Over years I’ve been enjoying comics I’ve noticed that many comic book artists get to a certain level of proficiency and “hold” there, evidently feeling that they have sufficient skills to turn out acceptable work on a continuing basis.

I’ll certainly grant that drawing a 24-page comic book on a monthly schedule can be a demanding task, and is not always conducive to creative explorations and artistic growth. Some comic book artists, however, are not satisfied with “good enough” and insist on growing and changing, rising above the limitations of the monthly schedule, even if it makes them incapable of keeping up that pace.

Canadian comics artist and illustrator Travis Charest (pronounced “sha-RAY”) started his career working with Jim Lee and the Homage Studios stable of artists. His early work shows the influence of the Homage style at the time, rife with over-muscled, grimacing superheros and a rendering style thick with superfluous hatching (sometimes referred to as “hay” by those who took a dim view of that inking style).

Charest soon outgrew that niche style and began to exhibit the influence of comic art greats like Al Williamson, Alex Raymond and Jean Giraud (Moebius). As he matured as an artist, he kept a high level of detail and hatching, which he seems to enjoy, but he graduated from lines for their own sake to a sophisticated rendering style more reminiscent of classic pen and ink illustrators.

He has done comics work and covers for Wildstorm on titles like WildC.A.T.s and for DC Comics on Flash and Darkstars, among others (checklist here). He gradually moved away from monthly comics, unsuited to the level of work and detail in his images, and began to do specials and covers, developing a detail-oriented painting style in the process.

There is an Unofficial Travis Charest Art Gallery site that includes galleries and features lots of convention sketches. His “official” site seems to be a MSN discussion group, The Art of Travis Charest, which includes tutorials, news and galleries (note the gallery sub-categories in the navigation bar on the left).

Also on that site is a delightful comic strip that Charest is posting to the web called Spacegirl (image above, top).

Charest almost apologizes for Spacegirl, saying: “This is just a bit of fun I get to have for an hour a week, don’t take it too seriously.”, but it is among my favorite of his endeavors. Perhaps because it’s “off the cuff”, his art for Spacegirl is wonderfully loose and has a freedom not always evident in his more polished work. Plus it has an Alex Raymond meets Moebius look to it that I just love, as they are probably my two favorite comics artists.

Charest left Wildstorm and made a logical move to French comics publisher Humanoïdes Associés, publishers of Metal Hurlant and home to many of Europe’s top comics artists. (The American branch is Humanoids Publishing). There he is currently working on a Metabarons graphic novel (promotional image: above, middle and detail, bottom) that has been a long time in development and promises to be spectacular.

As always, Charest continues to push himself to new levels of accomplishment, never satisfied with “good enough”.

Link via the heights of sublimation

Rob Gonsalves is fascinated with the twilight zone between worlds.

The Canadian artist creates crisp, detailed acrylic paintings that walk that boundary by simultaneously representing both worlds, and the seemingly impossible connection between them, in the same image.

In pursuing this he walks a shifting path himself, between the hauntingly connected juxtapositions of Magritte and the inverted logical constructs of M.C. Escher.

You will see people casually refer to his work as surreal, but I think it would be more correct to use the term “Magic Realism”, simply because Surrealism relies on images from the subconscious and Gonsalves works are much closer in intention to Escher’s carefully constructed excursions into the nature of perception and thought.

As you explore his work, you’ll see several themes that Gonsalves likes to return to and investigate repeatedly, much like Monet painting the same haystack multiple times.

The largest group consists of the merging of worlds of differing scale, a series of elaborate variations on a theme first explored by Escher in a woodcut that is one of my favorites of his, Still Life snd Street.

The other large theme is that of the blending of two worlds by similarities of repeated shape, again a favorite theme of Escher, but explored by Gonsalves in paintings that allow for the effects of color and atmosphere to carry some of the transition between the perceived realities.

Gonsalves’ ability to carry off these transitions is so effective that it’s often difficult to pin down exactly where in the image your mind makes the mental shift from one point of view to the other.

He explores other, smaller themes that lean more toward Magritte’s colorful collisions of realities. Among my favorites are Gonsalves’ wonderful images of what appear to be bodies of water in the distance that are revealed to be mirrored tiles in the foreground.

There are two volumes of Gonsalves’ work, accompanied by lyrical text and aimed at children. One is night-themed, Imagine A Night, the other, Imagine a Day, features daylight images and has text by Sarah L. Thompson.

Take some time and let Rob Gonsalves walk you along that shifting path where the boundaries of “here” and “there” shimmer and change with the merest movement of an eye.

Link via Kottke.org.

Frederick Lord Leighton (not to be confused with Edmund Blair Leighton, who I profiled last week), was one of the most influential of all Victorian Academic painters.

He was very much within the academic neoclassical tradition, in contrast to the painters of that time who were favored in retrospect by the 20th century art establishment, and were remembered primarily for their rejection of that tradition. For much of the 20th Century, art historians and critics considered rejection of 19th Century Academic art a badge of honor, because Academic art was the “bad”, “repressive” art from which the modern art movements “liberated” us.

I’ll resist going into a big rant about what a poisonous attitude this overt rejection of tradition by the modernist establishment was. I like a lot of modern painting, but I have nothing good to say about the concerted campaign the modernists waged to discredit figurative art when they came to dominate the art establishment. I’ll just say that I enjoy Academic art and, in spite of the formality and absence of emotion in much neoclassical painting, I would rather spend my time in front of one of Leighton’s beautifully executed canvasses than a museum full of late 20th Century “isms”, which were bred from another kind of formality and dearth of emotion. (OK, so I did rant, but it wasn’t a big rant.)

Leighton was closely tied to the Royal Academy, exhibited most of his major works there and was elected its president in 1878. He painted with the emphasis on draughtsmanship and elegant rendering that was fundamental to the neoclassical style, and his subject matter was mostly scenes from ancient history, mythology or the Bible. Unlike some of the weaker Academic painters who got caught up in the mere visual reconstruction of those times or subjects, Leighton was faithful to the original vision of neo-classical art and the pursuit of timeless beauty.

Leighton’s early work was influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites and he shared their literary subject matter, painting scenes from Shakespeare and Dante, but he moved into more classical subjects as he travelled and was exposed to contemporary French and Italian Classical art.

As a mature artist, Leighton was so influential among Victorian Classical painters that Edward Burne-Jones, himself one of the great figures of Victorian art, nicknamed him “Jupiter Olympus”.

To say that Alex Toth was a master of the comics art form is perhaps an understatement.

I first encountered his uniquely elegant and spare drawing style in issues of Pete Millar’s CARtoons and Drag Cartoons, drag racing and custom car oriented comics magazines in which he stood out like a Corvette in a parking lot full of Chevy sedans (image above). I then noticed his unmistakably fresh style in the pages of Warren’s Creepy and Eerie. Again, Toth shone like a midnight sun, even among the Warren magazines stable of superb comics artists.

Toth (pronounced like “both”) had a rare ability to abstract and simplify in his drawings to a degree that makes his work seem a bit like Chinese ink paintings or Japanese prints; not in any obvious similarity of style, Toth’s drawing style is as American as can be, but in accordance with the difficult-to follow maxim of “What doesn’t add, subtracts.”

In his pursuit of capturing the essence of things with very few lines, Toth brought to bear his superior draughtsmanship and his exceptional skills as a designer. His panels are composed, elements arranged, blacks spotted, white space controlled and figures and backgrounds drawn or simply suggested with a skill that passes into the sublime. Where the majority of comics artists, even the most accomplished, would use 5 lines to describe something, Toth would do it with two. Where they would draw a detailed object, Toth would suggest with deceptively simple areas of black or halftone.

His pages, particularly in black and white, were textbook examples of treating an entire comics page as a carefully designed whole, not just an arrangement of panels. Within that balanced and carefully arranged design, Toth exhibited storytelling skills, the ability to convey a story in images, that were among the best of the best. Like his drawing, his storytelling was dramatically different, unique, daringly cinematic and uncannily effective.

Toth originally wanted to do newspaper comics, but adventure comics were fading from the newspaper pages when he started his career, so he switched to comic books. He carried on the artistic tradition of newspaper comics greats like Milton Caniff and Noel Sickles, however, and was the main artist to bring that dramatic chiariscuro style to comic books, where it has been continued and championed by artists like Frank Miller.

Toth was also a terrific character designer and left his mark on the beautifully simplified characters for Space Ghost, Johnny Quest and the DC Comics series Super Friends.

Here is an excellent gallery of his work presented in black and white, from scans of the original art on the Comicartville site.

There is a multi-volume series of books on The Art of Alex Toth from Auad Publishing (where you will also find a Toth gallery), and you should still be able to find the Image Comics collection of his work on the comic book adaptation of the Zorro television show.

This post on Toth has been on the back burner for a while now. When I can, I like to let the posts on the artists who are at the very top of their artform simmer a while, in case I think of something else good to say; but I brought this post forward and finished it because Alex Toth died yesterday (May 27, 2006) at the age of 77. In what is probably as fitting a way to go as any artist could hope for, Alex Toth literally died at his drawing table.

John Constable, who is considered, along with J.W.M. Turner, to be the greatest of English landscape artists, made a decision midway through his career to move his landscape painting to a grand scale and began a series of large canvasses measuring approximately 6ft by 4ft (130cm x 188cm).

The “six-footers”, as they came to be known, are among the most famous landscape paintings in the history of English painting. Depicting the English countryside along the river Stour, these large paintings were not only remarkable for their scale, but also for the full-size preliminary oil sketches Constable did for them.

The sketches were open and painterly, with quick, distinctive brushstrokes that in some ways foreshadowed painting styles that were to follow much later.

From June 1 to August 28 of this year, The Tate Britain brings this series of paintings together for the first time, and also displays them in conjunction with many of his equally large scale preliminary sketches for them.

The image above, The White Horse, is from the Frick Collection in New York. The Frick’s site has a zoomable version of the image.

The full-size oil sketch for this works hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. There are detail images here.

Take a look at the oil sketch, particularly in the details, and see what your “impression” of it is.

Link via Art Knowledge News.

Any of you who are familiar with Dover Books, know what a great resource they can be of public domain images from previous centuries, particularly from the 19th century when thousands of engravings were published for novels, texts, catalogs and periodicals.

Many artists have used the Dover collections of these images as reference. Other artists have made more direct use of them to make new art.

Artist Caleb Johnston has taken a number of these examples of 19th century publishing technology and put them together in a 20th/21st century publishing technology, namely a Flash interactive, and produced a work in which these detailed engravings of people, plants, animals, anatomical diagrams and decorative letterforms animate, morph, and dissolve into one another in novel ways.

The module is interactive in that it depends on you move your mouse around to find “hot spots” within each image tableaux, and click on them to trigger animated sequences. Click, or re-click, on enough of them in a given image and you will trigger a progression to the next collage in the sequence.

The piece is nicely done although it does require a bit of perseverance to get some of the screens to “complete” and move on to the next one.

NFCTD is a wonderful diversion reminiscent of a cross between Max Earnst’s classic Surrealist collage-novel Une Semaine du Bonté, from the early 20th century, and the famous Nose Pilot Flash amusement that has been popular on the web for the last 8 or nine years. It presents an interesting juxtaposition of images, times, technologies and artistic visions.

Link via Cartoon Brew.

Dermot Power is a concept artist and designer whose work not only has a wonderful degree of variation from project to project, but who also exhibits an unusual flair and style in many of his concept paintings.

He was done stage, prop, character and costume designs, and concept paintings and drawings for films like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (image at top), Batman Begins, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (image above), Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, Leprechauns, Fear Dot Com and others.

His style ranges from straightforwardly realistic to highly stylized, but always seems appropriate to the material he is visualizing.

His site includes concept art and design work from many of the films as well as some storyboards for Prisoner of Azkaban and Fear Dot Com. Some of his most stylized work is for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, for which he did set designs, props, merchandise art, character and creature design as well as film visuals.

Power is also a comics artist and has done work for the UK comics magazine 2000AD on characters like Judge Dredd and Slane. If you search Amazon.com you can find collections of those titles that include his work.

In addition he has done game design and concept art for Virgin Games (Wonderland, Overlord, Golden Axe) and Konami (Lure of the Temptress).

Power is currently working with Doug Chiang at Ice Blink Studios.

If you look through his work in the various arenas, you can see the skills of character and costume design, the ability to design and render environments and the language of of visual storytelling that cross over into the seemingly separate disciplines of film design, storyboarding, game design and comic book art.

One of the things that art does at its best is to let us see the familiar as new and the ordinary as extraordinary. This is why I often like simple scenes of everyday things painted well enough to open your eyes to them. I also tend to like work that is immediate and “painterly”, in which you can see the artist’s hand in the form of visible brushstrokes.

When I did my post on “Painting a Day” blogs, I found that the conditions of painting a small painting each day make an immediate, painterly approach and the depiction of convenient everyday objects almost a prerequisite. As a result I discovered several painters at the time whose work I like for just those reasons; and I continue to find that true as I discover new artists for my follow up post on “Painting a Day” blogs, part 2 (coming fairly soon, I think).

As much as I like all of the painters I included in the first post, (in addition to the remarkable Duane Keiser, who started the practice), I found one new painter in particular whose paintings I enjoy very much.

Karin Jurick’s work exemplifies all of those things that I find so appealing in those small, quickly done paintings. Her paintings are bright, fresh, colorful, painterly, direct, and full of the textures and light of everyday life. When I went from her “Painting a Day” blog to the galleries on her regular web site, I was delighted to find the she carries those traits over into her more fully realized work .

Her daily painting subjects are generally small objects - flowers, jars, cheeses, fruit or other items found in the kitchen or studio. It would be easy for an arist to treat quick paintings of these humble objects as a simple study, but Jurick’s confident approach turns them into a statement.

One of the nice things about her Painting a Day blog posts is they are usually accompanied by a small bit of writing. She often gives her comments on the piece, why she chose the subject or made certain color choices; or just gives her observations about life in general, which, like her paintings, are direct, to the point and often charming.

Although I think she works from life for some of the smaller subjects that she can find or place in her studio, most of her larger compositions are painted from photographs that she composes on location, and works from later in her studio.

While there are occasional paintings that have a “from a photograph” look, most transcend it because of Jurick’s approach to simplifying he composition, abstracting the shapes, “pushing” the color and handling the paint. In many cases the only way you can tell she is referencing a photograph is from the subject matter, which is often of subjects that would be obviously difficult to paint on location - street scenes viewed from the middle of the street, airport waiting lounges, restaurant interiors, and a series I particularly like of gallery interiors.

She has a number of wonderful paintings of patrons of museums and art galleries interacting with and reacting to art on the walls. In these she not only captures the flavor of these spaces that are so familiar to many of us, but often gives her interpretation of the work being viewed in the course of portraying her subject interacting with it.

Jurick’s blog starts here, but her adoption of the practice of a painting a day starts here. The current page has only names and links no preview images, but once you click into an image they are conveniently linked by “Previous” and “Next” navigation. There is also a nice thumbnail gallery of the Painting a Day paintings (don’t miss page 2).

Her main web site has a “Still Wet” section of her most recent work as well as more extensive galleries of “Past Paintings“. In addition to selling her work directly through eBay, she is represented by galleries in Atlanta and San Francisco. There is also a selection of older work on an archive of her previous web site.

There are many things to be said for the practice of doing a small painting every day, not the least of which is the clarity and brevity of expression exemplified by Karin Jurick’s “of the moment” paintings.

Architecture is not only a fascinating art in itself, it’s a wonderful subject for other visual arts. In particular the architectural structure of cities, with all of the rich detail of interlocking geometry, makes for fascinating subjects.

Lok Jansen is an architect and illustrator living in Tokyo. There is something about the amazing and unique three dimensional space and complex structures of Tokyo that has an impact on artists. Jansen’s response, as both an architect an illustrator, has been multi-fold. His site features photos, sketches, visual essays on architecture and illustrations.

The illustrations show a fascination with the city as complex architectural and sculptural forms, textured with mechanical structures like bark on a tree.

He writes: “The metropolis to me, is like an organism. Growing. The tech seems almost organic. Highways, train lines, fly-overs, aircons, ducts, wires - they’re so wild its almost like greenery.”

Jansen’s linear response to these forms brings to mind the drawings of manga artists and anime background artists who specialize in architectural rendering, as well as the memory drawings of Tokyo by Steven Wiltshire and the complex comic art backgrounds of Geof Darrow. All seem to respond to the intricate topography of Tokyo as an expression of line.

Jansen’s site also includes drawings and sketches of other subjects from direct observation or flights of imagination. There are images of his design work, often involving three dimensional spaces , a large scale mural of the history of Europe and a fascinating illustrated essay on the current and potential use of space in Tokyo called Tokyo Parasito.

I particularly enjoy Jansen’s drawings of what appear to be layers of buildings and streets abstracted into block-like forms floating in space.

http://lokjansen.com/

We think of drawing, naturally enough, as lines or shapes on paper. Similarly, we think of sculpture as forms in space, particularly solid forms. Rarely do we think of drawing as three dimensional or sculpture as lines.

When I was younger I was fascinated with drawing telephone wires and the transformers on the poles that they intersected with because they seemed to be lines drawn in the air, lines in three dimensions, which I just thought was unbelievably cool. Then I discovered Alexander Calder.

Calder drew with lines in space. His remarkable constructions of twisted wire, metal and wood redefined sculpture and are wonderful excursions into drawing with lines in three dimensional space. His wonderful objects loop, swirl, and bounce their way through the air with the freedom of a Miro drawing and carve up space into amazingly playful forms like Henry Moore at his best.

Most of us have followed in Calder’s footsteps as children when we construct mobiles in art classes. Calder essentially invented the concept of a “mobile”, a sculputural construction in which shapes, often of metal, are suspended in a balanced arrangement from wires, most often in a way that allows for motion. These kinetic sculptures are usually suspended from the ceiling of a room or other space.

Calder’s familiar hanging mobiles actually evolved from earlier versions, kinetic sculptures of similar construction that were meant to sit on a flat surface and whose shapes incorporated elements that acted as a base or footing. He later went on to investigate more traditional sculptures that exhibited the same feeling, but in the swooping intersections of static forms; which Jean Arp named “stabiles”.

One of the delights of my frequent visits to the Philadelphia Museum of Art is glancing up at the crazy cool Calder mobile called Ghost that hangs in all of its kinetic glory in the Great Stair Hall of the museum. Calder was born here in Philadelphia and the city has several fine examples of his work, including a large mobile and stabile on and near the Ben Franklin Parkway.

Calder sculpture in Philadelphia is a family tradition. If you ask people about a family of artists from the Delaware Valley with three generations of working artists, they will inevitably think of the Wyeths, most are unaware of the Calders.

Calder’s father, Stirling Calder was also a Philadelphia sculptor, and his grandfather, Alexander Milne Calder, created the giant sculpture of William Penn on the top of City Hall Tower that is one of the prime symbols of the city. A.M. Calder also created more than 250 other sculptures for the building (which some not-too-bright politicians wanted tear down and replace with a “modern” office building some years ago, but were fortunately voted down).

Unfortunately, plans to honor the grandson and inventor of the mobile, Alexander “Sandy” Calder, with a museum here have been abandoned.

The Calder Foundation administers much of his work and looks after his legacy. The site has some good resources even if the arrangement isn’t the best.

You can’t experience Calder from photographs, though. You have to inhabit the same room with one of his delightful kinetic marvels to really get a feeling for how they liven up the three dimensional space in which they exist. The Artcyclopedia page for Calder lists museums that have his work on display, try to see some in person.

Then, you may be tempted to take up your own bits of wire and metal and “mobilize” your creativity to capture some of that playful balance that was Alexander Calder’s genius.