A petri dish is her canvas, and the microbes are her paint. By Jacqueline Howard.

France's iconic Chauvet cave holds mysterious spray-shaped imagery, made around the time when nearby volcanoes were spewing lava. By Ewen Callaway. (Jan. 15)

Artist Diala Brisly fled Syria in 2013 but she's well known among Syrians for her work on a children's magazine that, amazingly, is still printed in the country, despite the war.

Imagine the scene: you uncover a painting stored away in the closet of an elderly relative's home, coated in a blanket of dust so thick you can hardly make out anything but more dust underneath. You slide it out, begin to carefully brush it off, and find two piercing eyes peering out at you.

After her underarm hair caused a stir on national TV, the writer was asked to pose for a nude painting. The experience led her to wonder why we’re still so shy about the naked human form.

L.A.-based artist Alexa Meade takes the tradition of Trompe L’oeil — the Renaissance painting technique in which objects appear real — and reverses the process, turning the human body into seemingly two-dimensional tableaus and incredible portraits.

Long neglected, the 17th-century Japanese artist Tawaraya Sōtatsu influenced Western art 400 years later.

Twenty-nine abstract Washington Color School paintings hang in the halls of the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia. But unless you’re one of the CIA’s undisclosed number of employees, your chances of ever seeing these paintings, or even digital images of them, are pretty slim.

Combining art and science comes naturally to Kate Nichols. The colors in her pieces don’t come from pigment, but from tiny silver nanoparticles suspended in the paint. She makes them herself, as artist-in residence in the University of California, Berkeley’s nanotechnology research group.

Bob Ross introduces us to his "Almighty" assortment of tools and colors, tells us that anyone can paint, and creates a landscape of a forest path just after a rain shower.

On 17 June 2015, a white man opened fire on a prayer group in Charleston, South Carolina, killing nine people. Nine black people, or rather ‘nine more’, as the US artist Kara Walker puts it in an interview with photographer and filmmaker Ari Marcopoulos, published alongside ‘Go to Hell or Atlanta, Whichever Comes First’ – the first of two solo shows across Victoria Miro’s London spaces this autumn. After the shooting, pictures emerged of the gunman posing in front of the Confederate flag –

The pioneer Abstract Expressionist talks about the legends that have grown up around him, his battles with the art establishment, the early days of the New York School, and his gift of 28 paintings to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Miniature landscape paintings on two-inch plexiglas circles.

To coincide with a new major retrospective of her work, we reveal ten little-known facts about the Japanese queen of contemporary art.

  A fore-edge painting is a technique of painting on the edges of the pages of a book. The artwork can only be seen when the pages are fanned.

During the Protestant Reformation in 16th century Europe, Puritan iconoclasts destroyed an estimated 97% of religious art in England during the English Civil War.

Artist Emma Lindström imagines paintings to represent complexité of emotions and feelings in a pictorial way. As it, her artworks have dark and bright contrasts. Through her paintings she offers an colorful way to depict the feelings of your society.

Along the façade of the National Gallery these days are hoardings announcing Credit Suisse’s patronage of the Goya show, with the invitation: ‘Now you can bring Goya’s portraits to life, using your smartphone.’ I didn’t think much of the invitation as I passed it... By T.J. Clark.

Discovered by a Chemist, Prussian Blue Gave Painters the Spontaneity They Were Missing. By John Griswold.

Artists and paintmakers can breathe a little easier now that the European Union has officially thrown out Sweden’s baffling proposal to ban cadmium pigment from paint.