Art Babble is a terrific site that promises to get even better, and probably rapidly.

Art Babble, the tagline for which is “Play Art Loud”, aggregates art related videos from a variety of sources, most notably museums like the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Arts & Design, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Norman Rockwell Museum, Rubin Museum of Art, San Jose Museum of Art, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Van Gogh Museum, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; along with Public TV station KQED.

For the most part these seem to be high end, professionally made videos that delve into a variety of art subjects. I’ve only had chance to watch one full video so far, and perhaps I got lucky, but I found it fascinating, illuminating and nicely erudite without being stuffy or overly technical.

Research in progress: Van Gogh and contemporaries (images above), from the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, is a short in which a restorer from the museum examines a painting by Van Gogh and a painting by Monet side by side, utilizing a range of approaches, from naked eye to microscope to x-ray to ultraviolet, and explores similarities in their painting technique, the use of broken color and the choice to allow the ground to show through the brushstrokes to add to the color and texture of the painting.

if the other videos are of this quality, I’ll be looking for a lot of spare moments to return to the site.

You can view the list of videos by topic (”Channels”), by artist, by series or by the participating institution.

Cheeming Boey draws on styrofoam coffee cups with a sharpie pen.

Those of us who have a tendency to doodle on whatever surface is handy may not think that surprising, but the degree of skill and work that he puts into his unusual medium is outstanding.

His subjects range from cartoons to detailed stippled portraits to elaborate decorative drawings inspired by the style of Japanese prints.

The drawings use the entire circumference of the cop, connecting with themselves in a continuous band. The flicker set of his cup drawings features them set against a mirror and also often includes multiple views of the same cup.

There is a photo sequence of his process and a video as well.

Boey’s cups sell in galleries for $120 to $220 and are sometimes placed in plastic cases. There is an article on him on the OC Register.

You’ll often hear disparaging remarks about unorthodox art materials, particularly when they’re not “archival”. I dont’ know about the Sharpie ink, but Boey’s styrofoam “canvas”, as any eco-warrior will tell you, will last for a long long time.

Addendum: The Sharpie blog has an interview with Boey

[Via digg]

As a fun addition to my previous article on W. W. Denslow, here’s a piece on The Design Inspiration that has collected some contemporary artists’ interpretations of the major characters form the Wizard of Oz book and film: 25 Various Styles of The Wizard of Oz Illustrations.

To this list you can add Nancy Dorser, Marvel Comics’ Skottie Young and Image Comics’ Enrique Fernández (also here).

(Images above: Julian Totino Tedesco, Lee Gaston, Tony Papesh, Skottie Young, Enrique Fernández)

Many more people are familiar with the 1939 MGM movie The Wizard of Oz than are familiar with the source book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, written by Frank L. Baum and illustrated by W. W. Denslow.

Though not as iconically linked with the title as, say John Tenniel was with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, William Wallace Denslow was the definitive illustrator for the first Oz book, and was co-owner of the copyright.

The latter fact, and Denslow’s claim on profits from a very successful stage production of the story in 1902, for which he designed sets and costumes, caused a rift between Denslow and Baum; and Baum refused to work with him thereafter.

Denslow had previously collaborated with Baum on three other children’s books.

The following series of Oz books were illustrated by John R. Neil, an excellent illustrator with a very different style. Subsequent interpretations of the books were more in keeping with Neil than Denslow.

Denslow was an editorial cartoonist, with strong political views, leading many to look for political meanings in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (see this Wikipedia article). He was born here in Philadelphia and studied at the National Academy of Design and Cooper Institute in New York.

After his split with Baum, Denslow went on to illustrate other books with his now famous name, such as Denslow’s Mother Goose and Denslow’s Night Before Christmas, but it was royalties from the original OZ book and play that enabled him to buy an island off the coast of Bermuda and proclaim himself as its ruler, King Denslow I.

The best online source for Denslow’s Oz illustrations is the always enchanting BibliOdyssey (see my previous post on BibliOdyssey, and here), which has an article on Baum with nice large reproductions of many of the multi-color plates and monochromatic illustrations from the book (click on the illustrations in the article).

The original edition was very elaborate and stretched the book printing paradigms of the time, but the expensive printing costs apparently contributed to the book’s great success.

You can see a reproduction of the entire original edition of the book on The Library of Congress.

Through some remarkable combination of circumstance and personal strength, the work of Judith Leyster was not lost to us; as must have been the case with countless potential women artists who were denied the opportunity to even pick up a brush by centuries of restrictive social convention.

Leyster was active in Harrlem and Amsterdam in the first half of the 17th Century. She painted still life, portraits and genre scenes; particularly domestic scenes of women, a subject which she effectively pioneered. Many of her works feature dramatic lighting, and have a visible light source in the painting, an unusual practice at the time.

It’s presumed because of stylistic similarities that she was a student of Frans Hals, to whom much of her work was attributed for many years, including the image above, top, Serenade. To have had her work mistaken for that of Hals is a testament to her skill.

She also showed the influence of the Utrecht painters who took their inspiration from Caravaggio . She married painter Jan Miense Molenaer, whose work she easily outshone, and shared a studio with him, along with models and props found in both of their paintings.

The image above, bottom left, is a self portrait. Like most artists’ self portraits at the time, it was essentially a demonstration of her skill and an advertisement for her abilities as a portraitist.

This work is in the collection of the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., where it is currently the centerpiece of a show celebrating Leyster’s 400th birthday, Judith Leyster 1609-1660. The exhibition runs until November 29, 2009.

There is a click-thgough slideshow (accompanied by period music) on the national Gallery site.

Leyster’s active career was short, truncated by her duties as a mother, but at least we have her oeuvre as it stands.

[Suggestion and link courtesy of Larry Roibal (see my post on Larry Roibal)]

Today is the birthday of Maxfield Parrish, one of the great illustrators form the “Golden Age” of American illustratraton.

For more, see my previous post on Maxfield Parrish, which includes a list of links to galleries of his work and other resources.

I’ve included a few additional resources below that I’ve come across since then, in particular the large reproductions from The Arabian Nights on ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive.

The list on my previous post is the primary one, however, with the most resources and images.

The wonderfully demented art of Basil Wolverton, a cartoonist who helped put the “Ugh” in ugly and the “Gross” in gross-out with his work for Mad Comics (later Mad Magazine) in the 1950’s and 60’s, will be on display at the Gladstone Gallery in New York From June 20 to August 14, 2009.

The gallery has a selection of his work online that inclides pieces from many stages of his career, from early, more innocent cartoons, to the gross-out “Beautiful Girl of the Month” that made his reputation, to the apocalyptic Bible illustrations to which he devoted his later career.

There is a review of the show in the New York Times.

For more, including links to more of his art on the web, see my previous post about Basil Wolverton.

Cowboy Artists of America is an organization devoted, in the words of the founders:

To perpetuate the memory and culture of the Old West as typified by the late Frederic Remington, Charles Russell and others;

To hold an annual joint exhibition of the works of active members.

It is in the section of the organization’s web site devoted to the latter that you will find images of their work, in oil, water media and drawings, as well as dimensional works. Here is a link to the 2008 Awards, others are listed in the sidebar.

There are also selected works, usually one or two, shown with the members’ bios.

In my quick tour of the site, I found a number of artists that bear further investigation individually, but here is a nice opportunity to see them as a group.

This year’s 44th Annual Show will be at the Phoenix Art Museum in October.

(Images above: John Moyers, Fred Fellows, Bill Owen, R.S. Riddick, Martin Grelle)

[Via Don Coker]

Georgia artist Don Coker found himself at a crossroads this year when the round of cutbacks and layoffs sweeping the newspaper industry (which is being hit by both the economic downturn and the changing paradigm of how news is delivered) caused him to be laid off from his long time position as a newspaper illustrator, cartoonist, caricaturist, art director and designer.

Coker had for a couple of years been following the “painting a day” phenomenon, and was particularly inspired by its originator, Duane Keiser, and an early practitioner, Julian Merrow-Smith (see my posts on “painting a day“, Duane Keiser, and Julian Merrow-Smith).

Coker decided this was an opportune time to explore that avenue, and started a painting blog called “A Daily Curmudgeon“. The intention is to do small oil paintings in the format common to painting a day blogs, 5×5 or 5×7″, but to indulge in his fondness for whimsical character studies rather than the usual small still life or landscape subjects that are the staple of the genre.

Coker says his painting process is to start with a blank canvas or gessoed illustration board and to take a small brush loaded with burnt umber and just start pushing and pulling until an image begins to suggest itself. This has led so far to an array of odd characters as well as a portrait of Shakespeare and a homage to Van-Gogh self portraits.

Be sure to click on the images in the blog to see the large version, and Coker’s technique, which can be painterly or smoothly refined as subject dictates.

Something tells me that Coker’s interests and multi-faceted talents will lead to a wider range of subject matter and approach in the future, but in the meanwhile, his small painted characters are a delight (and a steal at the auction prices he’s asking, I don’t think anyone knows about his blog yet, he just started a few days ago).

Assembled Artifacts, a show of sculptural objects that opened today at Device Gallery in San Diego, is aptly named.

The wonderfully odd and eclectic collections of mechanical parts, metal objects, leather and cloth, have assembled into sculptures of figures, vehicles, robots, devices and animals by the participating artists.

As is often the case with these kinds of assemblages, there is great attention given to the nature, appearance and surface qualities of the materials chosen. Color is often subdued, and texture plays a dominant role. Shape, however, is the main focus, with found objects given relationships that produce recognizable forms, sometimes with oddly unsettling resonance.

The group exhibit includes work by Stephane Halleux, who I wrote about previously.

Assembled Artifacts runs until August 29, 2009.

(Image above: Jud Turner, Oliver Pauwels, Christopher Conte, Michiro Matsuoka, Stephane Halleux, Lewis Tardy)