Ashley Cecil is a Kentucky based artist who mixes paintings of still life and landscape subjects with those of rallies, demonstrations, meetings and urban scenes as well as subjects encountered in trips to South America (image at left, bottom).

She posts work to her painting blog, which she calls The Painting Journalist, and donates a percentage of the sale to non-profit organizations, often with a thought to matching the theme of the painting with the mission of the non-profit.

She supports organizations like Habitat for Humanity, the Bowery Mission, Democracy Matters, Witness for Peace, and Kentucky Youth Advocates.

A watercolor of a neglected dog in an animal shelter (image at left, top), whose leg had to be amputated because of an injury, not only sent $10 of the painting’s $70 sale price to the shelter, the blog post resulted in the successful adoption of the dog. Cecil’s blog features a time-lapse movie of that painting in progress, as well as others.

Unfortunately the “About” link on the blog just returns you to the main page and the “Gallery” page is not that helpful either. There is, however, a page of “Paintings for Sale” and a Sold Paintings page that have more variety and list the non-profit and amount of donation which is assigned from each painting.

Illustrator Jeff Miracola has subtitled his web site “Here there be monsters!”, and his Paintings gallery is chock full of them — grinning, leering and gnashing their lovely monster teeth amid assorted bad guys and other nasties. Miracola has done a good bit for work with Wizards of the Coast for their collectable card game Magic: The Gathering, which is always a fertile ground for monsters.

Miracola has also done illustration and occasionally conceptual toy design for companies like Warner Brothers, Jamdat Mobile/Electronic Arts, Upper Deck, Hasbro, White Wolf and others. His work has been featured in a number of books and collections, including several of the Spectrum collections of contemporary fantastic art.

In addition to the Paintings gallery, his site has a gallery of his Sketches, but what I find particularly fascinating is his forays into Digital Art, in which he is playing with iconic, almost primitive, decoration, particularly when applied to faces, often seen in a symmetrical head-on view like a mask, combined with modern gradient rendering techniques.

There is also a gallery, with additional comments, on the CGSociety site. His work has also been featured in in ImagineFX Magazine and is included in the February 2007 issue of Advanced Photoshop Magazine.

I will persist in my assertion that the early masters of oil painting were the special effects wizards of their day, astonishing those who viewed their works with the rich colors, brilliant luminosity and uncanny level of detail made possible by the new medium.

Not that there aren’t wondrously beautiful works done in tempera (Botticelli leaps to mind), but oil painting was a different painting technology, and allowed effects that were previously impossible.

Antonello da Messina, (which simply means Antonello of Messina, the town in Sicily where he was born, his family name was Antonello di Giovanni d’Antonio), was painter of the Italian Renaissance who combined the fanatical detail of the Flemish masters of oil painting (see my post an Jan van Eyck) with the openness and simplicity of the Italian painters.

His paintings often exhibit a remarkable sense of space, whether in the open, spacious skies behind his many unique visions of the crucifixion, or in voluminous architectural spaces, as in the amazing St. Jerome in his Study (above), in which Antonello plays with our sense of space and pulls us into his invented world.

(View the image larger by clicking on the preview image on this page on the Web Gallery of Art, and then clicking on “100%” at the top of the viewer window, or view the same image here, from this post on the French blog, La Boîte à Images which prompted me to do this post. There is also a highly zoomable, but watermarked, image on the site of the National Gallery in London, where the painting resides.)

Antonello invites us to step through a trompe l’oiel doorway, its reality emphasized by the tactile details in the way he represents the texture of stone, and reinforced by the carefully rendered birds and brass bowl in the foreground.

Once inside, our eye can wander through the fascinatingly divided space, through passages of dark and light, over the minute details of the objects arrayed on the shelves and platform on which St. Jerome sits at his study. We can gaze at the underside of the dimly lit curves of stone arches, and let our eyes pass across the intricate patterns of the tiles floors, through arches, doorways and colonnade and finally out through windows at the far side of the building, to the broad sky and distant hills of the landscape beyond.

What a remarkable journey Antonello has taken us on in the space of an 18 x 14 inch (46 x 36 cm) wood panel.

As I said, a master of special effects.

Ito Shinsui was a Japanese printmaker who, like his contemporaries Hiroshi Yoshida and Kawase Hasui, was part of the Shin Hanga movement in the early 20th Century. (In writing these artist’s names, I’m using the Western convention of putting the given name first.)

Shin Hanga was essentially a revival of the art of Ukiyo-e woodblock prints from the previous century (see my post on Hokusai), often combined with influences from Western art. Interestingly, one of the major European influences on the Shin Hanga artists was that of the French Impressionists, who, in turn, had been dramatically influenced but the brilliant colors and subtle compositions of Ukiyo-e prints.

Unlike Yoshida and Hausi, who, in keeping with the majority of the Shin Hanga artists, concentrated on landscape and scenes of life in towns and cities, Shinsui focused on the depiction of people, in particular beautiful young women.

His elegant compositions, in which the negative space is as vital as the primary shapes, are often 3/4 length figures with minimal space around them in the the frame. His beautifully dressed subjects, their decorative robes flowing about them in graceful waves, are frequently engaged in the application of makeup or preparation for the bath, and are warm with an understated eroticism. His forms are delicately modeled, with fine lines delineating areas enlivened with rich but subtle color.

You can see some of the influence of European art in certain prints (in his later years, you can even see the influence of cubism), and the strong traditions of Ukiyo-e in others. Though his depictions of women are his most notable subjects, Shinsui also created beautiful, brilliantly colored landscapes, which are not to be missed. He was at one point awarded the status of “intangible living treasure” by the Japanese government.

Even within the illustration community, which is itself often dissed by the fine arts world, medical illustration, like botanical illustration and architectural rendering, just doesn’t get the respect it deserves.

Good medical illustration, to my eye, can be as exciting and visually fascinating as the most far out science fiction illustration or movie concept art and as bizarre and intriguing as the wildest surrealist imaginings. The striking thing about medical illustration when viewed in this light is to remember that it is essentially realism. It is realistic depictions of things that in many cases can’t be viewed with the unaided eye, but a form of realism nonetheless.

I’ve found medical illustration to be a vastly underappreciated branch of illustration, but I’ve always liked it. (I’ve even done a bit myself, in a way, in the form of the illustrations and Flash animation for The Interactive Body feature in the Gift of a Lifetime web documentary.)

Edmond Alexander and Cynthia Turner, who share a studio under the name of Alexander & Turner, have been notable names in the medical illustration field for over 20 years.

Alexander seems to specialize in envisioning biological processes at the cellular, and sometimes molecular, level (image above, left). He utilizes intense color relationships and dynamic contrasts of value to make the processes snap into clear relief in a way photomicrography can’t. The result can be dramatic compositions filled with fascinating forms, often intertwining in dramatic relationships.

Cynthia Turner works more often at the macroscopic level, portraying organs or other parts of the human body that need to be diagramatically sectioned or otherwise have elements accentuated, again in the service of making things clear and dramatic that would be difficult, if not impossible, with photography. Turner tends to work in a way that feels more traditionally illustrative, and I’m particularly fond of the illustrations in which she brings part of the painting or drawing to a high degree of finish and leaves other parts to blend out into the recognizable lines of the initial sketch (image above, right).

The Alexander and Turner site has short bios of each artist and a gallery of their work. Unfortunately, like many artists who have posted their images on the web, and particularly those in the field of medical illustration, Alexander and Turner have felt compelled to mar their larger images with watermarking, in the vain hope that it will somehow protect them from being swiped.

At the risk of being repetitive, I feel I have to point out again to artists on the web in general, that this will only protect images from the laziest of image swipers. If your work is in print, anyone with a $50 scanner can produce higher resolution files of your images that you will ever post on the web.

I tend not to feature artists on lines and colors whose web based work is watermarked, but I found some unblemished examples of Alexander and Turner’s paintings on the Medical Illustration Source Book site for you to enjoy.

When approaching medical illustrations as artworks, particularly those of microscopic terrains, try thinking of them as abstract at first, then let them resolve into realism. In the case of Turner’s work, look first at the drawings around the edges, in those images where where she has left them as part of the composition, and then move to the more rendered forms.

Shaun Tan is an Australian artist who creates and illustrates “picture books“, which in his case usually means wonderfully bizarre and imaginative flights of fancy that look, at least at first, like somewhat dark children’s fantasy, but are often aimed at both younger and older readers.

He sometimes works with a writer, as in the award winning The Rabbits (image at left, bottom), written by John Marsden, and sometimes writes the stories himself, as in The Lost Thing (image at left, top), which is also a theatre production and in development as a short animated film (more information here).

Tan starts his paintings with thin layers of acrylic over white lines on a dark background, working from dark to light and continuing with oil for the final rendering. He also works in other media, including sctatchboard, pen and ink , pastel crayons, gouache and watercolor, collage, assemblage and digital media.

You can see the multi-media and assemblage techniques in many of his illustrations which employ a stratified and multi-planed approach, with areas broken into smaller images within a larger whole, unified by textures and patterns playing across their surface.

Tan also mixes design elements with more painterly areas, and also works in a more straightforward painterly approach at times, creating a fascinatingly varied array of work.

Tan’s books have been translated into multiple languages and have received book awards in several countries. Tan is also involved in other interesting projects, including murals, theatre productions and a children’s “Art Trail”.

Some of his books, like The Red Tree (image at left, middle), feature experimental narratives, or absence thereof, leaving the reader to wander amid the images and form their own narrative, almost like a Surrealist collage-novel.

Link and suggestion courtesy of Jesper Svedberg

[Note: we seem to have run poor Shaun's site past his (apparently not very generous) bandwidth allotment. I'm not sure how long that will last, perhaps the rest of the month. My apologies to Shaun (and I suggest he look for a more reasonable web host). In the meanwhile, I've found some Shaun Tan images on the French site La Boîte à Images.]

Adam Rex is an illustrator living here in Philadelphia who does fantasy themed and children’s book illustration for clients like Harcourt, Penguin, Knopf and a number of periodicals. Rex received the the Jack Gaugan Award for Best Emerging Artist, named for the noted Science Fiction artist, in 2005. He has also done a number of imaginative illustrations for Wizards of the Coast’s Magic: The Gathering collectable card game.

He often employs brusque textures and mottled patches of color to give his images a rough-hewn appearance. Edges are deliberately left ragged and thin layers of color are scumbled against background colors. At other times, when the subject calls for it, the finish is more refined, though never to the point of being without some suggestion of texture.

His fantasy genre paintings frequently feature complex compositions with intricate backgrounds and multiple figures, and often carry a suggestion of Renaissance settings as in “Novice Griffin Rider” (above).

The galleries on his site feature examples of his work sorted by genre, Kids, Bigger kids, Teen/Adult and Fantasy. There are additional illustrations on the page that lists some of the books he has illustrated. (You can also find many of them with an Amazon search.)

Rex works mostly in oils, often over acrylic and opaque ink backgrounds; but he occasionally uses gouache, brush and ink, scratchboard, even Sculpey modeling, and a few digital touches, as in his bestselling children’s book, Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich (which is actually titled Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich and Other Stories You’re Sure to Like, Because They’re All About Monsters and Some of Them are Also About Food. You like Food Don’t You? Well, All Right Then).

His work for children’s books, including Tree Ring Circus, another for which he is the author a well as illustrator, carry forward that feeling of rough edges and also seem to have a hint of strangeness, as if to say that life has rough edges and we should revel in it rather than denying it with glossy fantasy.

When I first saw Thomas Paquette’s small gouache paintings on the web a couple of years ago, my initial thought was that I wanted to see them bigger. I didn’t realize at the time that I was looking at them almost life size.

His gouache paintings (image above, bottom row) tend to be quite small, in the range of 2×3 inches (5×8cm), even smaller than the postcard size paintings that are becoming more common with the advent of the “painting a day” phenomenon. Even so they feel remarkably rich and detailed; not in the sort of forced or artificial detail sometimes found in miniatures, but more like sketchbook paintings that have been fully realized. The size and shape of them, once I knew how small they were, seemed oddly familiar. I eventually realized that they are of similar size and proportion to many small etchings I’ve seen.

The etching comparison is an interesting one, in that Paquette’s paintings deal with line, but in an oblique way. He doesn’t actually use drawn line in the paintings, as many artists will do, but his areas of color are often discreet and sharply defined, sometimes with a dark edge that forms a line against another color.

That characteristic of highly defined edges of color, which may be a natural extension of the flat color areas for for which gouache is noted, has been carried over and developed in Paquette’s larger works in oil (image above, top). The result is a painting style that has some of the intensity and rich color of impressionist technique, blended with the visual charm of the line and color combinations of Japanese woodblock prints or certain styles of illustration.

I missed my chance to see Paquette’s work in person the last time he had a solo show here in Philadelphia, so I was glad I caught the recent American Arcadia group show at the Gross McCleaf Gallery (also featured in the current issue of American Art Collector).

This show didn’t feature any of his small gouache paintings, but I had the chance to see several of his oils, large and small. It may just be because I had so recently been to see the Daniel Garber show at the Academy, but I couldn’t help but see a comparison, particularly in the surface of the paint. Close up the texture and appearance of the paint on the canvas, in both Paquette’s and Garber’s work, reminds me of the rough mounds of oil paint, rich with the physical sensation of paint as a three dimensional substance, found in some modernist work.

Paquette’s oils are often broken up into a sort of latticework, composed of paint edges and the lines of the natural forms he is painting, tree limbs, the dark spaces between rocks, or rough seams in serrated bark. He seems to find suggestions of line everywhere, even though he rarely uses line in an overt way. Frequently, the effect is the result of an under-painting, often in a complementary color, the edges of which are allowed to show; another area in which I couldn’t help but make the comparison to Garber.

Paquette’s web site has examples of his oils, large and small, and his small gouache gems. A beautiful small book has been published, Thomas Paquette: Gouaches, in which the images are printed very close to the size of the original paintings.

Those in the Philadelphia area may be able to catch the last couple of days of the American Arcadia show at the Gross McCleaf, which ends tomorrow. Beyond that, the Gross McCleaf is one of the galleries that represents Paquette on an ongoing basis; there in a selection of his works on their site.

Paquette lives in upstate Pennsylvania, which is the location for the majority of his recent work. In addition to shows, he is also represented by galleries in Maine and Colorado.

As the Golden Age of Illustration waned in the middle of the 20th Century, and color photography became the dominant force in magazines and newspapers, illustration itself, along with the rest of the art world, went through some major shifts.

One of the pioneers of this changing landscape was Al Parker, an American illustrator and painter who got his break with a contest-winning illustration for a cover of House Beautiful. Parker would go on to make a career of creating dynamic, ground-breaking and precedent setting illustrations for magazines like Collier’s, Ladies Home Journal, Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, McCalls, The Saturday Evening Post, Sports Illustrated, and Vogue.

Parker started out of the traditions of the Golden Age illustrators, but was soon moving into modern, and modernist, territory. Rendered forms gave way to more and more stylized abstractions of shapes. Flat areas of color replaced modeling and design came to the fore. Negative shapes, the areas in an image around and between objects, became prominent.

Parker became extremely popular and in demand. With packs of lesser illustrators nipping at his heels with imitations of his popular style, Parker kept changing his style, pushing into new territory and in the process defining mid-century modern illustration to a great degree. He once created every illustration for an entire issue of Cosmopolitan using different styles, and pen names, for each illustration. He was also influential on the generation of women who comprised a large part of his audience, making it a point to array his models in the latest fashions and helping to make those fashions part of the culture of the time.

I was surprised that I didn’t find more of Parker’s art readily available on the web, considering how influential he was on a generation of artists (he was also one of the founding members of the Famous Artists School), but I did find a few gems.

Paul Giambarba has come through, as always, with excellent illustrated posts about Parker on his terrific blog, 100 Years of Illustration and Design, with: Al Parker’s ads for American Airlines and Even more Great Al Parker Illos, and Leif Peng of Today’s Inspiration has an article about a illustrator Will Davis who had A Visit with Al Parker, and he has also posted a great Al Parker Flickr set and also has a page devoted to Al Parker on his site.

Addendum: The curator at the Norman Rockwell Museum was kind enough to leave a comment on this post to let us know that the museum will be holding a major exhibition of Al Parker’s work, “Ephemeral Beauty: Al Parker and the American Women’s Magazine 1940-1960” from June 9 to October 27, 2007.

Tommy Lee Edwards is an illustrator, comics artist and visual development artist who employs a delightful mixture of styles and approaches in the service of his wide mix of projects. His clients include gaming companies, the major comics houses, book publishers and film industry giants like Dreamworks and Lucasfilm in addition to commercial entities like Coca-cola and Hasbro.

His variety of stylistic approaches employs an amalgam of techniques that usually just calls “mixed media”, which I assume is at times a mixture of ink, charcoal, paint and digital media.

His work features a bright, engaging handling of color and textures, peppered with highlights, spots of accented color, scratchboard-like textures, and playful contrasts between elements that are in and out of focus. His figures and organic shapes have a strong geometry to them; folds on a coat can become a dramatic zig-zag of highlight color, edges are accentuated and areas of color snap against one another in strong relief.

At times he’ll abandon traditional rendering for pop-art like exaggerated lines and flat colors, overlayed with rough scratches and electric highlights. There is a wonderfully casual feeling to much of his work, obviously underpinned with solid draftsmanship and an apparent knowledge of the history of illustration. He’ll use Leyendecker-like strokes of color across faces and clothing or Cornwell style heavy outlines filled with rendered color, and there are echoes of Al Parker’s flat colors and dynamic shapes, particularly in his comics work.

If you browse through the galleries on Edward’s site, you’ll find an engaging mix of images from various projects — style guides (licensing and promotional art) for major movies like Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Superman Returns and Batman Begins, illustrations for books and magazines, visual development art and comic book pages, notably from his collaboration with Rick Veitch on The Question.

Click on the main image for enlargements. Unfortunately, many of the larger images are marred by watermarking, but they’re not so seriously obliterated that you can’t at least get a feeling for what they actually look like. Navigation through the galleries is a bit awkward, you have to click through bars of thumbnails, that for some reason are obscured until you roll over them, to find an image; and there’s no indication of how many images are in a given section or any way to jump forward or backward quickly if you’re trying to get to a specific image or lose your place. In spite of these glitches, the site is well worth exploring; Edward’s images are consistently worth looking through. He always manages to keep his subjects fresh and lively and I was often delighted to find some new facet of his work with which I wasn’t familiar.

Edwards has a couple of online comics, one on the WhatIsTheMatrix site: The Matrix An Easy One, and one on his own site, Teddy Grant Soldier of Fortune, which is very much in the mold of Milton Caniff’s terrific Terry and the Pirates (right down to the title graphic, which is an obvious nod to Terry). Edwards splits the traditional comics narrative here, placing text in a scrolling box to the left and wordless images in a frame to the right. In spite of this, the narrative works well enough, and the drawings are terrific at capturing Caniff’s film-noir chiaroscuro combined with the energetic zing of modern concept art.

(Images above, left, from the top: Wolverine comics cover, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone Style Guide, The Question, Teddy Grant Soldier of Fortune.)

There is a new collection of Edward’s work The Art of Tommy Lee Edwards, an Amazon search will also produce several other books in which his art is prominent.