John Gurche is a paleontological artist known for the near-photographic realism and compositional drama in his scientific reconstructions of prehistoric life.

Gurche was a consultant on Jurassic Park and provided paintings for the 1989 dinosaur stamps for the U.S. Postal Service. His illustrations have been in numerous books and have been featured in magazines like National Geographic and Natural History Magazine. His work is in the American Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian and the Field Museum, which houses the mural version of the t-rex image above, showing an interpretation of the famous t-rex find named “Sue” which is mounted at the Field.

His dinosaur images in particular showcase his ability to add realism to scenes of prehistoric life with his superb control of atmospheric effects and aerial perspective. He also has a knack for finding unusual positions and angles of view for his images.

Although his work covers many aspects of prehistoric life, his is most widely recognized by the general public for his dinosaur art, and is probably best known in the scientific community for his reconstructions of early humans and pre-human species.

He is currently involved in an 10 year ongoing project called “Lost Anatomies” for which he is illustrating many of the anatomical changes that have occurred to the human form over the course of our evolutionary history.

Olga Antonenko & Arseny Gutov are Russian concept artists, matte painters and illustrators who work in a variety of traditional and digital media. On their shared gallery site, CGpolis, you’ll find drawings, engravings, paintings, pastel, digital painting and 3-D CGI rendering and compositing.

The GCpolis site is somewhat enigmatic and mentions neither artist by name, so it’s a little difficult to sort out who did what. I think the majority of the 3-D CGI, some of the digital painting and most of the compositing is Gutov. He seems to specialize in that end of things although he does do nice digital painting as seen in this portrait of his sister, painted in Corel Painter, and this digital portrait painting tutorial on the CG Society site.

I get the impression that much of the traditional media work in the artworks section of the CGpolis site is Antonenko’s.

The concept art in the cartoons section (I’m guessing Antonenko, but I don’t know) is a grab bag of iridescent candy color that somehow works wonderfully well. Like the concept art it uses really fun contrasts of brilliant color and tone to create moods. I would love to know more about what these projects are.

There is, unfortunately, no information on technique on the CGpolis site and no background on the two artists or their clients. The concept section lists work from nurium games (image above – Antonenko’s?) and Sibilant Interactive.

Their is a brief interview with Gutov on 3DExcellence.com and a slightly longer interview with both artists on 3DValley.com.

invisibleman is a collaborative art blog where you’ll find a variety of art: drawings, paintings, sketches, cartoons, graphic design, illustrations and photographs, in a variety of media: pen, pencil, oil, watercolor, acrylic, print and digital, on a variety of surfaces: Moleskine pages, paper, canvas, posters, billboards, guitars and who knows what else, by a group of artists (image above, top row): Paul Antonson, James Antonson, Kurt Dietrich, (bottom row) Barbara Zuckerman, Kerry O’Neill and Jon Keegan.

There are links on the left to their individual sites in addition to the archives of their work on the invisibleman blog.

Note the wonderfully subtle Flash animation at the top of the page.

Along with Gustav Caillebotte Alfred Sisley is one of my two favorite “ignored” Impressionists.

Sisley is usually lost in the glare surrounding Monet, the “star” of Impressionism, particularly since Sisley’s work at its most “Impressionistic” resembles a slightly anemic version of Monet’s prismatic marvels.

Often referred to as “the English Impressionist” Sisley was actually born in Paris of English parents. He became friends with Monet, Renoir and Bazille as a student in the atelier of Marc-Charles-Gabriel Gleyre. With them, Sisley was one of the founding members of the Impressionist movement and is sometimes referred to as a “typical” impressionist.

This attitude, along with a lack of substantial biographical information and the overwhelming presence of Monet and other Impressionist painters with more distinctive styles, has long pushed Sisley into the background.

What I find most appealing about Sisley, however, can be found in his paintings that live somewhere on the realist side of full-blown Impressionist technique, painted honestly and directly with more of an eye to the color and light of the scene than to the abstract notions of purity of color and optical mixing of hues. The result is a fresh, painterly approach in which the feeling of light and color are more important than technique.

His palette is also likely to be more subdued than Monet at his most explosive, preferring a more naturalistic harmony of color. Although very influenced by his Impressionist compatriots, Sisley considered himself a student of Corot and also showed the influence of Courbet and even Constable.

He was fascintated with the effects of light and shadow and the process of capturing them by plein air painting. Sisley, even more than the other Impressionists, was a painter of water. His canvasses were often divided into horizontal bands of sky, land and water, as in the examples above.

I have occasionally seen his work referred to as “cold” or “reserved” but I’ve never felt that. I’ve always thought of his paintings of the French countryside and, in particular, the River Seine, the Thames in London and other streams, as quiet and contemplative, without the splashy drama of Monet or Renoir.

Compared to the more prominent Impressionists, there are few books available on Sisley, representative of the general tendency to ignore him on the way to cashing in on the most popular names. This catalog from a 1992 retrospective is out of print, but nice if you can find a copy. Richard Shone’s scholarly study, Sisley, is probably the most widely available book, and has nice reproductions as well. If you’re lucky, you might find Janice Anderson’s little hardback Life and Works of Sisley on a chain store discount shelf for $3.

The good news is that seeing a real Sisley in person is relatively easy. His paintings can be found in collections and Museums throughout the US and Europe. There is a listing to start with on the Artcyclopedia site. I’m delighted to say there are at least 6 here in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (although only 2 or 3 are likely to be on display at any one time).

The tendency to ignore Sisley when thinking of Impressionist painting is sad, particularly as a parallel to the difficulties he faced later in his life and career. To me he is a hidden gem, a treasure waiting to be discovered and enjoyed.

Spend some quiet time with Sisley’s subtle masterpieces and you may agree.

In a joint exhibition at the Newark Museum in Newark, New Jersey and the Jewish Museum in New York City, Masters of American Comics will present almost 600 works by some of the greats of the comics art form.

The images shown here are not necessarily in the exhibit, I’ve just pulled them out as examples.

The Newark Museum will play host to artists who worked in the medium of newspaper comics from the “golden age” of the early 20th Century to to the middle of the century:

Winsor McCay, creator of the astonishing Nittle Nemo in Slumberland,

Lyonel Feininger, a painter who “dabbled” in comics for a year in 1906-07, bringing his modernist sensibilities to comic art in the pages of the Chicago Tribune,

George Herriman, whose innovative, adventurous and startlingly original work of genius, Krazy Kat, was never wildly popular but was tremendously influential on other artists (in comics and other areas) and is dearly loved by those who are devoted to it (myself included),

E.C. Segar, creator of Thimble Theatre, whose chief character became Popeye, and was a much more powerful and sophisticated strip than the TV cartoons would ever let you believe,

Frank King, creator of Gasoline Alley, an innovative and involving strip with characters that grew, changed, grew old and died over the course of the years in defiance of all “continuing story” conventions,

Chester Gould, creator of of Dick Tracy, iron-jawed, tough as nails detective with the roster of demented villains and science fictiony gadgets that would lay the groundwork for Bob Kane’s Batman,

Milton Caniff, master of pen and ink chiaroscuro and creator of the great adventure strips Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon

and Charles M. Schultz, whose Peanuts was one of the most popular and beloved comics ever.

The Jewish Museum will showcase comics from the middle of the century to the present, with an emphasis on comic book artists:

Will Eisner, creator of The Spirit and one of the medium’s most brilliant and influential creators and a sort of guiding beacon for those who try to create superbly crafted comics even to this day,

Jack Kirby, who essentially invented most of visual language and conventions of modern super-hero comics, co-created The Fantastic Four, The Hulk and many of the popular characters that Stan Lee takes too much credit for and was more imaginative than any roomful of current superhero artists put together,

Harvey Kurtzman, the brilliant, irreverent comic genius behind the original Mad comics, working with the great Wally Wood, Jack Davis and Will Elder, who he also collaborated with on the underrated Little Annie Fanny in Playboy,

Robert Crumb, who Zapped us all with the instigation of underground comix in the 60′s, the influence of which still ripples through every maverick, underground, self-published and independent comic as well as resonating in the spirit of the more adventurous web comics,

Gary Panter, creator of punk sensibility comics for Raw and Slash,

and Chris Ware, who combines comics, design and fanatical attention to detail in books that are crafted as works beyond the mere printed material on the pages.

Together, this is a tour-de-force of comic art, a history of the development of the art form and an eye-opening adventure into what comics are, have been and can be. It should just be an absolute blast to spend a day energizing your eyeballs with all of this great comic art.

The exhibit was created and originally presented in a joint exhibition by the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. West coast readers hopefully saw the listings I had in the “Exhibitions” section of the lines and colors sidebar for several months earlier this year.

It’s our turn now on the east coast. The joint exhibition in New York and New Jersey runs from September 15, 2006 to January 28, 2007. The Jewish Museum is concurrently running another exhibit, Superheroes: Good and Evil in American Comics.

There is an excellent article on Art Knowledge News from which I borrowed he listing order of the artist names and gleaned some of the exhibit information.

Running down this list makes me feel like a slacker because of my unfinished posts on Herriman, Segar, Caniff, Eisner, Kirby, and Crumb, but I’ll get them finished and posted eventually.

I’m always fascinated to watch to watch artists develop, particularly if their style changes or evolves over time.

Carl Critchlow is UK comics artist and illustrator who has a painting style that has that kind of grungy, textured look preferred by many who like science fiction and fantasy art that leans toward the grotesque and violent, as exemplified in comics by artists like Simon Bisley.

Critchlow’s nicely horrific painting style is well suited to his illustrations of dragons and monsters for Magic The Gathering cards and a number of appropriately grotesque comic book covers he’s done for companies in the UK and the US.

Given that, you would think that a similar highly-rendered style full of textural details would be a predictable choice for his UK comic book interior art for titles like Nemsis and Judge Dredd, In the 2000 AD tradition of gritty, gruesome and gratuitously violent comic art.

Instead, Critchlow’s approach has evolved in his recent comic book work to an almost linge claire style, more like the French bandes desinnées artists that the typical 2000AD crosshatch-fest.

This approach, along with nicely graphic color, works very well, both for his science fiction approach to Judge Dredd (images at left, middle) and his own wonderfully over-the-top Thrud the Barbarian (left, bottom). Interesting also, is the use of limited line weights in his comic drawings, which adds to the open, graphic feel of the work, and the addition of bits of texture, more as accents than an overwhelming character of the art.

The galleries on Cricthlow’s site show several aspects of his work, including sketches and other stuff, but it’s the recent comic art and Thrud the Barbarian pages that I find most appealing.

Bill Mather loves to draw and paint women. If that wasn’t obvious enough from the galleries on his site, he’s named his blog Painter of Women.

I wrote about Mather in September of last year. Since then he has added to his online galleries and started a blog. The blog isn’t frequently updated, so you’ll find more artwork on the main site.

Mather’s site has several online galleries, largely consisting of lively portrait drawings, paintings and painted studies of women in various media: chalk, conté crayon, vine charcoal, pencil, acrylic, gouache and oil. Many of the thumbnail images have additional links below them to detail images in which you can see the surface of the drawing or painting in enough detail to see how the media were applied.

The work he features most prominently, and is more recent, is actually not the work I find most appealing. In the newer work he surrounds his figures and faces with swirls and splashes of texture and wild scrawls of colored line. While it makes for interesting compositions, I find I prefer his work when he approaches his subjects more directly, with just a bit of the graphic enthusiasm popping in around the edges. These images have a great balance of solid draftsmanship, confident application of materials and fun graphic experimentation.

The nice variety of his approach and the freedom of his linework make all of the galleries worth investigating. There are also drawing class figure studies and, if you look hard enough, a section of landscapes.

Oddly enough, what you won’t find on the main site, or on the blog, is a mention of the fact that Mather is a high-end concept artist by profession and has done matte painting and design work for films like War of the Worlds, the Star Wars Trilogy, Forest Gump, Jumanji and The Polar Express. He received an Academy Award nomination in 1993 for his work on Batman Returns.

As a concept artist, Mather is affiliated with Doug Chiang’s Ice Blink Studios, members of which have been the subject of several posts on lines and colors.

Mather also teaches figure drawing at the Academy of Art College in San Francisco.

Addendum: I neglected to mention that Mather has published two collections of his drawings and paintngs, DRAWN TO BEAUTY: Collected Sketches by Bill Mather Vol 1 and DRAWN TO BEAUTY: Collected Sketches by Bill Mather Vol 2. The links are to the excellent Bud Plant online store.

I came across Rhonda Nass on a site dedicated to botanical illustration and was struck by the textural qualities and dimensionality of her plant paintings.

There isn’t any information about technique on her site, but I assume from the look of her paintings that she works from photographs in the studio, even utilizing the out of focus background effect often found in photographs to control your eye in the composition of her paintings.

She uses detail and texture to bring her subjects into high relief, giving them a tactile quality, and also emphasizes the play of light across their surfaces.

Her site includes examples of her commercial work, stock images and available originals. In addition to her botanical illustrations there are paintings of birds and objects like gloves and jackets.

Nass is married to illustrator Rick Nass, and the web site divided on the home page between her work with his highly rendered cartoon style images.