With snow still on the ground throughout most of the Mid-Atlantic United States, and more on the way, I thought it appropriate to look at an American artist renowned for his scenes of snow and winter.

Edward Willis Redfield was one of the major figures among the artists who gathered in an artists colony in and around New Hope, Pennsylvania in the late 19th Century. Generally called the Pennsylvania Impressionists, this group included a number of artists who had absorbed some influence from the French Impressionists, but, like most painters called “American Impressionists”, took that influence and went their own individualistic way. (See my posts on Daniel Garber, Fern Coppedge and Art and the River.)

Redfield is often credited with co-founding the colony along with William Lathrop. Actually Lathrop was the driving force in establishing the colony, but Redfield, who was first to move to the area, was the star and seed around which the colony formed.

Born in Bridgeville, Delaware, Redfield studied with at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts with Thomas Anshutz, James Kelly and Thomas Hovendon. Anshutz and Kelly were carrying on the traditions of their teacher, Thomas Eakins, who had left the school shortly before Redfield arrived.

While at the Academy, Redfield struck up a friendship with Robert Henri that was to continue through the artist’s lifetimes.

After his time at the Academy, Redfield went to Paris with the intention of studying portraiture at the Académe Julian and the École des Beaux-Arts. At the latter, he studied with William Bouguereau and other classically trained painters. On his time off, however, he joined Henri and other young artists who were engaged in the newly popular practice of painting “en plein air“, and was exposed to the work of the young Impressionist painters.

Redfield frequented the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris, fascinated with the work of Monet, Pissarro, and Norwegian painter Frits Thaulow. Redfield became increasingly interested in the effects of light on snow, and had his first snow scene accepted in the Paris Salon of 1891.

On his return to the U.S., Redfield and his French bride settled in Center Bridge, Pennsylvania, on the Delaware River near New Hope.

Redfield took to painting the Pennsylvania landscape with bravura and abandon. His paintings are three dimensional marvels of spattered, heaped and piled on paint; with ridges and gullies in place of more genteel brushstrokes. It’s hard to see how remarkably tactile his canvasses are in reproduction. There is a zoomable image of Overlooking the Valley (image above, middle, with detail, bottom) on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s site that gives you a hint, but only a hint.

By all accounts, Redfield was just as physical in the act of painting, often forgetting to eat his lunch as he blazed through large canvases in one sitting. Redfield painted in all kinds of weather; not only in the cold in search of his famous snow scenes, but in wind, strapping his canvas to a tree where easels would be blown away.

He was a harsh critic of his own work, on more than one occasion burning canvasses he thought were not up to his standards.

Redfield was the most recognized and awarded of the new Hope painters, garnering more awards than any American painter except John Singer Sargent, and his work is in a number of major museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

There is an in-print collection of his work, Just Values and Fine Seeing (Google Books extract here), and you can find many fine examples in Brian Peterson’s excellent book Pennsylvania Impressionism.

Stephen Harby is a working architect and lifelong student of architectural history with a passion for travel and sketching architecture.

Harby took a sabbatical from the architectural office in which he had been working for many years and devoted it to travel and sketching, and in the process moved to watercolor as his preferred medium for observing and drawing architecture.

His site has a section of recent work as well as collections of archived work, both arranged by places, such as France, Persia, Rome, Northern Africa, Spain, Tuscany and Venice.

He moves between color and monochromatic watercolor, using the latter like ink wash for tone drawings.

Unfortunately, some of the posted images are frustratingly small (those from Venice, for example); others, however, are large enough to get a feeling for the work and place (note the “large image” button under the main preview images). Some are sketchlike and briefly notated, others more developed (like those in the Southern California section).

Harby’s knowledge of and affection for the great architecture of the past shines in his depictions of great architectural triumphs like the Pantheon, which has its own section (image above, bottom right, in which he captures sunlight from the oculus against the interior walls).

In his statement about Sketching Architecture, Harby points out one of the best and often overlooked advantages to sketching on location over recording a place with photography:

“When one is obliged to remain in one spot for longer than the snap of a shutter, sketching or painting with patience and concentration, one gains a sense of total immersion, not only visually, but through the sounds, smells, and (most rewardingly) tastes that a prolonged stay in these favorite places makes part of the experience.”

[Via Artist Daily]

Old master drawings are a challenge for conservators. Fragile and damaged over time simply by exposure to light, drawings cannot be placed on permanent display, or even frequent display. Every period of exposure to light must be considered, in effect, a time subtracted from the life of the drawing.

Also, drawings, even those by great masters, receive less notice and attention than paintings, and for both reasons are less frequently the subject of mounted exhibitions.

So when collections or parts of collections of master drawings are exhibited, it’s worthy of notice.

The Morgan Library and Museum in New York, which I have written about previously, and mentioned in my recent post on their cuerrent exhibit, The Hours of Catherine of Cleves, is home to a great collection of master drawings.

They have drawn form it, if you’ll excuse the expression, an exhibition focused on a particular place and time. Rome After Raphael displays over 80 drawings, most of them from the Morgan’s own collection, that take Raphael’s work as a watershed moment (not an uncommon thought, see my posts on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of 19th Century), and follow developments in drawing in the 100 years following.

Tough nothing quite compares with seeing master drawings in person (I think drawings suffer even more in reproduction than paintings), the Morgan has provided an extensive selection of drawings from the show. These are zoomable, and the zooming feature is supplemented with a terrific “Full Screen” option that allows you to view them without the constraining frame of many zooming features (look for it at the bottom right of the zooming controls).

There is also an online feature that walks through a discussion of several of the drawings and goes into more detail on some of the artists, their relationship to each other and their place in time.

Raphael was one of history’s greatest draftsmen, and is, of course, represented, along with another, Michelangelo (see my post on Michelangelo’s drawings).

Many well known and lesser known artists working in Rome during that period are also represented by drawings of a variety of subjects — allegorical, architectural and religious, like Parmigianino’s drawing after Michelangelo’s Pieta (above top); and even landscape studies, like Annibale Carracci’s wonderful pen and brown ink sketch of a riverside tree (above, bottom).

Rome After Raphael is on display through May 9, 2010.

I don’t know much about Jonatan Cantero; his blog doesn’t have much in the way of biographical information. He is a young illustrator living in Barcelona, Spain, and is apparently working toward a career in comics, though not yet published in the field.

His blog and deviantART page have some examples of his work, many of them featuring his small bean-like characters involved in things like harvesting strawberry pulp by mining operation or gathering pollen in buckets while incurring the displeasure of bees.

I was really taken with this piece, particularly when viewed large (large version here), and hope to see more from Cantero as he progresses.

[Via Monster Brains]

Illustrator and gallery artist Eric Fortune creates images that are at once fantastical and emotionally immediate. His subjects, often elongated and in motion, seem isolated but straining to connect, adrift in worlds just beyond their understanding.

His paintings, are done in acrylic on watercolor paper, and always have a strong element of texture, complimenting his often muted palette and tonally complex compositions. Shadows and half light play a frequent role, with areas of illumination moving your eye to the core elements.

Fortune studied at Columbus College of Art and Design. His clients include Simon & Schuster, Tor Books, Harcourt Brace, Scholastic and Realms of Fantasy. Lately he has been focusing more in gallery work with showings at Opera Gallery (NY), Copro Nason Gallery (LA), LeBasse Projects (LA), Roq La Rue Gallery (Seattle), Gallery 1988 (LA) and others.

There is a step-by-step process of the image above, bottom on Arrested Motion, and a step through of another image on a blog post from Irene Gallo on Tor.com.

Fortune also has a blog, and there is a nice introductory gallery on the Tor.com site.

Even among fans of his comic art masterpiece, Little Nemo in Slumberland (a group of whom I count myself an ardent member), few people are aware of the editorial cartoons of Winsor McCay.

During his stints as cartoonist for The Cincinnati Enquirer and The New York Herald, and through syndicated work for the Hearst papers, McCay did a remarkable series of editorial and allegorical cartoons. More social commentary than topically editorial, they were anti-materialism, anti-laziness, anti-drug and pro hard work and duty.

The best thing about them, of course, is that they were wonderfully drawn by one of one of the best draftsmen in the history of cartooning and comics.

In 2005 Fantagraphics published a terrific collection of McCay’s black and white work, Daydreams and Nightmares: The Fantastic Visions of Winsor McCay, 1898-1934 (more here), that is unfortunately out of print, but can be found used for essentially original cover price ($20).

In addition to McCay’s social commentary/editorial cartoons, the book includes pages of his early strips like Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, A Pilgrim’s Progress, Day Dreams and Little Sammy Sneeze. (Sunday Press published wonderful large-scale version of the latter, with color; my article here.)

Only a smattering of McCay material is online, but the generous and enigmatic “Mr. Door Tree” has published a number of McCay’s editorial cartoons on his blog Golden Age Comic Book Stories. Be sure to click on the initial images to see the large versions of the drawings.

Wonderful stuff.

[Link via BitterOldPunk on MetaFilter]

Christine Lafuente studied at Byn Mawr College, The Barnes Foundation and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; and is continuing her study at Brooklyn College in New York.

Lafuente blurs the line between representational and non representational painting, and moves further over it than I am usually inclined to follow; but her use of color and value, and the way she treats her brush strokes as textural elements and objects in themselves, captured my attention.

She works with splashes of color, their borders often indistinct, dissolving but never quite losing the underlying form. There is sometimes a feeling that the paintings are in motion. Wonderful smudges and swipes of paint coalesce to suggest objects, dissolve again into the background and recombine as another object.

Lafuente currently has a solo show the Gross McCleaf Gallery here in Philadelphia that runs until February 24th, 2010. I can’t find a dedicated web presence for her, but I’ve added some other links below.

I don’t normally feature photography on Lines and Colors, not that I don’t think of photography as an art form; I just feel that it’s dealt with better on many other sites, and seems different enough to be in a separate category from the art forms I feature.

But the photographs of Michael Paul Smith just charmed my socks off, and there is more to them then excellent photography. In the images you see above, the houses, cars and streets are 1/24th scale (1/2 inch = 1 foot; 1 m = 4.16 cm).

The cars are die-cast models; the buildings are built by Smith, constructed out of Gator board, plastics such as styrene and Sintra, and found objects (and it looks like the old model makers standby of lichen for shrubs).

The outdoor scenes are set up on a table and photographed against real backgrounds. The interior ones, lit very simply but cleverly, are photographed in Smith’s garage.

There is no digital manipulation, no GCI, no Photoshop compositing; it’s all in the models and the original shot from the camera.

My father, among his other skills, was a museum model maker, so this has a particular resonance for me. He, my brother and I spent many happy hours working on train layouts and even helping him construct his museum models; but we never managed photographs of them that had this kind of emotional depth.

Smith says: “What started out as an exercise in model building and photography, ended up as a dream-like reconstruction of the town I grew up in. It’s not an exact recreation, but it does capture the mood of my memories.’

There is a two page Flickr set of his photographs, (and here), many of the compositions have been photographed in both color and black and white, the latter looking uncannily like actual photos from the era Smith is recreating.

I know little about Martin Ansin, save that he is a free lance illustrator living and working in Montevideo, Uraguay. His web site and blog don’t contain a great deal of biographical information.

His portfolio includes posters for The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, and Taming Light, a group exhibition in Dublin inspired by the films of Stanley Kubrick.

His approach varies from a semi-rendered line and tone style, as in the Phanton of the Opera poster above, to a more fully rendered technique. His archives also include comics and comics themed illustration.

[Note: a couple of images on these sites may be considered mildly NSFW.]

California artist Johathan Bernard Koch studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design. Since then, he has apparently has had a successful career as an illustrator, with clients like The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune and Rodale Books, and has been honored by the Society of Illustrators New York; but I can’t find an online portfolio of his illustration work.

What is available online, however, is Koch’s painting blog, A Small Painting. Crediting Duane Keiser, Julian Merrow-Smith and Justin Clayton with inspiring him to start, Koch posts his small paintings (and sometimes larger ones) of still life subjects and landscapes, and offers them for sale.

Unlike most painter/bloggers, Koch does not sell his paintings through auction, or even list their price on the blog, asking instead that interested parties contact him for information.

There is a page of Available Work, but it is a small fraction of the posted images. There is also an Archive page in which you can browse thumbnails, but I recommend browsing leisurely through the posted works by clicking on the left arrow, or simply clicking on the images of the paintings, to view them full size as you go.

Much of the appeal of Koch’s work is in his deft handling of texture, contrasts of rough and smooth and delicate shimmers of restrained color.

He has a more rendered style than most painters who frequently post small paintings, and he obviously posts when a painting is ready and not on a pre-determined schedule (note the absence of a frequency in the name of his blog).

His still life paintings are composed against textural or dark backgrounds, and have a feeling of Dutch master still life. Koch has a wonderful command of soft and “lost and found” edges.

Despite the fact that he often renders more smoothly than many contemporary still life painters, much of Koch’s work consists of suggestion; he hints at where the curve of an onion or the edge of a glass jar might end against a dark background, and lets your eye fill in the rest.

His landscapes likewise have a feeling of soft edges, soft light, controlled color and gentle atmospherics, frequently evoking stillness and contemplation.