For many years I have been going, on and off, to open figure drawing and painting sessions here in Phliadelphia at either the Philadelphia Sketch Club or the Plastic Club, two of the country’s oldest arts organizations.

These are not classes, per se, with a set course of instruction, but simply sessions where artists jointly pay a model fee and are free to pursue figure drawing or painting in the medium of their choice. The sessions consist of a series of long and short poses, usually over three hours or so; and there is no requirement to sign up for a formal class. You can attend when it’s convenient. Hopefully, you have access to similar sessions in your area (they are sometimes part of the continuing education offerings of art schools).

There is a somewhat similar artist organization, or club, in New York called the Painting Group. It’s a little different from most in that it has a closed membership and is led by the renowned caricaturist and watercolorist David Levine, and the highly regarded portrait painter Aaron Shikler, who counts among his portraits the official portraits of John F. Kennedy Jackie Kennedy and Nancy Regan. They have been meeting regularly as a painting group for over 40 years.

Last October Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor sat for the group in a unique full-day portrait session, resulting in a fascinating situation in which 25 artists painted her portrait at the same time. You may have seen mention of it on the CBS Sunday Morning magazine show a few weeks ago.

The resulting works are being presented in an exhibit at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. through October 8. 2007. (See my previous post about the National Portrait Gallery.)

There is a slideshow online on the NPG site of seven of the portraits and a couple of photos of the session.

My thanks to Daniel van Benthuysen for the link and additional information

I finally got to see Meet the Robinsons, Disney’s 3-D, 3-D CGI animated feature. (How are we going to phrase that?)

I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised and liked it much more than I anticipated. Part of that is due to the design work, adapted from concept drawings by William Joyce, who wrote and illustrated the children’s book A Day with Wilbur Robinson, on which the film was based.

Joyce is also the author/illustrator of several wonderfully idiosyncratic children’s books, including Rolie Polie Olie and George Shrinks both of which have been adapted for television animation, Bently & Egg, Santa Calls, and the terrific Dinosaur Bob and His Adventures with the Family Lizardo (interior image here).

The production design on the film owes a lot to concept art by art directors Robh Ruppel (who I profiled last October) and David Goetz. Ruppel has finally begun posting some of the production art on his blog, The Broadview Blog. I found some other production art for the film scattered about on the Unofficial Disney Animation Archive and CanMag. There is a small book of The Art of Meet the Robinsons; and you can also see some early production art for the MtR game on San Neilson’s Tasty Art blog.

As much as I like the wonderful 1930’s retro-future, art deco meets the Jetsons by way of Flash Gordon look of the film, I can’t help but think how much better it might have been if the production team had been able to cleave even closer to Joyce’s charmingly quirky production drawings. Word is that the Disney execs wanted to change the title to “Get Lewis”, so you can imagine that they were pressing the production artists to make the design less original and more like other successful CGI features. A lot of Joyce’s originality comes through, but once you apply that standard CGI sheen over everything, it loses some of the visual charm it might have had if it were, dare I say it, a traditional drawn animation.

Joyce is no stranger to concept design for films, having worked on Toy Story and A Bug’s Life as a character designer and Robots as a producer and production designer. There are a few of his wonderfully quirky concept drawings in the beautiful, but unfortunately out of print, oversize book Toy Story: The Art and Making of the Animated Film. (Search alibris. There is also a miniature edition of this title, I don’t know how much of the original it contains.)

Joyce’s site has some of his original concept drawings for Meet the Robinsons, (above) along with some renderings from the final movie (inset) that you can compare. Unfortunately, I haven’t found any kind of gallery of his illustrations or concept art for other films, but I may not have dug hard enough. There is, however, a book called The World of William Joyce Scrapbook, that includes some of his illustrations in the working stages, as well anecdotes about his childhood, sketches and photos.

There is an info page about Joyce on the Harper Children’s site, along with a page about the books themselves. There are some short video interviews with Joyce on the Reading Rockets site.

It’s remarkable how much of our picture of history is formed by generalized impressions. There is an impression, for example, that Claude Monet was the central figure around which the revolutionary painting style of French Impressionism formed; as it crystalized out of the incisive directness of Camille Corot and the pioneering Realism of Gustav Courbet and the Barbizon school amid the social turmoil engendered by Napoleon III’s military campaigns and the rebuilding of Paris.

The assumption seems to be that Monet was the “father of Impressionism”, when, in fact, it was Camille Pissaro who was actually called “Père Impressionism” by his colleagues (particularly Cezanne and Gaughan, to whom he was a mentor and father figure), and who was as instrumental in the creation of Impressionist technique and theory as Monet, if not more so.

Like the other painters who would form the group that came to be known as the French Impressionists, Pissarro was a realist landscape painter. He counted among his instructors Jean-Babtiste-Camille Corot, Gustav Courbet and Charles-Francois Daubigny. (Wow, talk about amazing influences!)

With the exception of a brief fling with Pointillism, Pissaro probably remained truest to the Impressionist techniques that he helped to define and refine, and was the only one of the original group to exhibit at all eight of the Impressionist exhibitions. Within the refinement of that technique, however, his restless explorations of methods for applying paint, using brushstrokes, and searching for the Impressionist ideals led him through wonderful variations in color, paint surface and subject.

Pissarro’s brilliant, sparkling canvasses are all that we have come to expect from Impressionist painting, full of those wonderful splashes of pure pigment, energetic brushstrokes, brilliant color, and dazzling light captured from plein air painting in the French countryside.

There is currently a rare opportunity, however, to see Pissaro and Impressionist painting in its nascent stages, when the first colorful buds were blossoming on the tree of French landscape painting.

There is an exhibition of Pissarro’s work, Pissarro: Creating the Impressionist Landscape, curated by Baltimore Museum of Art, that focuses on his early work and the development of Impressionist technique out of his roots in the traditions of 19th Century landscape painting.

The show is only at the Baltimore Museum until May 13th (sorry about the short notice) and then moves to the Milwaukee Art Museum in Wisconsin for a run from June 9-September 9, 2007, and finishes at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art in Tennessee from October 7, 2007 to January 6, 2008.

For those in other locations, Pissarro’s work is well represented in many museums (including 9 here in the Philadelphia Musuem of Art). You can find a list of museums containing his work on the Artcyclopedia site.

I don’t know if the image shown here, “The Hermaitage at Pontoise“, is in the exhibition, but it’s one of his early paintings and illustrative of the transition from traditional landscape to Impressionism (plus, I just love it). The original is in the collection of the Guggenheim in New York.

Link via Art Knowledge News

In addition to the multitude of individual artists’ styles in comics art, there are some very broad generalized categories, like the intense stylizations of Japanese manga, the anatomical exaggerations and dynamic action of American super hero comics, and the somewhat more restrained amalgam of styles that could loosely be called “European”, although practiced by comics artists in Europe, the UK, Scandinavia, South America, Australia and New Zealand.

I’m particularly fond of the latter, which is often characterized by a more naturalistic portrayal of people than is usually found in mainstream American or Japanese comics. The figures are often loosely handled, with open line work and quick suggestions of details, and are commonly set against richly detailed backgrounds.

That’s a pretty succinct description of the approach of one of my favorite artists working in the “European” style, New Zealander Colin Wilson (not to be confused with the well-known writer of The Outsider — if you do a Google search, use a qualifier like “comics”).

Colin Wilson, the comics artist, started in his native New Zealand, where he published a comics fanzine called Strips, which included his work and that of several other artists, and is credited with helping to spark a comics revival in the country. He moved to the UK, where he worked for 2000AD on titles like Rogue Trooper and Judge Dredd, alongside such talents as Dave Gibbons, Brian Bolland and Mike McMahon. He later moved to France where he kept up his association with comics greats by working with Jean-Michel Charlier on on La Jeunesse de Blueberry (Young Blueberry), a spin off of the wonderful and immensely popular Lt. Blueberry series by Charlier and Jean (Moebius) Giraud (more on Giraud in a future post).

Just before his stint on Blueberry, Wilson wrote and drew a series of comic albums called Real, Mantell and Alia, part of a series called Into the Shadow of the Sun. I first encountered Wilson’s work in a U.S. reprint of Rael from Acme Press/Eclipse Books (out of print).

Wilson has done some work for the American comics market, including the Point Blank series for Wildstorm. Written by Ed Brubaker, who has been getting good bit of attention lately, Point Blank is not a superhero story, though it features characters from the established Wildstorm Universe, but more of a crime noir saga, a genre to which Wilson’s gritty and casual drawing style is an excellent fit.

There is an interview with Wilson on Newsarama from around the time of that release.

Since then he has worked with French Comics writer Maitz on another crime noir series in Europe, Du Plomb Dans La Tete (literally translated as “Lead in the Head”).

Wilson has recently done more work for the American market: three issues of Star Wars: Legacy for Dark Horse, two of which just published (#9 and #10), the other of which should come out in the another month or so (#13).

If you can’t find those, look for the Trade Paperback collection of Point Blank, or, even better, the Dark Horse printing of Rain Dogs (image above), a story originally printed in short chapters in 2000AD, and reprinted here in the U.S. in the style of a European graphic album: 48 pages, large format, great printing and no ads.

Wilson has a blog, albeit infrequently updated, on which he posts artwork and talks about his projects and other items of interest.

PJ Loughran is a busy guy.

In addition to his career as an illustrator, creating his wonderful line and color illustrations for clients like The New York Times, Newsweek, Time, Sports Illustrated, Nike, Ford, Simon and Schuster and Harper Collins, he has served as the Design Director and Creative Director at the AGENCY.COM, and has recently founded his own firm, Kerosense Creative Services.

If that weren’t enough, Loughran is a musician and songwriter, with two full length records to his credit and performances that have included opening for the likes of R.E.M, Taj Mahal, Todd Rundgren, REO SPeedwagon and the North Mississippi All-Stars.

Oh yes, Loughran is also an adjunct professor at Parsons, teaching classes in web design, illustration and drawing, and has been a guest lecturer at a number of other art schools and universities.

And I thought I had a busy schedule.

While wearing his illustrator’s hat, Loughran has garnered recognition from The Art Directors Club of New York, Communication Arts Magazine, Print Magazine and the Society of Illustrators (more details here).

His illustrations have a wonderfully loose, almost casual feeling, with lots of varied-weight to his ink lines, bright, freely-applied areas of color, interesting suggestions of texture and the frequent use of open, irregularly shaped compositions, in which the image is not constrained by a rectangle. He sometimes incorporates collage-like elements of photographs, colored and integrated with the drawings.

His portfolio opens to an initial page from which you choose a category of subject matter. Once in a sub-section, you can click on one of the large images for an enlarged view, which opens in a pop-up that allows you to conveniently click forward and aback through all of the images if you like. (Are you paying attention, all you designers of artists’ web sites who think that “pop-up and close, pop-up and close” is a good arrangement for an artist’s portfolio?)

There is an article about Loughran from a few years ago on the Adobe site that features a brief how-to for one of his sports themed images.

David Cunningham is a contemporary American realist painter living in Tennessee.

Cunningham practices a crisp, sharply focused realism, concentrating on still life and blending over into trompe l’oiel.

His still life paintings begin with carefully arranged tableaux of personal objects, chosen both for personal meaning and, I would think, as a challenge the artist poses for himself to handle not only complex compositions but a variety of surfaces, colors, shapes and textures.

It’s easy to miss the fact that there are additional galleries of still life on his site (linked with page-bottom text links) here and here.

I doubt if Cunningham deliberately set out to work in trompe l’oiel, as it feels like a natural progression from his keenly observed and meticulously handled still life subjects.

There is also a page of drawings, many of which, unfortunately, are not linked to larger images. I might wish for larger images all around, actually. It would be nice to see his precise handling of both drawing and painting media in more detail.

Cunningham he is also a professor of art at Franklin College, and there are some pages of drawings and paintings by his students posted on the site.

(Suggestion for this post courtesy of Tim Allen)

I’m constantly amazed at the way in which we, as artists, allow ourselves to be locked into restrictive little boxes by accepting and participating in an unspoken hierarchy of the artistic value of different genres of visual arts.

Those in the fine arts community, even within all of the strata it contains, look down on illustrators as “not artists”. Mainstream illustrators look down on science fiction and fantasy illustrators, who, in turn, look down on comics artists, and so on; stratification within stratification. By accepting these distinctions, we culture elements of mutual disdain to coddle our tender egos, in the process allowing ourselves to be classified and pigeonholed.

Not only is this unfortunate for individual artists, and the appreciation of different styles, it allows wonderful art to go ignored by those unwilling to cross boundaries within these strata. Fighting this tendency is actually at the core of what I try to accomplish with lines and colors, and I take particular delight in finding terrific visual art in areas that, while respected and valued within their own industry, are often ignored by the larger artistic community, like scientific, medical and botanical illustration, paleontological reconstruction art and entertainment industry concept art.

Closely related to the latter is the field of architectural rendering, in that it involves the imagining and visual conceptualization of things that don’t yet exist.

Unfortunately, this is a field where the convenience of 3-D CGI is replacing a lot of the traditional rendering with boringly adequate renderings of 3-D models. In the cases where the presentation requirements are more sophisticated, however, hand-drawn and painted renderings are still in demand.

What a delight it is to see a proposed architectural work portrayed, not as a blandly rendered CGI model, but as a fresh, clear ink and watercolor drawing, as in the beautiful work of James Akers.

Akers is an award winning architectural renderer whose work has been featured in shows for the American Society of Perspectivists and the New York Society of Renderers. His renderings (a convenient term in this case, as ink and watercolor works could easily be called either drawings or paintings) not only convey the appearance of the proposed structure, but have a refined sense of color and a superb feeling of texture, materials, place and atmosphere. If the buildings were not in the process of being imagined, you might assume that these were simply wonderfully precise works drawn and painted from life.

Akers has a knack for including just enough detail in the surrounding elements to make the proposed building fit seamlessly with its environment, while making it clear that the proposed structure is the highlight and subject of the image.

Akers works on a variety of projects and the galleries on his site feature renderings related to Hospitality and Entertainment, Institutions, Retail and Office, Sports and larger scale Planning and Urban Design. The highest resolution images, in which you can get the best feeling for his watercolor technique, are in the Recent Work section. (This is unfortunately displayed by way of a randomized script, so you may have to persevere through repeats of several images to see the larger variety.) There is also a Sketchbook section that includes travel sketches.

I would particularly encourage artists interested in concept design for the film and gaming industries to study the masterful way Akers handles the representation of structures and physical spaces in both linear and atmospheric perspective, and his naturalistic handling of the structures in their environment. (While you’re at it, also look at the work of Thomas Schaller).

In 1876 the Centennial Exposition (officially the “International Exhibition of Arts, Manufactures and Products of the Soil and Mine”) was held here in Philadelphia, where the Declaration of Independence had been signed 100 years earlier.

It was the first major World’s Fair to be held in the United States and served as announcement of the nation’s emergence as a major industrial world power. The exhibition was also announcement of the new nation flexing its cultural muscles, and the exhibit of American art that accompanied it must have been something to see.

It was around this time that a number of American artists and architects, among them the great illustrator and teacher Howard Pyle, come to feel that not only was American art coming into its own, but that it had matured enough to inherit the mantle of the great traditions of the European Renaissance and classical antiquity.

Though the artists themselves used it for awhile, the term “American Renaissance” isn’t in common use these days. The period isn’t widely recognized as a coherent art movement, and you won’t find more than cursory mentions of it in most sources. In fact, if you search for the phrase “American Renaissance” on the web, you’ll find more references to a literary movement earlier in the Century.

Pyle felt that painting, and illustration in particular, could have a civilizing influence on large numbers of people, and it was within his fascination with the classical ideals that he emphasized history painting. In his case, of course, it was not European history that he portrayed, but the history of his own nation. Pyle became renowned for his paintings of the American Revolution. His ideas influenced his students, who included many of the greatest American illustrators.

The Brandywine River Museum, a gem of a small museum in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, where Pyle taught his classes in the summer, and not far from Wilmington, Delaware, where Pyle was born and had his studio, has picked up this theme for a wonderful exhibition called “Howard Pyle and the American Renaissance”, with works by Pyle and many of his contemporaries who were influenced by this ideal.

The show features many seldom seen Pyles, like his illustrations for Quo Vadis, as well as many of the best from the collections of the Brandywine and the Delaware Art Museum, which houses the single largest collection of his work; and includes a newly acquired painting, Richard de Bury Tutoring Young Edward III, jointly purchased by the two museums.

Other artists represented in the exhibition include Edwin Austin Abbey, Joseph Clement Cole, Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Kenyon Cox. The N.C. Wyeth illustrations that are the stars of the museum’s collection have been temporarily replaced by his infrequently displayed landscapes. The exhibit includes European and English artists who influenced the Americans; among them is Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, whose beautiful “Sappho and Alcaeus” (image above, bottom) is on loan from the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.

If you’re fortunate enough to catch the exhibition, which runs until May 20th, 2007, don’t miss another exhibit of American Illustration, on display in a separate gallery that is not well marked (straight ahead as you leave the Pyle exhibition).

Here are some web links for Howard Pyle; there are additional links on my earlier post about Pyle.

Vladimir Kush is a Russian painter who studied at the Moscow Art Institute and is now living in the U.S. He works in a vein of fantastic art obviously influenced by Surrealists like Dali and Magritte, but with a distinctly different emotional context.

His paintings have something of a visionary mystical quality and many of them feature recurrent themes like butterflies, sailing ships, fruits and other natural forms, and visions within cloud formations.

His images often deal with interesting combinations of visual elements. Sailing ships are masted with stalks of gladiolus, their blossoms unfurled as sails. Giant butterflies catch the wind on another ship (above), or form the blades of fantasy windmills. Giant mechanical fish and dragonflies and a monumental rhinoceros undergo maintenance. The rising sun is revealed to be the yolk of a giant egg or the pearl of an oyster. A half pear is envisioned as a lute, and a half apple as a butterfly. Through many of the works, beautifully stylized and textured clouds roil and tumble revealing visions of seas and harbors or taking on forms like hot air balloons.

Unfortunately, the images on Kush’s own web site are too small to get a real feeling for his paintings. Fortunately, his work is represented on the web on the sites of galleries that carry his prints or originals.

There is a nice selection with large images on the Reflections Gallery, and another selection with somewhat smaller images on the Art Center Gallery. There is a particularly nice selection of images featured on the Dark Roasted Blend blog, some of which are linked to even larger versions on Flickr.

There are print collections of his work, but I’ve had trouble establishing their availability (it may be primarily through galleries rather than traditional book sources). One is called Metaphorical Journey and seems to be pricey ($200) as a used book on Amazon. On the books page of Kush’s site two other titles are shown, The Bronze Drops of Time and Journey to the Edge of Time, which is apparently new and more readily available.

Journey to the Edge of Time isn’t a collection, per se, but a coffee-table science fiction book, arranged as diary with many of Kush’s paintings as illustrations. The authors are Oleg Kush and Mikhil Kush, though I don’t know their relation to Vladimir.

Link suggestion courtesy of Karl Kofoed

Dan Gheno is an artist and teacher who places a special emphasis on figure drawing. He teaches at The Art Students League and The National Academy School in New York and is Prefessor Emeritus, The Lyme Academy College in Old Lyme, Connecticut.

I’m particularly fond of his life drawings because his approach is similar to my own, in that it is a combination of line and tone, heavily influenced by an admiration for the drawings of masters like Michelangelo, Raphael and Rubens.

Gheno also credits his approach to an early fascination with comic book art, and the corresponding desire to develop the ability to draw the figure from his imagination; a path that gave him the impetus to approach figure drawing with special emphasis on a solid sense of geometry underlying the form and a feeling for the volumetric nature of the human form in three dimensional space.

One of the key skills that sets comic book artists apart from other illustrators or cartoonists is the need to develop a consistent ability to invent and quickly draw figures from the imagination, portraying the human form, however exaggerated, in an enormous variety of positions and spatial relationships, often with severe foreshortening.

Dramatic foreshortening and dynamic projections of the figure in space are also hallmarks of masters like Michelangelo, Raphael, Carracci, Tiepolo and Pontormo; and I’ve always suggested that comic book artists and illustrators who work with the invented figure would do well to supplement their life drawing with the study of these artists’ drawings, along with more traditional sources of instruction like the books of Andrew Loomis, George Bridgeman and Walt Reed. (Would-be comic book artists who study only the work of other comic book artists are simply lost.)

To that list of instructional inspiration, I would easily add Dan Gheno, not only for comic book artists and illustrators, but for any artist interested in drawing the figure.

Though Gheno has not yet written a book of his instructional methods, he has over time written a series of articles on figure drawing for American Artist magazine and American Artist’s Drawing magazine. These have been collected into a special issue of Drawing Highlights that is now on the newsstands.

This is essentially a figure drawing instruction book in magazine form and is a tremendous resource for under $10. Gheno supplements his clear and thoughtful instruction not only with his own accomplished drawings, but with the work of a variety of master draftsmen, including the artists mentioned above and a host of others, like Rembrandt, Ingres, Goltzius, Rodin, Durer, Da Vinci, Prud’hon, Greuze and Charles Dana Gibson.

There are articles on drawing the figure, the hand, the head, actions and gestures and the seldom covered subject of drapery on the human form, i.e. folds in clothing.

You can also find somewhat truncated versions of some of these articles on Gheno’s web site in the Teachings section.

Unfortunately, Gheno’s site is one of those awkward, mid-90’s style nightmares with scrolling pages full of centered text and oversize linked headings, but you’ll find it worth the trouble to dig around and find your way to his drawings, metaphorical figurative paintings, landscapes, teachings, reading list and materials list. (The navigation links that should be on the home page are strewn down this page. Click on the large text links that look like headings for the subsections; the images are linked to their larger versions. In the galleries, only the images with red dots are linked to larger versions, the others are empty links that will leave you 404.) Gheno has also provided a nice set of links to art resources he has found of value.

There is also a transcript of an online chat with Gheno on the American Artist site. The special issue of Drawing Highlights should be on the newsstands for a few months (or until it sells out).

Addendum: The managing editor of American Artist was kind enough to write and let me know that the issue of Drawing Highlights mentioned here can be ordered directly from them through this link.