The Organ Rehearsal, Henry Lerolle

In the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Use Fullscreen link and zoom or download arrow.

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Jeremy Deveraturda is an illustrator and digital painter who studied at the School of Visual Arts in NYC, and moved from his initial love of watercolor into the appealing freedom of digital art.

His light-filled digital seascapes and landscapes have something of the feeling of gouache, and display his admiration for artists like Sorolla and JWM Turner.

Deveraturda’s website has galleries of both personal work and illustration. In addition he maintains a blog, Paint My Brains Out.

There is an interview with Deveraturda on STAMP magazine.

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Like his remarkable Hare, Albrecht Durer’s study in watercolor, pen and ink of a clump of earth containing an assortment of wild plants, known as the Great Piece of Turf, is a remarkable example of the artist’s penetrating powers of observation and brilliant rendering.

Like his Hare, the Great Piece of Turf has become one of the most well known of Durer’s works, in spite of — or perhaps because of — its unassuming subject matter.

This work, along with 90 other watercolors, drawings and prints from the extraordinary collection of the Albertina, is still on view here in the U.S. as part of an exhibition titled: Albrecht Durer: Master Drawings, Watercolors and Prints from the Albertina, at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. until June 9, 2013

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Those who don’t, like me, use a shortcut for search in a browser bar, but instead actually go to the Google homepage, will frequently see Google Doodles.

These are versions of the Google logo made of illustrated elements that, to one degree or anther, suggest or form the letters of the word.

Google has artists who work on these, and they can be wonderfully clever, imaginative and entertaining, as I’ve mentioned on occasion.

For the past 6 years, Google has been sponsoring a Doodle 4 Google competition for K-12 students in U.S. schools in which the participants create their own Google Doodles based on a theme.

The national winner gets their Doodle featured on the Google home page, is awarded a $30,000 college scholarship, a Wacom tablet (grin) and other prizes, and brings home a $50,000 grant to their school for establishment of a computer or technology lab.

This years theme was “My Best Day Ever…”, and the national winning entry (images above, bottom) from Sabrina Brady of Sparta High School, Wisconsin, is posted on the Google homepage today (May 23, 2013).

The pages devoted to the contest feature the national and state finalists and winners.

For those interested in next year’s competition, there is a FAQ page.

Despite the obvious self promotional aspect for Google, I like this because it not only encourages drawing, but creative thinking in the arrangement of graphic elements to make or contain the logo’s letters.

I was also pleased to see a high percentage of girls’ names among the finalists and winners.

Images above:
Maria I, Chestnut Ridge Middle School, NJ [6-7]
Madelyn K, Homeschool, IN [6-7]
Lauren S, Sheridan High School, WY [8-9]
Marissa F, Urbandale Middle School, IA [8-9]
Andrea S-L, Washington High School, WV [10-12]
Drexel B, Albert D. Lawton Intermediate School, VT [8-9]
Natasha D, Lake City Junior Academy, ID [K-3]
Amy L, Highland Park High School, TX [10-12]
Audrey Z, Michael F. Stokes Elementary School, NY [4-5]
Sabrina Brady, Sparta High School, Wisconsin, [10-12]

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When walking around during the recent Wayne Plein Air Festival here in Southeastern Pennsylvania, looking for painters working in the streets of the town (and feeling a bit like a birder searching for rare species, as many of the participants had found off the beaten path locations to paint), I came across Vermont artist Charlie Hunter working on the small painting of a railroad underpass shown in my photo above, top, and was immediately impressed.

Unfortunately, neither my hasty location photo, nor the relatively small reproductions of work on Hunter’s website or the sites of the galleries in which he is represented, adequately convey the wonderful textural and painterly quality of his work.

Hunter works in a subdued, often almost monochrome palette — shifting attention to his command of values, variation in edges and the surface qualities of his paintings. They sometimes have a feeling similar to Andrew Wyeth’s drybrush watercolors, though Hunter works in oil, most often of the water-miscible variety.

Hunter was last year invited to join the Putney Painters, a painting group in Vermont guided by painter Richard Schmid, without question a contemporary master of edges and value in particular, and Schmid’s wife, artist Nancy Guzick, notable for her command of those same qualities.

Hunter indicates that his style developed almost accidentally, evolving out of his career as an illustrator and designer, and his ability to see and work with major shapes and compositional geometry.

He works with a limited palette of burnt sienna, viridian and French ultramarine, occasionally supplemented with yellow ochre or Naples yellow. He begins by toning the canvas with a diluted mix of his three basic colors, out of which he pulls large and then smaller shapes with paper towels, Q-tips and other implements before going back in with brushes.

Like those great old black and white film noir movies, Hunter’s paintings have a quality of atmosphere and mood that would be difficult to maintain in a higher chroma palette.

When I encountered him working on the painting above, top, he was just reaching the stage at which he was ready to make the call of “complete”. He commented that Mother Nature had made his job of finding a suitable subject more difficult by dealing him a brightly lit sunny day.

When I later saw the painting in the Plein Air exhibition, I saw little change, and was just as struck with the visual quality of his other paintings, one of which was awarded First Place by juror Jim Wodark.

The links to work on his website under “Images” are a little awkward, in that only “Current“, “Other Available Paintings” and “Painting Archives” are within his site, the other links take you out to other sites or even a Flickr page for galleries (linked below). In the Painting Archives section you will find some of his commercial work and gallery work in other media.

There is a profile of Hunter on OutdoorPainter.com

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The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. is one of the great art museums in the U.S., and a national treasure on which I am happy to see my tax dollars spent.

The NGA has long had a web presence, but it has never been quite what those of us who admire the museum’s collection might have liked, with small images of items in the collection and less than ideal presentation overall.

That has all changed, as the museum recently rolled out a beautiful new website.

Searching or browsing the collection is much easier, and many of the individual objects are now provided with zoomable high resolution images.

You can also still download images, as you could before, through the NGA Images database. Though the basic system for that hasn’t changed since my post on NGA Images in 2012, it is now more gracefully integrated into the main website.

I’ll point out again that though you can download a reasonably large image without an account, registering for a free account with a simple email address gives you access to wonderfully large high-resolution images.

As an example, an image of John Constable’s landscape, Wivenhoe Park, Essex (images above, third from bottom) can be downloaded without an account in a size from which I’ve taken the crop shown above, second from bottom. The bottom image shows a crop from the size available to those logged in to a free account (essentially the same as maximum zoom in the website interface, if you’re not concerned about downloading).

In addition to better presentation of exhibitions and items from the collection, there are other treasures to be found by looking around, with excellent features on subjects like Conservation Projects.

(By the way, the detail image of the hand from Vermeer’s exquisite Woman Holding a Balance in the examples above is not blurred; the extreme close-up just shows Vermeer’s brilliantly soft edges.)

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Bracketed by Walt Disney reading quotes from Robert Henri’s The Art Spirit, this delightful short from 1958 briefly visits four Disney animators in the studio, where three of them are at the time working on the classic Sleeping Beauty animated feature, and then follows them into the California countryside, where they paint an old live oak.

Accompanied by jaunty Disney documentary background music, the four artists, Marc Davis, Eyvind Earle, Joshua Meador and Walt Peregoy, set up their equipment and, in a variety of media and styles, each paint their interpretation of the subject.

I was particularly interested in the approach of Eyvind Earle, who I have featured previously, as he painted the detailed textures of the gnarled tree trunk in casein (images above, bottom two). Earle eventually went on to a successful career as a gallery artist.

[Via Mark Frauenfelder on Boing Boing]

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Lady Elizabeth Thimbelby and her Sister, Anthony van Dyck

In the National Gallery, London. Use fullscreen and zoom controls to the right of the image. You can zoom in even further than I have here.

Van Dyck dazzles with his masterful rendering of fabric, flesh and hair. I love the way he has positioned and painted the hands.

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