Illustrator Jaime Jones studied at the Corcoran College of Art and has worked for companies like Arenanet, and currently Bungie, as well as doing freelance work for Wizards of the Coast, Image Comics, Alderac Entertainment and others.

Jones works primarily digitally and his online galleries are divided into sections like Digital Paintings, Digital Sketches and Old Work and includes a section of drawings and sketches in Traditional Media.

In his primary Digital Painting galleries you’ll find a nice crisp approach to digital rendering; that often carries a feeling of painterly brushstrokes and spattered textures. His background renderings are often atmospheric; with enough suggestions of detail to ground them in tactile reality without weighing them down.

As often seems to be the case with digital artists, some of the most interesting images are in the section for digital sketches including studies after Bouguereau, Corot, Degas and Alma-Tadema.

There is a brief interview on Irene Gallo’s blog, The Art Department as well as an additional gallery of Jone’s work on the Tor.com site.

Long time readers of Lines and Colors will know that I have a particular fondness for painters at the edges of French Impressionism, both in terms of precursors to the Impressionist style and a range of other painters who were influenced by that style but took it in somewhat different directions, most notably the painters who are labeled “American Impressionists”.

Over the weekend I had the opportunity to take in a new exhibition at The Newark Museum in New Jersey that showcases works in all three categories.

Paths to Impressionism, French and American Landscape Paintings from the Worcester Art Museum opens with one of Monet’s paintings of waterlillies and features paintings from Impressionist precursors in the Barbizon School and other early exponents of en plein air landscape painting, like Camile Corot, Charles-François Daubigny, Constant Troyon, Julien Dupre, Eugene Boudin (who was directly influential on Claude Monet) and Georges Michel, who was one of the first French landscape painters to make a regular practice of painting on location.

The show then moves into American painters influenced by the Barbizon school, like Joseph H. Greenwood, Jervis McEntee, John Francis Murphy and Dwight Williem Tyron. A highlight is a series of stunning small landscapes (and a few larger ones) by George Inness, who grew up in Newark and later settled in nearby Montclair, New Jersey.

As you progress through the exhibit it then presents you with a few paintings by French Impressionists, notably Alfred Sisley and Camille Pissarro (also here); and it moves into a gallery of American Impressionist painters for a grand finale that includes a number of striking paintings by Childe Hassam, a beautiful Sargent landscape and a small jewel by Luther Van Gorden.

It’s a beautiful show, and while not large by blockbuster museum exhibit standards, is complete enough within itself to give a very nice overview of the influences leading to and away from the nexus of artistic styles known as Impressionism.

The exhibit is nicely complimented by another exhibit at the Newark Museum called Small by Sublime: Intimate Views by Durand, Bierstadt and Inness, featuring works from the Hudson River School and Tonalist movement in the U.S; and for those like me who are visiting the Newark Museum for the first time, can be supplemented with a number of pieces to be found in the permanent collection, including landscapes by Childe Hassam and one of my favorites by Pennsylvania Impressionist Daniel Garber.

(When in the Newark Museum’s permanent collection, be prepared to be assaulted at least once by the museum’s poorly implemented proximity alarms, that hoot and screech long after you’ve removed your nose from the painting, giving you no indication of how close is too close, and leaving the poor guards to exasperatedly ask someone to move back every few minutes. Somebody at the museum needs to re-think this — mark the floor and/or set the alarms to cease as soon as the offending nose is back far enough from the painting. Fortunately, this only seems to be in place in the permanent collection, and doesn’t mar your enjoyment of the featured exhibit.)

Paths to Impressionism was organized by the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts in 2004, and traveled to The Allentown Art Museum in Pennsylvania and the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, Tennessee, and possibly other regional museums, before it’s current run in Newark (the page devoted to the exhibition on the Worcester Art Museum site is not up-to-date with the exhibition’s schedule). I don’t know where, if anywhere, it goes from here.

Paths to Impressionism, French and American Landscape Paintings from the Worcester Art Museum is at the Newark Museum until January 4, 2009. There is a catalog accompanying the exhibiton.

(Image above: Julien Dupre, Luther Van Gorden, George Inness, John Singer Sargent, Camille Pissarro, Childe Hassam)

Bill Carman has an approach that combines stylish exaggeration, line, painted rendering, texture, design and a variety of applications of color to achieve an entertaining and eye-catching range of illustrations, paintings and drawings.

Carman studied at De Anze College and Brigham Young University and is currently a professor of illustration and drawing at Boise State University.

In addition to his work for clients like Lucas Arts Entertainment, TSR, Opera Idaho, Ford Aerospace, UTNE Reader, and a number of other editorial and commercial accounts, his work has been featured in publications like the Society of Illustrators Annuals, American Illustration and the Spectrum collections of contemporary fantastic art. He is the author and illustrator of the children’s book What’s That Noise?, from random House.

The gallery on his own site is essentially just a shopping cart for giclee prints; of more interest is the wider range of work shown on his gallery on Boise State University, which is divided into sections like illustration, children’s books, paint stuff and draw stuff. I particularly like the pieces in the painted stuff section. Don’t miss the Altoids icon at the bottom of the pop-up that leads to a selection of painted Altoid tins, and the sketchbook link to the right of that.

There are also larger images of some of his paintings in the Tor.com gallery.

When I discovered Erin Kelso’s work on conceptart.org, I did my usual dig to see what else I could find about the artist, who was listed only as “bluefooted”.

I eventually found out that she also has a presence on deviantART, where she is also listed only as “bluefooted”, but no actual website or blog.

I eventually contacted her, found that she does have an actual name, and that she a PhD in evolutionary biology and a Master’s in zoology and is working for a university; and her art is done in her off hours.

Kelso is largely self taught as an artist (though I think I saw in a post that she is taking a class of some kind currently), and takes her inspiration from numerous sources. When I contacted her, she confirmed my thoughts that she was influenced by artists like Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, Gustav Tenggren and Gustave Klimpt; and mentioned contemporary artists like James Jean, Jon Foster, Yoshitaka Amano, Michael Kaluta in addition.

Kelso does her drawings in pen and ink, and sometimes pencil, scans them and applies color and textures in Photoshop and Painter. (She has a brief Fake Watercolor Tutorial on her sketchbook post on the conceptart.org forums – about halfway down.)

It is the strong design elements and artful use of texture that make her work particularly appealing for me. I also enjoy the pen and ink and watercolor approach that carries some of the flavor of both drawing and painting; and her nice combination of Rackham-inspired line work with areas of Klimpt-like textures and patterns.

Peder Mork Mønstead was a Danish painter active in the late 19th and early 20th Century.

Looking through his work you will find lush, color saturated paintings of his native Denmark, where Mønstead studied at the Copenhagen Academy, as well as landscapes from lands where he traveled, including Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, North Africa and Italy.

His paintings ring with a crisp, vibrant naturalism, emphasized by passages of sharp detail and strong value contrasts. The detail doesn’t keep them from being painterly, and lively with the feeling of the artist’s hand.

His subjects ranged from shade darkened streams, dappled with sunlight, to snow covered Nordic fields and the warm sun of the Italian coast.

Mønstead’s fascination with water and small streams remind me of Norwegian painter Frits Thaulow (also here).

Overall Mønstead’s style is a wonderful blend of intense, almost impressionistic color with strong academic underpinnings.

Hethe Srodawa is an entertainment industry concept artist currently working for Rockstar Games.

Like many in his field, Srodawa paints digitally in Photoshop. I came across his work, specifically the image above, “Enchanted“, on the CGSociety site.

Srodawa has a blog called The Pirate’s Cave, Illustrated Memoirs of a Dead Pirate, in which he posts sketches, finished work , flights of fancy, and in the case of the piece shown here, step by step progress and preliminary alternative layouts for some of his digital paintings. (He says that this image is about and inspired by his wife, and that he’s going to tell his children when they’re older that this is how he met their mother and that they come from royal fairy blood.)

He also has a web site in which the portfolio is pretty much as informal as the blog, a mix of drawings, painted sketches and more finished works.

His drawings and painted sketches have a nice, comfortable looseness about them, and his more finished works carry some of that forward at times with a feeling of gestural fluidity and brusquely applied textures.

One1more2time3’s Weblog is a blog written by animated film industry production designer Hans Bacher.

Formerly based in Europe, the U.S. and Tokyo, Bacher is now in Manila, Philippines and writes about a number of animation and production art topics.

According to Michael Hirsh’s Articles & Texticles, Bacher had been blogging previously on a different platform, stopped for a time and has recently relaunched his blog on WordPress.

I don’t know if he will eventually bring his archives from the older iteration of the blog over to the new one. I hope so, because the current crop is fascinating, informative, insightful and crammed full of great illustrations (what more could you want from an animation blog?).

The most recent article (as of this writing) is about 4 masters, production artists who Bacher has had the opportunity to work with, one of whom is Alex Niño, who I recently profiled.

Of particular interest in the articles currently available are several on the nature and production of backgrounds for Disney’s classic Bambi. One of them discusses the range of greens in the background paintings, displays them as a palette, and talks about the predominance of saturated, intense colors in modern animation backgrounds vs. the more subtle and naturalistic backgrounds in the older classics. There is a related article about the rendering of rocks. (This discussion would be of interest to contemporary landscape painters as well.)

The image shown above is a screen capture of Bacher’s article about perspective, referencing a blog post by John Krikfalusi on the topic and showing backgrounds from Disney’s Clock Cleaners.

This looks to be a blog worth watching.

[Link via Articles & Texticles]

I will wander off topic for a little personal background (”local color”, so to speak) and then come back.

The town of Arles is in Provence, a region of France that borders the Mediterreanean Sea and Northern Italy, where the Romans established their first province (provincia) outside their borders (hence the name). Arles was one of the major Roman cities in France, still has a largely intact Roman theater and arena and a good bit of the city wall. Today it’s a charming and visually rich town, popular with tourists.

Provence has long had a draw for artists, who find a particular appeal in the warm light and beautiful countryside. In 1888 and 1889 Arles was home to Vincent van Gogh for two of his most productive and most troubled years.

There are none of Van Gogh’s paintings in collections in Arles, the closest is in Avignon, about 20 miles (35km) away, but there are signs of him in many places. When my wife and I traveled to Arles on our first trip to France in 2002 (and I came to the immediate conclusion that the sunlight is indeed wonderful in Provence), Van Gogh’s presence kind of snuck up on us several times.

When we arrived in Arles, after two flights, a bus and train ride and a considerable walk, we were exhausted; and soon discovered that the locals don’t seem to eat between lunchtime and 6 or 7 PM. After spending some time searching for a cafe serving food in the mid-afternoon, we were finally relieved to find a small place that happened to have outdoor seating at the edge of a courtyard with a pleasant garden.

As we were eating and unwinding, I kept looking at the garden and courtyard, which was backed by a building faced with rows of arches. I found myself fascinated with it, partly because it was attractive, but partly, I gradually realized, because there was something oddly familiar about the place, which was impossible, of course, as I had never been to France before, let alone to this courtyard in Arles.

I finally noticed there was a plaque at one corner of the courtyard and as I approached it, and the view changed slightly, I suddenly realized we were in the garden portrayed in Van Gogh’s The Courtyard of the Hospital at Arles (image above, bottom right, larger version here); which, the plaque confirmed, is intentionally maintained in a pretty good approximation of the way it looked when he painted it (photo here).

Later, after unpacking and settling in a bit, we were out for a drink in a cafe that I had chosen primarily because it had internet access, and I was sitting at the table sketching when I got a similar feeling of odd familiarity from a cafe a few steps away with a yellow front and awning; and I realized that it was the subject of van Gogh’s Cafe Terrace at Night (image above, bottom left). The cafe is currently a tourist spot, named “Cafe Van Gogh” (also here), though we didn’t notice it at first.

We had chosen to sit not in the cafe that was the subject of his painting; but, by sheer chance, in another cafe in almost the exact position Van Gogh must have been sitting while composing his well known work. The effect was even more dramatic in the night, when the awning was lit from below by the glow of lamps, and the colors were uncannily similar to the painting.

We felt the artist’s presence again when walking by “The Yellow House” and in the fields surrounding the town. In particular, when looking out over the Rhone River at night, I imagined him painting Starry Night Over the Rhone (image above, top, larger version here).

Most people are more familiar with the other “Starry Night”, the famous one, The Starry Night; but both paintings, along with The Night Cafe (the lamplit interior) and a number of other works, remind us that as much as van Gogh was a painter of brilliant fields ablaze with the Provence sun, he was also a painter of the night; more specifically, the colors of the night.

Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night is the title of a new exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The exhibition promises to be a small (23 paintings, 9 drawings and some letters) but insightful look into Van Gogh’s interpretation of the night, of which he said: “I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day.”

The exhibition should prove that with some of his most renowned works, including The Night Cafe, The Dance Hall in Arles, The Potato Eaters, Gauguin’s Chair, Starry Night Over the Rhone and the iconic The Starry Night, which is in the MoMA’s permanent collection, along with several less well known works. (The Courtyard of the Hospital at Arles and Cafe Terrace at Night are not in the show, I just included them here to illustrate my story.) There is a catalog accompanying the exhibition.

Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night runs until January 5, 2009 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and then will be on display at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam from February 13 to June 17, 2009 (English link here). Advance tickets are suggested.

The exhibit should demonstrate that even though the light for artists is indeed special in places like Provence, it is even more special in the eyes of the artist, day or night.

Just a quick note that there is a new extensive exhibit of works from demented genius cartoonist and underground comix pioneer Robert Crumb at the Institute for Contemporary Art here in Philadelphia.

I’ll write a post about the show, and Robert Crumb, in more detail after I’ve had a chance to see the exhibit, but I wanted to give a heads-up about it now for those within traveling distance.

The ICA site has a list of events and public programs related to the show, including tours, a showing of the film Crumb, and a lecture by cartoonist Charles Burns.

The exhibit is called “R. Crumb’s Underground” and features over 100 works. It runs until December 7, 2008.

It’s always a treat for me to get to meet and talk to some of the contemporary artists I write about. This past Friday, I had the opportunity to attend an opening of a new show at the Gross McCleaf Gallery here in Philadelphia of works by Western Pennsylvania artist Thomas Paquette.

I wrote about Thomas Paquette back in the Spring of 2007 on the occasion of another show at the same gallery, but I just made it to that show before it closed, and missed the opening.

At the time I was fascinated with his small works in gouache that I had seen in reproduction, and since then in a beautiful book, Thomas Paquette: Gouaches, that is available directly through the artist’s site, or though Amazon. The pieces featured in the book are also available as archival prints.

Though the gouache paintings weren’t part of the show that time (or this time), I became fascinated with some of the gouache-like characteristics of his much larger scale oils, that seem to carry some of the same feeling.

This time I had a chance to meet the artist and talk with him about his work and technique. Though still pursuing many of the same subjects and approaches that were evident in his work before, he is pushing with some of his new paintings in new directions, notably in paintings in which large color filled skies dominate the composition.

You can see some of his recent work on his own site, and a selection of additional work on the Gross McCleaf site.

In asking about his working methods, I found out that Paquette often works over his oils in layers, painting and repainting areas, partly building up texture and placing areas of color within areas of color, and partly searching out the forms and colors, almost like an additive sculptor working back and forth in clay. It reminded me that there is actually a sculptural quality to his work, in which the surface texture of his paint is one of the appealing elements of the painting; unfortunately, one that is lost in reproduction.

Paquette’s work strikes me as a delightful blending of seemingly contradictory elements, impressionistic in its color and open brushwork, yet academically strong in the drawing and composition. Close up, the shapes and areas of color seem abstract, in the true sense of that word, meaning to extract the essence of something, but also in the sense that you could crop out a small section of almost any area of his paintings and have a vibrant non-representaional composition, filled with lively variations in color and texture.

That texture itself, layers of richly applied paint, well raised above the surface in places, is also a contrast with the apparently flat nature some of his shapes take on from a middle distance. Step back more and that graphic quality, a sense of line and color that reminds me of colored woodblock prints, resolves into a lush naturalism.

The surface character of his paintings, and the nature of the areas of color close up, seem so different form the naturalistic appearance of the works from a distance that I asked him if he does a lot of stepping up and back as he paints; something I’ve been curious about in regard to a number of painters in who exhibit similar characteristics, like Sargent or Daniel Garber.

In Paquette’s case, the answer is no. He told me that it is more of a mental grasp of overall work, maintained while working close, than a technique of constantly viewing the work from close up and back.

Paquette is, after all is said and done, a realist; but his rendering technique pays attention to paint as paint, areas of color as individual abstract elements; and texture as an exploration in itself.

The tension between these opposites, along with his strong sense of value and color and the dynamics of his compositions, are what make his work so fascinating.

The show at the Gross McCleaf Gallery runs until September 27th, 2008.