Practical advice for painters: “It shouldn’t feel like reinventing the wheel every morning,” Kevin Adams said when I visited his studio this past winter in the picturesque village of Washington, Virginia.

Adams has a well honed eye for depicting a scene, and he has used it all over the world, painting arctic glaciers, Cuban skies, national parks, a changing Chilean river, Russian cities, and many breathtaking views of the forests, farms, mountains and beaches of the American East Coast where lately he splits his time between Virginia and Massachusetts.

He served as a Marine Corps combat painter, which sparked my friendship with him more than a decade ago. (I was writing a dissertation on combat art.) The U.S. State Department has shown his work around the world, and he has been commissioned multiple times by the Department of the Interior and National River Conservation to document some of the most amazing landscapes in the Americas.

Find his work here: http://www.kevinhadams.com