It may be disconcerting to some, but I actually enjoy the fact that art history, like history in general, is a fluid landscape. New discoveries and the reinterpretation of existing information can make textbooks obsolete overnight and reverse the fortunes of collectors and museums; and can also lead to excitement, disappointment or simply clarification.

A reversal of a reversal has led to excitement, and improved the fortunes of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, as the attribution of Portrait of a Man, a painting in their collection once assigned to Spanish master Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, but later downgraded to “workshop of” (meaning painted perhaps under his guidance, but by lesser hands) has recently been reexamined, cleaned, restored and reassigned to the master’s hand.

Velázquez is one of the great masters of Western art, considered the greatest of all painters by some, and the reassignment of the painting to him is a significant event.

This is particularly interesting because the painting, when originally attributed to him, was thought to be a self-portrait, an assessment that just seems “right” to me. I say that not because I’m any kind of expert on Velázquez, but simply because the portrait has that particular look I’ve seen in dozens of self-portraits.

This is partly, I think, due to the staring-directly-at-you face-in-the-mirror pose, but partly due that special look that I think comes from the mental shift into that mode of seeing that accompanies drawing and painting from life. (See my posts on Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, The Face of Leonardo? and Marie-Denise Villers)

The portrait matches that of the figure of a bystander in Velázquez’s Surrender of Breda (to the far right, image above with detail). That figure also stares directly at us (or the mirror) and has something of that same look to the eyes. This figure too was long thought to be a self portrait while Portrait of a Man was still attributed to Velázquez.

Portrait of a Man is more of a study than a finished work, but the face is pretty well finished. To think that we have the face of the artist staring out at us is a wonderful addition to the treat of knowing we have another Velázquez in the world.

Terrible Yellow Eyes is a blog established by illustrator Cory Godbey to express his fascination and admiration for the work of Maurice Sendak, and in particular, his classic Where the Wild Things Are.

The blog is a growing collection of artwork from a variety of artists, each expressing their own admiration for Sendak’s work with homages to the book and its characters.

The list of contributing artists includes some wonderful talents and Godby has curated an exhibition at Gallery Nucleus in Alhambra, CA, also titled Terrible Yellow Eyes, that puts many of these works together in a gallery setting.

The Gallery Nucleus exhibition runs to October 6, 2009. Godby’s blog has some photos from the opening.

Here is the initial post in which Godby explains his inspiration for Terrible Yellow Eyes.

Both Godby’s blog and the Gallery Nucleus page about the exhibition have links to the artist’s sites and blogs, a list that can keep Lines and Colors readers happily clicking deeper for may hours (timesink warning).

Images above:
Jason Caffoe
C.G. Young
Joel Furtado
David Miles
Mike Daley
Mike Lee
Shaun Pendergast
Saud Boksmati

[Thanks to Masha Dutoit for the suggestion]

Maurice Sendak has been a window dresser for F.A.O. Schwartz, an illustrator for All-American Comics, and, since 1951, the author and illustrator of some of the most well-known and influential books in children’s literature.

A fair bit of attention is currently focused on Where the Wild Things Are, his award winning and controversial classic that has just been adapted as a movie.

Sendak is the author/illustrator of several other books and the illustrator of over 40 more. My personal favorite is In the Night Kitchen, the illustrations for which harken back to the illustrators of the early 20th Century, as well as carrying a flavor of the surreal (i.e. dream based) comic strip flights of Winsor McCay.

The controversy about Where the Wild Things Are focused on the darkness of the illustrations, deemed “too frightening” by adults unfamiliar with the nature of traditional fairy tales.

In the Night Kitchen aroused concerns because the young protagonist loses his clothing and is naked for the first part of the story, something innocent to children who only learn the concept of shame that shame-filled adults teach them. Many of those shame-filled adults have challenged the book, tried to ban it from libraries or actually censor library copies by defacing the book, covering the “naughty bits”.

Also controversial is the implied darkness of the story sequence in which the threat of being placed in an oven with the bread dough, by bakers sporting Hitler-like mustaches, is an allusion to Sendak’s own preoccupation with the events of the Holocaust. (See the excerpt on Google Books.)

Sendak’s willingness to interject darkness and sophisticated themes (however tangentially referenced) into his children’s books, along with wild imaginings and his wonderful use of color and texture, light and shadow, has made his work resonate with generations of readers, young and old.

The Rosenbach Museum and Library here in Philadelphia is the official repository for Sendak’s work, with a permanent gallery devoted to his collection and frequent special exhibits.

I don’t know of an online repository for Sendak’s illustrations, but searching on Google, Google Books and Amazon will produce plenty of images. I’ve listed some other resources below.

One of them is an audio interview in which Sendak discusses one of my all time favorite children’s books, Crocket Johnson’s Harold and the Purple Crayon.

Randy “RK” Post is an illustrator who has a fascination with monsters and a penchant for the gruesome and grotesque, an inclination that serves him well in his role creating fantasy and gaming illustrations for clients like TSR, Wizards of the Coast, LucasFilm, 20th Century Fox, Sega, and others. He also counts comics companies like Marvel, DC and Dark Horse among his clients.

Post’s richly detailed and vividly imagined monsters are joined by warriors, priestesses, wizards, and demonic figures of all shapes and sizes. His intricate renderings of characters and their accoutrements, along with his wildly bizarre monsters, are often set against spare, but highly textured backgrounds, giving a nice counterbalance while still serving up lots of fantasy eye candy.

Post also plays with his color palette, contrasting deep, color filled darks with intense color areas, and arraying them across detailed costume and creature designs.

There is a book of Post’s work called Postmortem: The Art of RK Post.

Todd Bonita is a New Hampshire based painter who studied at the Art Institute of Boston, and here in Philadelphia at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

He has worked as a muralist, designer, sculptor, painter and illustrator, and has over 30 books to his credit.

As an oil painter, Bonita paints a variety of subjects, but focuses in particular on compositions involving small boats in the water. These are often in shallows, adding interesting effects of rocky, sandy or muddy bottom surfaces through layers of translucent water; along with weathered docks, reeds and shorelines arranged against the often colorful and texturally rich boats themselves.

Texture plays such a part in these paintings, in fact, that at first glance, I thought they were thickly layered pastels. Bonita works most often in oil on Masonite, wood panel or canvas; and the paintings featured on his blogs (he maintains two, painting life and Todd Bonita’s Art Blog) and web site vary in size from roughly 24×30″ to 6×8″.

He finds in his subjects wonderful areas filled with colors and textures of ground and water between his boats and their surroundings. Look at those areas as negative shapes to appreciate the strong design aspect of his compositions.

[Via Mick McGinty (see my posts on Mick McGinty)]

Dan Santat is a California based illustrator and children’s book writer.

His clients include The Wall Street Journal, Esquire, The Village Voice, Harper Collins, Simon and Schuster and many others. Santat is also the creator of the Disney Channel animated series, The Replacements.

Santat’s style ranges from detailed to quite spare, but always seems to have a freshness and snap, in part because of his lively linework, rich colors and loose, painterly textures.

Santat used to paint in acrylics. He moved into a process of starting pieces in acrylic and developing the finish in Photoshop; and now does many of his illustrations directly in Photoshop.

Even when working digitally, Santat says he works from dark to light with opaque strokes of color, analogous to the way he paints in traditional media.

Santat’s site includes a blog, portfolio and a list of books he has authored or contributed to.

There is an interview with him on Diskursdisko.

[Via LCSV4]

At first I thought these images by Japanese artist Kazuki Takamatsu were 3-D depth mattes, renderings of 3-D CGI models in which shades of gray are assigned to areas according to their distance from the virtual camera. (Their white, sculptural quality also brought to mind the paintings of A. Andrew Gonzalez.)

However, even if CGI depth mattes, or something similar, are the source material or inspiration for them, Takamatsu’s finished works are actually gouache paintings, and fairly large in scale as you can see from these photos at Gallery Tomura.

Takamatsu uses the term Distanfeerism to name his style. Other than that, and the fact that he graduated from Tohoku University of Art and Design, I can find very little information about the artist.

Takamatsu’s site is in Japanese, but there are link titles in English.

(Note: the sites linked here may be considered mildly NSFW.)

[Via Jason Kottke]

Those in the art establishment who like to rewrite art history, or simply ignore it, in the defense of their position that illustration is somehow “not art”, conveniently ignore the number of well known artists who also happened to be illustrators.

A case in point is Winslow Homer, widely regarded to be one of the most prominent American artists and renowned as a master of watercolor, whose career as an illustrator is largely glossed over.

Homer worked for over two decades as an illustrator and visual journalist, reporting from the front lines of the Civil War and portraying more bucolic domestic scenes for popular periodicals like Harper’s Weekly.

His powerful and sensitive drawings, full of sunlight and shadow, emotion and atmosphere, were captured for print in astonishingly intricate wood engravings made by professional wood engravers (who are unsung artistic marvels to my mind), who reproduced the artist’s drawings with a beautiful range of tones made from delicate linework.

Wood engraving is a process that takes the age-old concept of woodcuts a step further, using harder wood and cutting into the end grain instead of the normal block surface. That and the use of tools initially developed for metal engraving, notably the burin, made for a super-fine line that gave an almost photographic appearance.

Homer’s wood-engraved illustrations are the focus of Winslow Homer: Illustrating America, an exhibition organized by the Brooklyn Museum (and taken largely from their collection) and currently showing at the Jersey City Museum in New Jersey.

The exhibition runs until December 23, 2009, and is accompanied by a complimentary exhibit called Hudson Views: A Celebration of the River that features wood engraved illustrations by other artists from similar periodicals.

There isn’t an online gallery for the exhibition, but you can view many of the illustrations in the Brooklyn Museum’s collection.

As these illustrations were mass produced, many are available from dealers in prints and etchings. I’ve listed a few other resources below.

Caravaggio’s striking painting The Supper at Emmaus is one of the most respected and influential paintings in the canon of Western Art.

The occasion of the painting crossing the Atlantic to be on display at The Art Institute of Chicago is an occasion to be noted; similar to the significant visit of Vermeer’s The Milkmaid to the Met in NYC.

The rarity of Caravaggio paintings in U.S. museums in general makes the visit of what is perhaps his most significant work even more worthy of note.

In exchange for the loan of the Art Institute’s The Crucifixion by Francisco de Zubaran, the painting will be on loan from The National Gallery, London to the Art Institute from October 10, 2009 to January 31, 2010.

Caravaggio’s display of virtuosity here is well known (in spite of the oddly disproportionate rendering of the right hand of the disciple to our right). The painting is also fascinating for the compositional choices the artist has made, the fingers extending off canvas at right, the about-to-stand position of the foreground figure, the rich detail of the still life arrangement on the table, the dramatic shadows against the wall, seemingly in contradiction to the direction of light in other parts of the painting, and the interplay between the figures and the directions of their gazes.

Caravaggio painted two versions of this scene, separated by time, space and widely different circumstances in the artist’s life; as reflected in the dark, subdued version in Milan, a stark contrast to the richly colored, dramatic composition of the London painting.

Scott Musgrove is a painter, illustrator, comics artist and “Co-executive Director of the National Institute of Creative Biology”. The latter self-appointed title refers to his new imaginary bestiary The Late Fauna of Early North America: The Art of Scott Musgrove.

Musgrove is the creator and producer of the Fat Dog Mendoza TV series, which was based on his comic book of the same name, published by Dark Horse Comics. He is also the artist and writer for Loose Teeth, published by Fantagraphics Books and has had work included in a number of comics anthologies.

Lately, Musgrove has been focusing on gallery art, in particular his series of fanciful animals, in the portrayal of which he sees himself as continuing in the tradition of James Audubon (if Audubon’s subjects were from another planet, perhaps).

His whimsical take on various fauna are portrayed in compositions that combine a cartoon-like sensibility in their forms with rendereing in a detailed painting technique that speaks to his declared influences of Carlos Crivelli, Jan van Eyck and Heironymous Bosh, along with contemporary artists like Botero and Odd Nerdrum.

Musgrove’s web site includes galleries of his paintings, arranged into categories like “Accidential Organisms” and “Natural Alchemy”, along with watercolors and a section on Fat Dog Mendoza.

He also maintains a blog, in which he goes into more detail about his projects, and in which you can find out more about the new book and the limited edition version; and also see his work in place in an exhibition space, giving you a feeling for its scale.

There is an article on Wired with some large images, an interview on Millionaire Playboy, an additional gallery on the beinArt Surreal Art Collective and a gallery (scroll down) and short bio on Jonathan Levine Gallery.