Gustav Klimt is an artist of surprises.

Considered both a symbolist and a member of the Art Nouveau movement, Klimpt is most well known for his bold intersections of design and draftsmanship, like his first Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, shown above (larger version here) which last year set a record for the highest price paid at auction for a single work of art, at $135 million.

Unlike many artists whose works become posthumous monuments to the greed-fests in an art market gone mad, in which dealers make millions standing on the graves of artists who lived in poverty and desperation, Klimt actually received a good deal of success with his work during his lifetime. Many of his works from his most successful periods used gold leaf on their surface, a tradition reaching back to the decorative arts of previous centuries.

Klimpt’s work is general is some of the most sought after, highly priced and most widely reproduced art in the world, and there are numerous books on the artist. But for those with on only a passing exposure to his paintings and drawings, he can continue to surprise and delight as you delve further.

Klimt’s art can be seen as a nexus of many styles in influences. If you’re familiar with works like the above portrait or his famous image of The Kiss, one of the most widely reproduced images in art, you may be surprised by his earlier works, that are much more traditional and academic (or “realistic”) in approach. Some of them, like Two Girls with Oleander, suggest the work of the Pre-Raphaelites in their blending of Art Nouveau grace with representational painting; others have the muted softness of Whistler’s portraits.

If you are aware of Klimt’s fascination with the female figure and the warm, frank eroticism of his drawings, you might be surprised by the the number and intensity of his landscape paintings.

In his landscapes, as in his most famous figurative works, Klimt flattens out the image to the picture plane, but mixes “realistic” rendering of figures or objects with design elements, often filled with luxurious patterns pulled from the rich history of decorative arts. His figures can retain their “realism” even while being stretched and extended like those of Modigliani of Giocametti, so that the figures themselves become simultaneously decorative elements and pictorial images, both standing out from and blending into the Byzantine dazzle of their surroundings.

He manages to simultaneously prompt delight in our appreciation of design and the decoration of surface, and tap our deep response to recognizable figures and elements of nature.

This intersection of pictorial image and design is one of the reasons for the strong appeal of Art Nouveau, and Klimt throws in another strongly appealing element, sexual desire, with smoldering erotic undertones in many of his images, and overt eroticism in others, particularly in his drawings.

In other words, Klimt knows how to push our buttons, and oh how we love to have them pushed.

[Note: the sites linked here contain images that are not suitable for children and Not Safe For Work.]

Ovi Nedelcu is a character designer and stroyboard artist for animated film.

He is currently working for Laika, an animation studio owned by Phil Knight, the co-founder and Chairman of Nike, on a new short feature called Coraline, which in turn is based on a novella by Neil Gaiman, who is known for his writing for comics.

Nedelcu is also a comics artist, and outside of his animation work, he writes and draws Pigtale, a comic book series and Lunchbox, a short online strip.

Nedelcu has multiple online presences. His main site has examples of illustration and character design. His blog, OV!, has sketches,experiments, pages from Pigtale and Lunchbox and includes an interview from Mike Manley’s Draw! magazine, in which he was recently profiled.

Lunchbox, a short strip about a couple of young siblings, has its own site; as does Pigtale, though it is a print comic with a few sample page online in the “Story” section. Pigtale, a dectctive adventure, seems particularly interesting for its layouts and panel compositions, which are very cinematic (image above), reflecting Nedelcu’s background in film.

There is also an interviewfrom the Character Design blog that includes many images and serves as a nice overview of his work.

Back in the mid-90’s, when the web was maybe 1/1000th of it’s current size, and digital art was in its infancy, I saw an image in a magazine (I think it was an illustration issue of Communication Arts) that grabbed my attention. It was a portrait image. It looked painterly, but with flat colors arranged into tonal areas, and had something of the feeling of gouache, but not quite.

The description of the image said the medium was digital (something still relatively rare at the time) and listed the software as an application called “Painter”. I had just started swimming in the digital art waters of Photoshop 2.5 and though I had seen plenty of digital art at by that time, most of which looked like identifiable “computer art”, this was my first exposure to “digital painting” (the use of digital tools and a pressure sensitive stylus to “paint” in manner analogous to traditional media).

I wasn’t familiar with Painter (at the time produced by Fractal Design), but that image was enough for me to say that whatever “Painter” is, I want it. Since then I’ve used it extensively, both for digital painting and to draw my webcomic.

Painter, currently owned by Corel, is a now a familiar application for most digital artists.

The image that introduced me to digital painting was by illustrator Nancy Stahl, who is still know for her exemplary work in Painter, though she has said that her clients tend to prefer her digital work in Illustrator; not so much because of the look, but because it’s easier for art directors to ask for changes (which some of them just love to do) with pieces created in vectors.

Stahl is a widely recognized illustrator whose clients include The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, American Express, Sony Records, Der Spiegel, Business Week, Ballentine Books, Lippencott an others.

Her work is familiar to many digital artists through inclusion in numerous how-to books, including the Illustrator CS Visual Quickstart Guide, the Painter WOW Books and the Illustrator WOW Books. She has also been included in Roling Stone: The Illustrated Portraits, Walt Reed’s Illustrators in America and the Society of Illustrators’ touring exhibit Women Illustrators Past and Present.

Stahl’s boldly graphic images, whether painterly or rendered in vectors, have a terrific sense of color and design, and are textbook examples of how to see and isolate the geometric forms produced by volume, light and shadow. Hidden planes reveal themselves, and people, objects and landscapes shift between representational images and pure design.

Her illustrations sometimes have a retro feeling, harkening back to the poster and advertising art of the 30’s and 40’s. Her interests extend to textiles and crafts and her portfolio includes a section of knitted and embroidered images used as illustration. Stahl has also created five stamps for the U.S. Postal Service.

I’ve wanted to write a post on her work for some time, but was put off by her personal web site, in which the images were (and still are) so small as to be essentially pointless. She now has a portfolio site, however, on Illoz, and a portfolio on Workbook, in which there is a selection of images large enough to get a feeling for the appeal of her work. Her personal site still has some useful links to other info about her work. There is also a section of links on the Illoz site.

She also now has a blog on Drawger, in which her work is reproduced in much better detail than anywhere else and which includes discussions of her process.

She has a new book (one of those ones with a little painting kit included) called Real Art!: The Paint by Number Book & Kit (with Douglas Brenner).

Stahl is currently on the faculty of the Hartford Art School Limited Residency MFA in Illustration program.

[Link suggestions courtesy of Jack Harris]

Michael (Mick or Mike) McMahon is a British comics artist who was influential in hammering out the look and feel of Judge Dredd, as well as working on a number of other important characters for 2000AD. McMahon took over on Dredd from Carlos Ezquerra, initially mimicking his style at the editor’s request, but soon putting his own stamp on the character. I was tempted to use the word “refined”, but it’s not a good choice. McMahon’s early work on Dredd was anything but refined, coming at you with a raw, slap-in-the-face immediacy.

McMahon has evolved through numerous stylistic changes in his career, but he is best know for highly stylized drawings in which his characters are created with blocky, angular shapes, peppered with texture.

From the U.S., it’s hard to get anything but scattered glimpses of the UK comics scene, mostly from reprints and album collections, so I don’t know much about how his career progressed or how stylistic influences might have passed between artists like McMahon, Kevin O’Neill, Brian Bolland, Ian Gibson and Dave Gibbons. Viewed from across the Atlantic, it all seems to have arisen from the same boiling caldron.

McMahon did small bits of of work for American comics publishers, notably a Batman: Ledgends of the Dark Knight story, and could be found in titles like The Last American and Tattered Banners.

Judging from his web site, he has apparently been dividing his time lately between comics and art for the gaming industry.

Some of my favorite work of his was for Slaine, a Celtic barbarian hero, in which his style was much more detailed, and, well, if not “refined”, more controlled. In his drawings for Slaine (image above), McMahon filled his areas of black with wild scratchboard textures, giving the feeling of reading a comic story drawn in woodcuts.

[Thanks to Simon Rodgers for reminding me about McMahon, see my post on Simon Rodgers]

One of the immediate standouts from my quick look around the galleries in Lambertville (see yesterday’s post) was the work of Colette Sexton, an area artist who, though not native to the town of Lambertville, has found it to be home in both the physical and artistic sense. Her bright, fresh paintings of the town and its surrounds seem to me to be in keeping with the plein-air painterly realism of the New Hope school.

In particular, her Winter scenes of Lambertville from above, viewed from an overlook near a graveyard, have the flavor of some of the New Hope painters, who loved to capture the bright, geometric shapes of the houses and other buildings in both towns from the surrounding hills.

Aided by the fact that Lambertville’s contemporary merchants have painted many of their storefronts in bright colors, Sexton’s paintings are vibrant with splashes of brilliant color, rendered in loose, confident brushstrokes that are left unfussed-with and give her work a pleasing surface quality and tactile appeal.

I doubt that Sexton, any more than the original New Hope painters, would call herself an “Impressionist” but she favors elements that many of the painterly realists of the turn of the century had in common, bright contrasts of color and light, the deep, cool colors of dappled shade, and sunlight cascading across spring flowers and snow covered rooftops with equal dazzle.

Walking into what I assumed was a one-preson show in a regular gallery, I discovered that it was, in fact, the “Collette Sexton Gallery”. In speaking with the artist, I learned that she is one of several in the area who have chosen the approach of renting and maintaining their own dedicated gallery space. While this is not a new practice, I think this path is gaining appeal as gallery commissions creep higher and competition for exhibition space grows more intense.

Sexton indicated that the overhead and work involved in running her own gallery were balanced out by the advantages of having her work always on display, rather than at the whims of other gallery owners or institutional shows. It also allows for interaction directly between the artist and collector, something usually restricted to openings. She was fortunate, she said, in that one of the established area artists, who has been running his own dedicated gallery for many years, was kind enough to show her the ropes. Some of the other artists in the area who have followed suit will occasionally compare notes and otherwise support each other’s endeavors.

What I don’t know is how economically viable this approach would be for artists in different areas. Some collectors will follow up on their appreciation for an artist’s work by buying additional pieces, others strive for variety and are not as likely to acquire multiple pieces by one artist. Lambertville and New Hope are unusual, situated within an easy drive of both Philadelphia and New York, and thriving on a reputation as an arts related tourist destination, ensuring that the area has a consistent flow of new visitors.

Personally, I was pleased that Sexton’s work was there at the time we happened by and not part of a show that “closed last week”. She also takes advantage of the other, more common means of keeping her artwork available and on view at all times, with a simple but effectively arranged web site.

Her online gallery has one outstanding feature in particular, in that the main images are available in two resolutions. Thumbnails are linked to medium size images that can be viewed in sequence with a convenient “previous - next” navigation. These browsing size images are supplemented with a second set of higher resolution images that are available from a small drop-down above the navigation area.

While I might wish for a script that would allow visitors to make a set choice to always show the larger images when proceeding through the gallery, I still think this extra step is an excellent practice: providing one size for casual browsing and a second, higher-resolution version for those genuinely interested.

Sexton’s online galleries are divided into two sections, one of “Historic America and its People“, which seems to be largely of scenes in and around Lambertville, and “Water Scenes“, in which she ranges farther afield.

My wife and I recently took a pleasant day-trip to the area of New Hope, Pennsylvania. She grew up in the area and we had a good time exploring sights both familiar and changed, and doing a little “art tourism”.

New Hope is a small town in Bucks County, about 40 miles northeast of Philadelphia, that became a thriving artist’s colony around the turn of the last century (see my posts on Daniel Garber). Prior to that, it was a key point on a canal system that, at a time when “highways” were muddy ruts, helped move goods past drops in the Delaware River that weren’t navigable.

I’ve mentioned the New Hope area before in articles about Garber and Fern Coppedge, artists who, along with Edward Redfield, John Folinsbee, Walter Schofield, William Lathrop and others, have come to be called the “Pennsylvania Impressionists” (a term I always put in quotes as I doubt the artists ever referred to themselves that way).

New Hope these days is still known as a center for art and artists, but is less of a real artists’ colony and more of a tourist destination built on the remnants of that reputation. Though it certainly has some charm, the town now has a feeling of Gucci meets Jersey beach town; its main streets lined with restaurants and shops that the barge and and canal workers of the past, or the artists of Garber’s day, would not have imagined; and it’s becoming weighted down with the mall and condo barnacles that always seem to crust themselves onto any place with a hint of artsy bohemian appeal these days.

There are a number of galleries, though actually not as many as I might have expected. Unfortunately the Gratz Gallery, which deals in 19th Century art from the New Hope school, the Philadelphia 10 (see my post on Fern Coppedge) and artists from The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, had closed for the day by the time we got to it.

Also disappointingly, the small New Hope branch of the James Michener Museum didn’t have any of that museum’s collection of New Hope artists on display.

At the foot of Bridge Street, however, a steel girder bridge lets you drive or stroll over the Delaware river, not far from where George Washington and his army made their famous crossing, to the larger, less famous, but more “real” town of Lambertville, New Jersey, which, I think is more interesting in terms of art galleries and currently working artists; even though it’s also obviously a tourist town.

There we found a number of galleries and a thriving arts scene, supported by the area’s reputation as an art center and its location within an easy drive of both Philadelphia and New York, and I was pleased to find an abundance of artists working in the kind of painterly realism that fits into the traditions of the New Hope school.

New Hope and Lambertville have Second Saturday gallery walks, and the 2007 Annual New Hope Outdoor Arts and Crafts Festival is this weekend Sept 29th & 30th.

[Image above, left to right: Gordon Haas, Dot Bunn, Robert Beck, Sandy Askey]

I recently did an update on James Gurney, and I don’t normally do two posts about the same artist in such quick succession, but I finally had a chance to spend some time enjoying my new copy of his latest book, Journey to Chandara, and I was just knocked out.

Journey to Chandara (more detail here) is another in his series of Dinotopia books, fantasy adventure stories set in a “land apart from time”. All of these books, and particularly the new one, are the kind of books for which even that wonderful term “lavishly illustrated” is inadequate. To say these books are fantasy adventure stories is insufficient as well; they are excursions into the science, history and, in particular, art of previous centuries.

In a way somewhat more subtle than William Stout’s playful series of dinosaur images that make reference to various painters and Golden Age illustrators, Gurney likes to combine his fanciful images with his fascination for the styles and techniques of great artists, particularly those of the 19th Century, from Charles R. Knight to Daniel Ridgeway Knight.

In the new volume, this phenomenon is even more pronounced than before. This is a quest adventure to a distant part of Dinotopia. From Waterfall City, which is an idealized European city (think Rome + Venice + Mongo, which Lucas & Co. “borrowed” uncredited as the inspiration for Naboo in Star Wars Episode I), Gurney’s dinosaur and human characters “journey to the east” on their way to Chandara, the Dinotopian equivalent of China. On the way, they visit an ever widening variety of places with their attendant variety of landscapes.

In the process, we see Gurney observing, absorbing and playing with the techniques and subject matter of a host of great landscape painters (which I have to think is the real inspiration for the story). In particular he shows his affection for painters like Caspar David Frederich, John Constable, J.M.W. Turner (particularly his early work), and a number of the “Orientalist” painters (like Jean-Léon Gérôme), who took their own journeys of exploration.

Gurney also continues his obvious display of affection for 19th Century Academic painters, the Pre-Raphaelites, great illustrators like Maxfield Parrish and N.C. Wyeth, and even M.C. Escher.

Somehow, he manages to mix in his knowing winks and thank-yous to these artists with dazzling lighting and dramatic compositions that will enthrall modern adventure fans, as well as inventive designs for places, characters and props that would be the envy of many accomplished production designers and concept artists, and make it all feel like part of a whole. Remarkable.

There is another aspect to this book that makes it my favorite of his published works to date. The reproductions seem even better than in the previous volumes, even though they were excellent. You can see more of the artist’s brushstrokes and the surface quality of the paint. This may be due to the quality of the reproduction, or the way in which the works were photographed, or it may be that Gurney himself is getting more painterly and confident as he continues his restless exploration of the art of painting. I suspect it’s a combination of those factors. The paintings are in oil but Gurney occasionally achieves watercolor-like effects where the paint is thin enough to let the white of the support, and at times hints of the underlying drawing, come through.

Beyond the subtle details for art lovers, and the illustrated adventure itself, Gurney adds, as he often does, features like imaginative cut-aways of the interiors of structures and devices that appeal to the 12-year old inveterate Popular Science reader in many of us. This includes inventive conceits like the use of a brachiosaurus as a fire truck, with an escape ladder on the back of its neck.

The level of detail extends to invented alphabets based on dinosaur tracks and and a separate, beautifully done, National Geographic style Traveler’s Map of Dinotopia. The attention to detail in this volume rivals that of Chris Ware’s amazing book/artifacts.

Gurney also continues to mix real science and history in with his fantasy. He goes on to explore Escher-like surface tessellations (made, of course, of dinosaur tracks) and the presence of the Fibonacci series (the “golden section”) in the surface patterns of seeds and flowers. He shows real designs for astrolabes, demonstrates how an abacus functions; and illustrates, in a detailed, David McCauley-like cutaway, an explanation of how a windmill works.

Of course, on top of that we get image after image of Gurney’s beautiful renderings of dinosaurs; all manner of dinosaurs — large, small and in between. Again, he is including real science. In spite of the fanciful setting, Gurney strives to keep his renderings paleontologically accurate, and the book’s dust-jacket features, amid raves from Ray Harryhausen and Walt Reed, notices from renowned paleontologists like Michael Brett-Surman and Mark Norell. In some cases the relation of the dinosaur images to the story is subtle enough that that the fantasy element is subdued and the images just look like particularly beautiful straightforward paleo illustrations, making me hope that Gurney has plans for such a book up his sleeve.

All of this plus the way that Gurney has allowed us to look over his shoulder as he explores the work of great artists from the past, adds up to a package that is an absolute treat.

Gurney continues to cover his own journey, as he travels in support of the book, on his blog, Gurney Journey. The blog is increasingly fascinating and features posts on his process and technique for the book, on the practice of studying and borrowing from the masters, and the subject of painting in general (see his recent post on his favorite How-To books). It also features larger reproductions of some of the paintings than those on the Journey to Chandara section of the Dinotopia site, along with preliminary studies and sketches, and even some of Gurney’s recent landscape paintings.

Original paintings from Journey to Chandara and his other books are currently on display in exhibitions in Los Angeles and Oshkosh, Wisconsin. See my previous post and Gurney’s Dinotopia Exhibitions page for more links and details.

William Heath Robinson wanted to be a landscape painter. Even after his study at the Islington Art School and later at the Royal Academy, he came to the realization that he could support himself better by following his brothers Charles and Thomas into the burgeoning field of illustration. (See my post on Charles Robinson.)

The Robinsons were part of the generation of artists that flourished in the Golden Age of illustration, along with artists like Franklin Booth, Maxfield Parrish, Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, J.C. Leyendecker and Elizabeth Shippen Green.

Though he created beautiful illustrations for classics like Beauty and the Beast, Bluebeard, Little Red Riding Hood, The Red Shoes, and Sleeping Beauty (image above, right), he achieved widest notice for his humorous drawings and cartoons.

Robinson created cartoons of life prior to, during and after the First World War. He drew numerous cartoons depicting the follies of golfers; like the one above, left, in which the protagonist is trying to “play it as it lies” with a contraption of strapped together clubs, demonstrating the kind of visual invention for which Robinson became a household word.

Robinson drew countless “inventions” in which overly complex gadgets and bizarre devices were employed to accomplish otherwise simple tasks. Her in the U.S. this kind of inventive visual absurdity is associated with later drawings by Rube Goldberg, but in the U.K. they were simply called “Heath Robinsons”.

Robert Hale Ives Gammell was an artist out of sync with his times, for which I set the fault on the times rather than the artist.

Gammell was born in 1893, when academic realism and the classical traditions to which it adhered were about to be overthrown and temporarily (thankfully) submerged beneath the turgid waves of 20th Century Modernism.

Gammell trained at the School of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, where he was a student of Edmund Tarbell, Joseph DeCamp and Phillip Hale. In particular he came to be profoundly influenced by his study with William Paxton, who had been classically trained in Europe and had studied with Jean-Léon Gérôme at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

Gammell thrived on the nourishment of the classical traditions, but found himself in a century when those traditions and values were being denigrated and treated as passé. His large scale paintings of mythological and Biblical themes were not well received by an art establishment caught up in the sacred “newness” of whatever modernist “ism” was in this week, and he eventually suffered a nervous collapse. He credited his recovery partly to his study of the writings of the visionary psychologist Carl G. Jung.

As he recovered he laid the groundwork for his book Twilight of Painting (out of print, but available used), in which he laments the demise of those traditions and (wrongly, I think) lays the blame partly at the unfinished Academic training of the Impressionists; which left them unable bring a painting to a finished state, and established a permissiveness for unfinished works in the art establishment. He wrote two other books, The shop-talk of Edgar Degas and The Boston Painters 1900-1930.

He devoted the remainder of his life to teaching and perpetuating what he saw, and rightly so, as the threatened traditions of classical Western Art. A number of his students (and their students) went on to become notable realist painters.

He also started what would become his masterwork, a series of 23 related paintings (or “panels”) based on the poem Hound of Heaven by English poet Francis Thompson. You can see small reproductions of nine of the panels on Wikipedia (panel 12 shown here).

Gammell found himself at a loss for some of the imagery he needed to transform the ideas in the poem into the visual realm and found them in the writings of Jung, perhaps putting him more in touch with the times than he thought.

The Bayeux Tapestry is a 20 inch by 230 foot (50cm x 70m) embroidered cloth that shows the story of the Norman invasion of England in 1066, from the “portent” of Halley’s comet to the Battle of Hastings. It may have been completed within a few years of the invasion, but the earliest other record of its existence is in an inventory of the Bayeux Cathederal in 1476.

Like Trajan’s column, some pre-columbian manuscripts and Eqyptian hieroglyphics, it can be thought of as a “graphic story”, a form of storytelling we know today as “comics”; i.e pictures, or words and pictures, arranged in sequence to tell a story (to borrow Scott McCloud’s succinct definition).

In a kind of odd completion of a circle, there is now a computer animated version of the tapestry.

Initiated by a school project when he was 21, in which he merely needed to demonstrate that he had a command of motion graphics software, British designer David Newton took a tracking shot (like a long pan, but along a straight axis) of the tapestry and animated it, added a bit of sound and music and come up with a short movie that probably tells the story better than Hollywood could in a typical over the top blockbuster.

The camera moves along the tapestry and the pictorial elements, kings, princes, soldiers, shipwrights, blacksmiths, ships, horses and a cast of hundreds (well, dozens, anyway) come to life along the story’s path. Delightful.

There is a semi-official site devoted to the actual tapestry, and some info on Wikipedia. The only link I have to the animated version is the YouTube link, which doesn’t have much supporting information.

[Link via Kottke.org]