics for painters. . . .

ONE OF THE BEST-SELLING novels of all time, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, told the story of finding a shocking secret message in Leonard da Vinci’s Last Supper fresco in Milan, Italy. This was fiction, of course, but the search for secret codes in historic artwork also has its nonfiction realm. For a very long time, painters have been presumed to put hidden meanings in their paintings. . . .

NOBODY LIKES THE middleman, and the same is probably true in the art world. The middleman is positioned between customer and seller, and takes a cut. In the art world, that would be the agent or gallery owner. In economies across time and place, the middleman has created both enclaves of success—often with ethnic identities—but also drawn resentment and persecution. Artists have always needed middlemen to succeed. . . .

WHENEVER YOU SEE a photo of a painter's studio, notice one thing: the large number of cans holding a great number of brushes. It illustrates not only a painter's joy in collecting these tools of the trade, but also the many choices to be made—which brush to use for which kind of painting? In the age of classical painting, up through the 1800s, it was seen as a demerit if the painter showed the brush strokes in the work. It was to look polished, that is, "with finish." The modern art revolt put this conceit in its cross hairs. The new vogue was to show brushwork.

MARYLAND, OH, MARYLAND! Wouldst though be a better place to paint landscapes, I pray! No such Elizabethan lament is known, but I will attempt to put flesh on the bones of such a poetic plea. That is because Maryland is my home turf, a state which I have scoured in search of evocative vistas to paint. Home geography will define, limit, or liberate an outdoor painter. If you live in the West, you have mountains, prairies, and deserts. You have a color range that is probably incomparable. And you have the outdoor weather. In Maryland you have what the state has to offer.

OF THE MANY PUZZLES a painter must solve in a landscape composition, the foreground can be trickiest. Get everything else right, and a mismatched foreground—what is closest in the viewer’s field of vision—can undermine the whole painting. Fortunately the choices, if not the execution, are quite clear and easy to understand. There are three. . . .

ON OCCASION, A SERIOUS painter would do well to stop and ask, "Am I a Leonardo da Vinci or a Johannes Vermeer?" Goodness gracious, either one is just fine! The real question, however, is not one of skill or fame, but of temperament. The two great artists, as best we know, illustrate temperaments of two types. . . .

ART, AND PAINTING IN particular, has always mixed with ideologies of the age. For Western art, the two prevailing ideologies of modern times have been Christianity and Marxism, two polar opposites. These underlying outlooks have become more like trace elements in the hurly-burly of the modern art markets, art appreciation, and art criticism than like outright doctrines. Yet a closer look shows how they still define most of how we view visual art. . . .

WHENEVER THE U.S. CENSUS is taken, it tries to count the different professions. Several cover the arts of some kind, but in the case of painters, they would come under "visual arts." This mixes together ceramicists, commercial artists, and many other variations. We are left not only with a question mark on the true number of "fine art painters" . . .

THE CANADIAN ECONOMIST Don Thompson, after years of exploring the market in modern art, offered this pity comment on the collector class: “Money is no problem, everybody’s got it.” The average painter may agree. Yet the compelling question remains: Where are the collectors, and how do you reach them? . . .

IN MOVIE-MAKING, IT has long been called "special effects," that manipulation of film, actors, or scenery to do something usually not normal under human condition. We might say that the history of painting has also taken up this manipulation, well before film, of course. The term typically connotes something dramatic or extraordinary. . . .

IN THE MOVIE My Fair Lady, based on the George Bernard Shaw novel, an upper class speech instructor teaches a young, lower class London woman to speak the Queen's English. The idea is that proper dialect makes one more acceptable in the more refined social class. This is also the topic that linguists study, and there may be some parallels to the "languages" of the art world, among painters in particular. . . .

THE NUMBER OF REGIONAL artists of note is not great, and the number of regional painters known for documenting the ocean is smaller still. Rarest of all is a painter who painted one ocean location his entire life. In American art history, that is pretty much narrowed down to one name: Walter Anderson (1903-1966). As one historian notes, Anderson was "the artist of the Gulf of Mexico," specifically the barrier islands off Mississippi and Louisiana. . . .

THE FRENCH NOVELIST Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) once said that he “firmly believes that details alone will henceforth determine the merit of works.” This made him a pioneer in literary “realism,” much followed by the likes of Charles Dickens, a genre that admittedly is no longer geared to the short attention spans of modern readers. For Balzac insisted on details, down to minutia describing people and objects. . . . In modern art, “detail” has gotten a bad name. . . .

A FIRST STEP IN LEARNING how to paint, or to improve on one's practice, is to attend a "painting demo," or demonstration. The instructor stands before the audience and shows how he does a painting. In the world of realist painting, where a desired end is sought (something that looks real), the demo is a popular phenomenon, and growing ever more so. . . . And one could argue that such demos tend to take one of two different forms. . . .