Wojtek Siudmak is contemporary Polish born artist who studied at the College of Plastic Arts and Adacemy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He now resides in France.

Siudmak is a leading proponent of fantastic realism (sometimes called “magic realism”), a branch of fantastic art with one foot in classicism and the other in Surrealism. You can see both in his paintings, classical draftsmanship and technique in the service of free-wheelingly imaginative imagery. At times Daliesque, at others leaning toward Renaissance themes, Siudmak’s subjects swirl, morph, appear, disappear and fade from one image to another, occasionally revealing glimpses of hidden worlds.

Siudmak was associated with a group of artists, writers and filmmakers in Paris who resisted the currents of Modernism in the late 20th Century and became associated with the fantasy and science fiction illustration community. Siudmak’s paintings have been used for the covers of science fiction books, and he has actively illustrated others, including the Polish version of Frank Herbert’s Dune.

He has a web site with a gallery of both drawings and paintings, though I found the “pop up and close” routine a bit tiring. You may find it easier to browse his paintings on other sites like The Funny Web (2 pages) and Museum Syndicate (3 pages), but come back to Siudmak’s own site to go through his drawings, which are poorly represented elsewhere.

Note: sites should be considered mildly NSFW.

A question from a reader prompted me to revisit my 2006 post on Marie-Denise Villers, a talented but little known French portrait painter whose “one-hit-wonder” claim to fame was that her painting, now called Young Woman Drawing (detail, above), was for some time attributed to Neo-classical master Jaques-Louis David (also here).

The painting, which I believe is a self-portrait, shows a beautiful and intensely focused young woman staring directly at the viewer and drawing in a portfolio sheaf in her lap. Through an enigmatically cracked window pane behind her, what may be a pair of lovers confers on a railed walkway atop a wall. The painting is beautiful and striking when you see it in person, and it seemed unfortunate that there was little information on the artist or her other works at the time I was writing.

As the art resources on the Web are constantly being added to, I went looking to see if more information on Villers had cropped up in the three years since my post. The bad news is that there isn’t much more available on her. Apparently there just isn’t much information about her in general; though I did manage to find some links that I’ve added to the original post and listed below.

The good news is that the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has the painting in its collection, has added a larger, more color-accurate image to their listing, as well as a zoomable version of the image, which makes is possible to see the painting in more detail if you can’t make it to the Met to see it in person. I’ve used it to show the detail image above; for a view of the entire painting, and more of my comments on it, see my previous post on Marie-Denise Villers.

The Met has also added the painting to their Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History and makes mention of Villers and her sister, Marie-Victoire Lemoine, who was also a painter, in their related article on Eighteenth-Century Women Painters in France.

I also found a few other tidbits, including a painting in a past auction from Sotheby’s, A Young Woman Seated by a Window, which also has a zoomable image; though this work seems less accomplished than the piece in the Met. (I don’t know how long this auction image will remain available.)

Brian Despain’s world-weary and weather-beaten robots may be the “every robot” in all of us. At times active and engaged, at other times forlorn and seemingly lost, his dented and roughly textured copper-skinned automatons carry a darkly humorous portrayal of our own place amid the natural world.

I first wrote about Brian Despain back in 2006, when I pointed out my admiration for his approach to texture and subtle use of a controlled palette, plus my basic fondness for his original take on most things robotic.

Despain’s work is currently on view in a show at the Roq La Rue Gallery in Seattle, Washington until December 5th, 2009. There is also a page devoted to Despain on the gallery’s site that includes a video interview with the artist.

Despain’s own web site has been redesigned and expanded since my last writing, and there are also new resources elsewhere, including a Facebook page.

You will find some larger images on this blog post about a 2008 show at Roq la Rue.

There is also an iPhone app featuring Despain’s art, that can be appreciated simply as a gallery or used as iPhone wallpaper images, AppShopper review here, and iTunes link here.

[Via io9 and Drawn]

If, like me, you find yourself frequently frustrated with the relatively low resolution images provided by many museums and fine art sites; and tire of the frustrating little zoom windows that they provide for a “close up”, I have a suggestion for a site that you may not have considered.

This site has nice large images of museum quality art that happens to be changing hands. It is the Sotheby’s auction site.

Sotheby’s is a long established auction house through which some of the world’s most expensive (and notorious) art purchases have been transacted. Prior to their sales they post on their site previews of the items to be auctioned, in high enough resolution for potential buyers to take a look, and even bid online if inclined.

For those of us who can’t shell out a few million for the odd masterpiece here and there, the site is still a treasure trove of relatively high resolution images of terrific art.

You can’t pick and choose, of course; what’s up is what happens to be for sale, but I find it rare that I cannot check out an auction of art from the early 20th Century or earlier without encountering several pieces that make the visit worthwhile.

They currently list an auction of American Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture that is due to be auctioned in New York on December 3, 2009. It includes work by Everett Shinn, Jessie Wilcox Smith, Andrew Wyeth, Robert Henri, Childe Hassam, Thomas Hart Benton, Norman Rockwell, Mary Cassatt, Edward Redfield, Frederic Edwin Church, Thomas Moran, J.C. Leyendecker, Thomas Eakins, James Bama, Frederic Remington, and N.C. Wyeth, among others.

Click on “View E-Catalogue”, wait a few seconds for the pop-up window to populate with thumbnails, then maximize the window and scroll through the thumbnails to find what you like. Mouse over them to see the name of the piece and artist, and click to view the single piece. Then look for the “Zoom In” button below the image and use the plus sign to enlarge the image as large as it will go. The title block and zoom control can block part of the image, but you can get around that by moving your mouse to scroll.

Exit zoom and you can then use the next and previous buttons to move through the images, or use the navigation to return to the thumbnails.

The images are usually much larger than most encountered on the net, often large enough to see the brushstrokes quite nicely.

From the main pages you can choose “Explore Auctions” and find sales of old masters, 19th Century art, Russian painting, Impressionist and modern art and a variety of other auctions scheduled in locations across the world. There are several pages of auctions listed at any given time.

For any of them, click “Browse New E-Catalog” to get to the large images. There are also downloadable PDF catalogs for many of the auctions, but the images in them are not as large as those on the site.

Come back in a few weeks, and there will be another set of auctions to browse.

Do I see someone in the back raising their hand? Making a bid? No? A Question. “What about Christies?” you say.

Yes, Christie’s is the other high end art auction site, and you will find some wonderful pieces there as well, but their display is limited to the more common zoom in a box feature, albeit a larger one than usual. The Sotheby’s display is much nicer (though it’s certainly worthwhile browsing through the Christie’s lots).

So take a look through. You never know, you might find something you want to pick up for over the couch.

(Image above, with enlargement from full size image: The Courtship: J.C. Leyendecker; estimate: $30,000 – $50,000)

I’m fond of retro-futurism, the appreciation of past visions of the future; often the “future” in which we are currently living.

I’m particularly delighted with future visions rendered out in that wonderful ’50s & ’60s modern cartoon style that seems to be having a bit of a revival these days.

Disney’s Magic Highway, USA is a classic in the genre. Originally part of a TV program aired in 1958, it took off from visionary speculation about the U.S. Interstate Highway System, the construction of which had just been authorized two years prior.

The animation presaged some of the realistic aspects of that system, which had been championed by then-President Eisenhower as a national defense initiative. The animators then carried on into flights of imaginative fantasy about the future of automobile transportation.

It is at once naive, silly, fanciful, astute, ridiculous, clever and, at times, surprisingly predictive of things like rear-view cameras, digital dashboard read-outs (”onboard teletypes”) and the equivalent of GPS map displays.

Remember this is pre-Interstate Highway, pre-Jetsons, pre-space travel, pre-widespread commercial jet travel and produced at a time when computers as powerful as an iPhone took a up an entire room.

It is also remarkably insightful in the prediction of the de-centralization of urban areas into an idyllic version of contemporary suburban sprawl.

The animation and design work are a delight. Disney, both in animation and in their theme parks, often indulges in futurism, and this is one of the best examples from their animation studios.

Unfortunately, I don’t know of a source for the animation credits.

[Via Daring Fireball]

Milton Glaser is one of the most influential graphic designers of the last 50 years. Even if you haven’t heard his name, you’ve probably seen his work, from his iconic Dylan poster to his “I (heart) NY” design (yes, that one). Glaser has had a significant impact on design and illustration.

He has new book called Drawing is Thinking.

Shortly prior to the book’s release he was captured in this short (5 minute) video, Milton Glaser Draws & Lectures by C. Coy, in which he talks about drawing as he draws a picture of Shakespeare. (For some additional interest, here are some of Glaser’s cover illustrations for the Signet Classic Shakespeare series (part of a multi-page Flickr pool of Glaser designs and illustrations), and here is my post about portraits of Shakespeare.

Curiously, Glaser appears to be drawing with some kind of multi colored pencil that changes color in the process of the drawing.

[Via BoingBoing]

Giovanni Boldini was an Italian painter and printmaker, renowned for his fluid, sweeping portraits of society women. He is frequently associated with John Singer Sargent, sharing some of his dramatic, facile brushwork as well as his international lifestyle, living and working in Paris and London for much of his career.

Sargent and Boldini knew one another and moved in the same circles. Boldini took over a studio on Boulevard Berthier in Paris from Sargent when he moved to another. Boldini was also friends with Courbet, Manet and Degas, and apparently knew Whistler, at least well enough to paint his portrait.

Boldini encountered the Italian painters known as the Macchiaoli (also here), who were Italian precursors to Impressionism, in his early years in Florence. He infused their revolutionary ideas, along with those of the French Impressionists, into his academically strong portrait style and became, along with Sargent, one of the premiere portrait painters of his age.

Though most well known for his portraits, Boldini first came to my attention with a quietly striking landscape in the Philadelphia Museum of Art titled Highway of Combes-la-Ville (image above, center, with detail below, zoomable version here), which I think is absolutely beautiful.

The painting is an example of the kind of painterly realism that I particularly love, appearing almost photographic from a few feet away, but showing itself to be a gem of loose, painterly notation on close inspection. (Note: the close-up shown here is not available from any of the sources I list below, it’s from my own photo of the painting. See my post On taking photographs in museums.)

Boldini’s portrait style, in which the fluid lines of the sitters and their flowing garments are frequently cast against boldly unfinished (and strikingly modern) swaths of brushstrokes, earned him the nickname “Master of Swish”.

If you take the time to dig deeper into the online resources like Giovanni Boldini: The Complete Works (an inaccurate title, but still a useful resource), and Ciudad de la pintura, you will find a few examples of his refined and painterly landscapes as well.

There is a museum devoted to Boldini in his birthplace of Ferrara, Italy. It has co-organized an exhibit of the artist’s work, Giovanni Boldini in Impressionist Paris, that is at the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrera until January 10, 2010 (which also currently has an exhibit on Chardin, see my post on Chardin), and then travels to The Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, from February 14 to April 25, 2010.

[Exhibit listing via Art Knowledge News]

There are hundreds of art instruction books out there, with a wide range of topics, approaches and degrees of value, but Imaginative Realism: How to Paint What Doesn’t Exist by renowned painter, illustrator and Dinotopia artist James Gurney, is exceptional in several ways.

Before I go too far, I’ll point out that although this is essentially an instructional book, it also works well simply as an art book; and fans of fantastic art in general, and Gurney’s work in particular, will quickly find it a “must-have”. (See my previous posts on James Gurney, also here and here. As a side note, Gurney is part of the Enchantment Artist’s Symposium and Exhibition at the University of Hartford’s Joseloff Gallery, 6 November 2009 to 17 January 2010.)

First, this book is unusual because of its topic. Most art instruction books concern themselves with drawing and painting aspects of the real world, and this is certainly the most fundamental and important factor in representational art. But for those in working in areas that demand the creation of images of things that do not exist, whether of real but extinct animals, scenes form the historic past or visionary imaginings of undiscovered worlds, the challenge is to take those fundamentals of drawing and painting from life and extend them into the realm of the imagined.

This is increasingly important for contemporary illustrators, movie and gaming concept artists, animators and comic book artists. Figures, faces, animals, creatures, scenes and entire worlds need to be conjured from the the artist’s imagination and made visually manifest.

Gurney tackles the skills needed in this kind of art head-on. He goes through an extensive array of topics, from generating ideas to initial sketches to models and maquettes, through materials, mediums, techniques, perspective, composition and finishing. In the process he covers elements like imagined architecture and landscapes, vehicles, dinosaurs, history painting, characters, creatures and aliens. The topics are arranged in short, but densely informative two-page topics and sub-topics, lavishly illustrated with Gurney’s own work and occasional nods to the masters.

Steeped in the traditions of classic representational art and the firm artistic foundations of 19th Century academic art in particular, Gurney starts from his interest in those traditions and opens with a brief look at the history and origins of imaginative art, with an acknowledgement of the value of studying the work of artists that have defined the field.

The topics are at once wide ranging and surprisingly consistent. I say that because of the other, perhaps most important, stand out characteristic of this book, its rather unique origin.

There are several approaches to the creation of art instruction books. We can eliminate those that are mediocre or downright terrible and concentrate only on books we would consider valuable.

Among these there are books that are proposed by editors in publishing houses, and fulfilled in a perfunctory, but capable manner by artists and writers chosen for the task. There are books that are proposed by the artists themselves in an effort to leverage their knowledge into financial stability beyond its application in their own work. There are books that are created from the artist’s inclination to take on the role of a teacher.

Rarest of all, there are art instruction books that are born out of the artist’s sheer enthusiasm for what they have learned and the desire to share it with any who are inclined to benefit from that knowledge. Imaginative Realism is one of those rare gems.

The contents of this book didn’t originate as a book project, but were gleaned from posts to Gurney’s superb blog, Gurney Journey, in which they have been offered up for free over the course of the last few years.

Over the extent of it’s run, Gurney’s blog has evolved from chronicling a book tour into a personal journey of artistic exploration and discovery; in the course of which Gurney has shared his insights into painting, composition, color, light and a variety of keen observations about the nature of creating art. As you can imagine, in the course of writing Lines and Colors I have occasion to visit hundreds and hundreds of artists’ web sites and blogs. Gurney Journey is one of the exceptional few that I return to on an almost daily basis.

The book started as an idea in a blog post, and further posts followed it’s creation and eventual publication. In this one, Gurney explains his intention in creating the book.

The resulting book is beautiful. It’s printed in a nicely oversize format on heavy stock, with printing values that make the hundreds of illustrations jump off the pages. The reproduction standards follow in the tradition of the superb reproductions and excellent printing evident in Gurney’s popular Dinotopia books (particularly the most recent one, Journey to Chandara), and his refined use of color is vibrantly present.

I also haven’t seen many art instruction books as information dense as this one. Not that the book feels visually cramped in any way, the book design is clear and elegant, but every one of its 200+ pages can be mined for nuggets of art technique gold. This is likely due to the origin of the book in blog posts collected over a long time, rather than a book project that had to be filled out from its inception. Instead of having to put together enough material to create a substantial book, Gurney probably had a job sifting through that wealth of material and deciding what to leave out.

Gurney even goes the extra mile and gives an insightful overview of art careers based on the techniques he outlines in the book, including paperback covers, film design, storyboards, concept art, video game design, toy design and even theme park design.

The one glaring omission is comics, perhaps because it’s an art form in which Gurney doesn’t personally work, and, though he pays plenty of attention to drawing, his emphasis is on painting. I do work in comics, however, so I’ll take in on myself to point out that virtually all of the concepts in the book can be applied to the creation of comics in addition to the other areas mentioned.

The last way in which Imaginative Realism is different from most other art instruction books is the feeling it carries of a start-to-finish labor of love; from its origin in the artist’s enthusiasm for the subject, to the fulfillment from a lifetime of experience, observation and work, to it’s refined finish, crafted like one of Gurney’s own paintings. It is instructive not only in how to draw and paint from the imagination, but in how to create an outstanding art instruction book.

In short, an absolute treat.

“Gifted Artist” is a charity art show and auction to benefit the Loma Linda University Children’s Hospital in Loma Linda, California.

The event will be held on Saturday December 19th from 5 to 10pm at the CCAA Museum of Art in Rancho Cucamonga.

The auction features work by a long list of concept artists, character designers and illustrators from the film and gaming fields, as well as children’s book illustrators and other artists.

There is a blog devoted to the event that shows some of the art that will be up for auction, and will be adding more as the event approaches.

The list of participating artists includes a number of artists that I have featured on Lines and Colors. Here are some links to my posts: Alina Chau, Bill Perkins, Chris Appelhans, Iain McCaig, James Paick, Justin Gerard, Khang Le, Mike Hernandez, Peter de Séve, Robh Ruppel and Shaun Tan.

The Gifted Artist blog lists all of the artists, with links to their web sites or blogs in the sidebar. There are also posts of a flyer (front and back) that gives more details about the auction and event.

(Images above: Erik D. Martin, Uwe Heidschoetter, Pascal Campion, Martin Hsu)

While I’m on the subjects of sketching and anniversaries (see my previous post about Urban Sketchers), this Saturday marks the 5th anniversary of the World Wide SketchCrawl.

SketchCrawl is a drawing marathon, originally conceived by Pixar storyboard artist Enrico Casarosa, and modeled as a pubcrawl, but with art materials. Artists gather in groups in various cities around the world and move from location to location within their respective cities, drawing what’s around them.

The results are often posted in blogs, Flickr groups and in the SketchCrawl forums.

This Saturday, November 21st, 2009, is the 25th World Wide SketchCrawl. You can look through the forum posts to see if anyone is organizing a SketchCrawl near you. Anyone can participate, at any level of sketching experience, including complete novice, and you can sketch with the group for a much or as little time that day as you choose.

Here are the guidelines for participation.

Prior to the event, the forum posts are about the locations and times of the events in various cities. After the event, look for the posts labeled “Results” to see comments about the event, photos and sketches from the day.

(Images above, from SketchCrawl 24, September, 2009: Gary Amaro, San Francisco, CA; “4ojos“, Ribafrecha, Spain; Guillaume Bonamy, Natsumi Tsuchida, Tokyo, Japan.)