Streamline Publishing

Norman Maclean’s novella A River Runs Through It has always been about more than fly fishing. It is about family, loss, the things we cannot say to the people we love, and the way a river keeps moving through all of it. Fifty years after its publication, the story is becoming an opera — and one of America’s finest landscape painters has been asked to help tell it.

There is a moment in Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Bal du moulin de la Galette — painted in 1876 and among the greatest works of early Impressionism — when you stop looking at the painting and start feeling it. The crowd moves, the light dapples, the conversations overlap. You are not standing in front of a canvas. You are standing at the edge of a Sunday af...

Daniel J. Keys has a philosophy about painting that is refreshingly free of mystique. “As painters, we have to get away from thinking there’s some trick we just haven’t learned yet that’s going to make all the difference,” he told the packed room at his demonstration during the 2026 Plein Air Convention in the Ozarks. “Great painters don’t know anything we don’t know. They’re...

“To say to the painter that nature is to be taken as she is,” James McNeill Whistler once declared, “is to say to the player that he may sit on the piano.”

It’s a line worth pausing on — because more than a century after Whistler delivered it, contemporary painters are still wrestling with the same question he was asking: What is painting actually for?

I’ll be honest — I wasn’t sure what to expect from the Ozarks. But the closer I got to Chateau on the Lake, the home for this year’s Plein Air Convention, the more the magic of the place revealed itself. Spring-fed, crystal-clear rivers and streams. Cascading waterfalls. Dramatic limestone and dolomite bluffs. Soft, hazy morning mist. Dappled, layered light filtering through ...