Tritan Elwell is an illustrator who graduated from the High School of Music and Art in New York and went on to attend the School of Visual Arts there on a full scholarship. In addition he worked as an assistant to photorealist painter Charles Bell. He returned to the School of Visual Arts as an instructor, teaching classes in painting and illustration.

He has maintained a client list that includes HarperCollins, Penguin, Avon, Pocket Books, Bantam and Tor Books. Tor books has a gallery of his work.

He has also been featured in Print, Communication Arts and the Spectrum collections of contemporary fantastic art.

Elwell utilizes contrasts, not only of value and color, but of degree of detail, to control how he directs your eye and snaps attention to the focal point of the image. He also maintains a designerly eye to the graphic elements of his images, giving them a balance of positive elements and negative spaces.

The image shown here is perhaps not as representative of his work as some others might be, but seemed delightfully appropriate for Halloween.

I was unable to find a dedicated web site for Elwell, but I’ve gather a list of links to galleries of his work.

The study of human anatomy has long been a juncture of art and science. The dissection of cadavers, at times forbidden by the church and state, has been of fascination to artists as much as to those endeavoring to figure out how this wondrous collection of bones, flesh and fluids works.

Just as the scientific or medical examination of the body has been of interest to artists working to represent the human form, so artists have played a vital role in recording and making clear those discoveries, a tradition carried on today in the specialties of medical and scientific illustration.

Dream Anatomy is a special online feature from the U.S. National Library of Medicine, originally accompanying a physical exhibit at the National Library of Medicine, which explores this relationship and the history of anatomical representation, including a fascinating gallery of anatomical art.

Many of the pieces, like the image above, Anatomia per uso et intelligenza del disegno ricercata…, are collaborative works between anatomists and artists, in this case anatomist Bernardino Genga and artist Charles Errard.

The exhibit includes a broad range of images, both in the gallery and accompanying articles, from modern anatomical drawing, Renaissance, Baroque and Victorian artists, as well as Aboriginal “skeleton” drawings and contemporary gallery of children’s drawings of “Under Your Skin“.

They missed the chance, though, to include some of the representations of “spiritual” anatomy, as seen in the work of visionary painters like Alex Grey and Mati Klarwein.

In the image above, I love the foreground figure, apparently an angel, with wing bones connected to the scapulae.

[Link via BoingBoing]

Chris Appelhans, who I profiled back in 2006, has added some new images to his site, Froghat Studios, along with a fun short Superman animation.

The latter is more of a slide show than an actual animation, but it works quite well, timed to music and with nice touches (I love the scene of Superman doing the Boy Scout thing for an old lady toward the end — image above, top right).

There are additional updates to the site including additional concept art for Monster House, the enigmatic and fascinating “Alice in Underworld’ project (image above, bottom) and concept art for what is apparently a movie with a title, or working title, of Highmoon (top left).

Appelhans’ site is essentially just a list of links to images. Unfortunately there is still little or no information about the projects or Appelhans himself.

I found out about the Superman animation when Joe Gordon, writer for the Forbidden Planet International Blog Log in the UK, wrote to say he had found my previous post about Appelhans in his own search for information about him.

You will find an additional, and quite nice, selection of Appelhans’ work, both originals and prints for sale, at Gallery Nucleus.

I discovered Luther van Gorder from a striking small painting of his that attracted my attention in the midst of some of the terrific French and American Impressionist work in the current Paths to Impressionism exhibit at the Newark Museum in New Jersey.

The piece is called In the Park, showing women strolling in New York’s Central Park around the turn of the 20th Century (left, top); and it’s one of those wonderful combinations of impressionist color and free, open brushwork with the traditional academic draftsmanship and geometric solidity that the French Impressionists rejected to great extent, that exemplifies why I love American Impressionism. The original is in the Worcester Art Museum (from which much of the current exhibit at the Newark Museum is drawn).

Van Gorder was from Ohio, studied with the brilliant American Impressionist William Merrit Chase at the Chase School of Art, and under Emile Carolus-Duran, the French painter and atelier master under whom several of the French Impressionists studied, and at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

He painted scenes of rural France, urban Paris, particularly its colorful flower markets, and the banks of the New York Sound among other places; and exhibited at the National Academy of Design and The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

It’s interesting to compare his Japanese Lanterns (left, bottom) to Sargent’s beautiful Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose which was likely its inspiration. Van Gorder also studied in London for a time, where he met Sargent and was exposed to the work of Whistler, the influence of which shows in the tonalist character of some of his work.

I love the line in Christopher Rahn’s website bio that goes: “As the son of a hippie and a photographer, I was encouraged to pursue what I loved and see how far I could take it… look what happened.”

Look what happened indeed. Rahn is an illustrator with an emphasis on the fantastic and otherworldly, who uses painterly textures, atmospheric effects, sharp contrasts of value and color and compositional tension to give his images drama and visual punch.

Unfortunately, his bio provides little in the way of actual biographical information, other than the fact that he lives in the San Fransisco Bay area, so I can’t tell you much about what he’s done or who his clients are.

I was able to glean a little from his news page — he has apparently done work for Wizards of the Coast, has been published in the Spectrum collections of contemporary fantastic art, and I saw at least one Village Voice cover and a book cover in his portfolio on Lindgren & Smith, so I know he works in those areas. His News section also mentions that he received a scholarship to the annual Illustration Academy in Sarasota in 2007 as part of an award from the NY Society of Illustrators.

Looking through his portfolio, you’ll find a variety of subjects, but always a bent for the strange and dramatic. Rahn works both in traditional media, oils and acrylic, and digital painting. His galleries on his own site and on the Lindgren & Smith sites are organized that way. There is also a portfolio of his work on Workbook that is divided, somewhat redundantly, into Fantasy/Sci-Fi and Oil/Acrylics; though it does contain some images not found on the other sites.

One of the best selections of his work, as is the case with many fantasy and science fiction artists, is in the Tor Books gallery. While I was on the Tor site, I jumped over to Art Director Irene Gallo’s blog, The Art Department, and sure enough, found an interview with Rahn, from which I learned that he received a BA in Illustration from the Academy of Art in San Francisco; and found mention by him of admiration for the work of Jon Foster (also here), whose influence I though I could see in Rahn’s work, particularly in his painterly approach and intriguingly textured backgrounds.

I found another article on Gallo’s blog with a mention of the Society of Illustrators Student Scholarship Exhibit at which Rahn won the Illustration Academy Award. (If you ever want to know what’s going on in fantasy, science fiction and fantastic art, check in on The Art Department.)

Suzanne Duranceu is a Canadian illustrator whose paintings evidence a strong sense of textural detail and a delicate refinement that give them a feeling of presence and gravity.

In other hands images like her version of works by Holbein or Gainsborough as represented by cats might lapse into kitsch, but she handles it with such élan that it becomes a naturalistic extension of the painter’s style.

Her other work ranges from fanciful to serious, and often makes use of detail and value contrasts to give weight and solidity to otherwise whimsical scenes; like her Newlyweds, the Owl and the Pussycat, enjoying a seaside picnic (presumably with the client’s delightful foodstuffs) before embarking on a honeymoon cruise in their beautiful pea-green dingy.

She also has on her site some intricately detailed interpretations of ecosystems (unfortunately in small images), and a fascinating Escher-like series of world views called Trilogy.

The web site is apparently still in progress. I found the navigation throughout somewhat problematic, the individual image dots didn’t respond to my click (at least on the Mac), but the Next and Previous arrows seem to work OK. A couple of the sections are still unfinished, including the bio section. For that you can turn to her bio on ZAKS Illustrators Source.

Wang Hui was a Chinese painter who gathered up influences from past masters and wove them into his own interpretation of their methods and techniques; and refreshed the traditions of Chinese painting in the process.

Active during the early Qing period (17th Century), Wang was exposed at an early age to the influence of some of the most prominent orthodox painters of his time, two of whom, Wang Shimin and Wang Jian, were his direct teachers. Together with Wang Yuanqi, these painters are in retrospect referred to as “the four Wangs” and they formed the core of the “orthodox school” of traditional painting during the period.

Wang Hui revived the practice of painting reverential copies of paintings by masters from previous periods, notably from the Song (960-1279), Yua (1279-1368) and Ming (1368-1644) periods. The idea of copying and learning from previous masters is more familiar in Western painting tradition. Wang apparently gets downplayed as academic and derivative by some critics, but he reached such a high level of refinement in his own synthesis of those influences that he is highly regarded in the eyes of others.

Since my knowledge of traditional Chinese painting is exceedingly shallow, I’m not troubled by these concerns, and to my untrained Western eyes, his work is simply beautiful.

Whenever I think about traditional Chinese painting, the word “poetic” comes to mind, in the sense that written poetry is often a distillation, the employment of fewer words, carefully arranged, to tell a story or evoke a mood in a more immediate way than by extended prose.

Similarly, Chinese ink painting seems to be distilled, so that each stroke or tone is weighted with extra meaning, as if alluding to some hidden secret.

Wang Hui’s landscapes resonate with that feeling, his sweeping vistas of undulating curvilinear mountain ranges, mist ladled valleys, graceful trees and sinuous rivers seem transporting, at once etherial and immediate, hinting at the rewards to be found in extended contemplation of the scene.

The images above are two sections from a large scale scroll, 26 inches high and over 45 feet long (68cm x 14m); one of three such scrolls depicting the Kangxi Emporor’s tour of Southern China done by Wang Hui and his assistants. Though they are ostensibly the focus of the story being told, the tiny figures, characteristic of traditional Chinese landscape painting, emphasize the humble place of humankind within the grandeur of the natural world.

This scroll is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which has a dedicated feature on it with several images: The Kangxi Emperor’s Southern Tour, Scroll Three: Ji’nan to Mount Tai.

The Met has mounted a special exhibit Landscapes Clear and Radiant: The Art of Wang Hui that extends from now until January 4, 2009 and features 27 works form several collections in China and the U.S., along with a selection of paintings from the Song, Yaun and Ming period masters who were Inspirational to Wang Hui.

As I noted when I first wrote about it back in 2005, SketchCrawl is a series of outdoor group drawing events, originally conceived by Pixar artist and illustrator Enrico Casarosa, as the artistic equivalent of a pubcrawl (seem my post on Enrico Casarosa, and here).

He started to organize the events ahead of time, in which artists would gather at a predetermined point and wander the city (originally San Francisco) sketching in various places, usually with small sketchbooks and portable watercolor equipment.

Since then the event has continued, expanded and spread to multiple locations worldwide, each organized by a local individual, but timed for the same day and coordinated through the SkwtchCrawl site and forums.

The next event, World Wide SketchCrawl #20 is this this Saturday, October 25th, 2008.

You can see listings of some of the events in various locations around the world in the SketchCrawl Forums (note at the bottom a link to the second page), view some suggested materials (image above, left, both images by Enrico Casarosa), or view the page on how to participate, even if starting your own local SketchCrawl with as few as one participant.

You can find more on the SketchCrawl site or blog.

[Link to current event via Drawn!]

Shy the Sun, the South African animation production company formed around the talents of Ree Treweek and Jannes Hendrikz from the Black Heart Gang, has produced a new animated TV spot, this one for Bakers Precious Biscuits.

See my previous post on Shy the Sun’s Sea Orchestra spot for United Airlines.

The new spot dovetails live shots into the computer animation and seems to rely a bit less on drawing, but brings to bear the quirky visionary talents of the Black Heart team in a short tale of dropped cookies that waken a forest populated with storybook characters.

Little Bo Peep, the Owl and the Pussycat, the Dish and the Spoon and a host of others come out to indulge in the cookies in the midst of a delightfully oddball fairy tale forest.

It might be fun just to go through and see how many references there are to particular fairy tales, fables and children’s classic storybooks like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. (See if you can catch the dish making a face and hat for himself out of cookies.)

See my previous post on the Blackheart Gang’s Tale of How and illustrator Ree Treweek (also here). You can also see the Tale of How on Vimeo now.

This is obviously a group effort. Some of the credits are: Client: Bakers, Agency: Ogilvy, Johannesburg, Animation Directors: Jannes Hendrikz and Ree Treweek (Shy the Sun)
Production House: Blackginger, Live Action Director: Bruce Paynter (Cab Films); and the full credits are listed on the Shy the Sun project page along with the video.

[Link courtesy of Shy the Sun producer Nina Pfeiffer]

Back in 2005 I found myself writing an arts oriented blog; partly because I enjoyed writing it, and partly because in the process I was discovering terrific artists I wouldn’t have sought out or encountered otherwise.

One of them was Duane Keiser, who had originated the “painting a day” blog concept; painting daily postcard-size paintings, mostly still life, and posting them to a blog called A Painting a Day. At the time, it was a novel idea.

I then discovered Julian Merrow-Smith, who was pursuing a similar process; but much to my delight, was painting not only the intimate still life subjects that lend themselves most readily to that discipline, but also beautiful small landscapes of the Provence countryside. He was posting these to his aptly named blog, Postcard from Provence.

I wrote articles on both artists; and in the subsequent years I watched the painting-a-day blog phenomenon grow from two to hundreds of daily painting blogs; many of them named for variations on “a painting a day” or “postcard from wherever”.

Over that time I’ve written articles on many of the best daily painters, as well as hundreds of other artists and topics, but I find myself coming back to Merrow-Smith’s site more frequently than the others.

I’ve tried to pin down why, exactly. Merrow-Smith is an excellent painter, but the potential subject matter of Lines and Colors encompasses a wide range of visual art, and virtually all of art history, so it’s not like I would favor him over Sargent or Vermeer.

For someone who has been to Provence just enough to respond to images of the area with a wistful desire to return, there was an element of personal identification and visual pleasure in his interpretations of the Provence landscape; and perhaps a projection into the imagined life of a painter in the rural French countryside, evoked by his simple but intensely observed still life subjects; but there was something else that kept me checking back more frequently than to most other sites.

I knew that I particularly enjoyed looking back through his archives, noticing the sequence of his subjects, how long he would pursue a series of still life subjects, then move to landscape, interject a striking portrait, and then return to still life and then back to landscape.

Within each avenue of subject matter there were fascinating smaller cycles of variation in approach, in the type of still life, or composition and choice of landscape; each with recurring themes, like his wonderful shadow-crossed rural French roads or his shimmering views of the Rhone.

In thinking about it, and looking back over his work, I finally realized that what makes his paintings particularly compelling for me is that they represent a story.

There’s a narrative here, a chronology of artistic discovery, perseverance, discipline, economic survival, and the ongoing effort to continue to grow and learn as an artist. Postcard from Provence represents several years of the living of an artist’s life, encapsulated in a series of small paintings, each one of which seems to be a penetratingly direct and honest observation of what the artist encountered as he met his daily joining of brush and paint.

Merrow-Smith has just reached something of a landmark, posting his 1,000th Postcard painting, a beautiful still life that seems to sum up the rich contrasts of value, color and texture that have marked his study of the simple and small (image at top), followed by his 1,001st, a landscape without land, the crown of a lime tree, bright against the Provence sky, not far from the door of his home (image at left, top). I’ve added a few more of my favorites, including two portraits; the one on the left is a self-portrait.

You’ll find his archives can be viewed chronologically by month, sorted by subject; or, if you’d like to see the thumbnails of all 1,001 paintings, viewed by full archive, which gives you an overview and sense of the story that I’ve found so expressive.

The process of writing my (almost) daily blog posts has taught me a few things about creative discipline, and also; after many fallow years, inspired me to take up painting again. And there I find my other fascination with Merrow-Smith’s process and progress — as a terrific example for painters, and other artists, of how to pursue art as a daily practice.

Addendum: The other portrait shown is of Merrow-Smith’s wife, cellist Ruth Phillips. (See this post’s comments.) I wondered if that might be the case, but wasn’t certain.

Katherine Tyrrell has a nice post about his 1,000th Postcard painting, including past comments on several of his pieces and an interesting interview with him about his work and his daily painting process. (See my post about Katherine Tyrrell.)

Also, there is a nice article about Merrow-Smith and his 1,000th Postcard in The Guardian.