When I first wrote in 2006 about Frank Brangwyn, the superbly accomplished painter, muralist, watercolorist, illustrator and printmaker, there were only a few scattered resources on the web, and very little in the way of available books or other printed material.

Since then, more resources have become available on the web, and I’ve listed some of them below. Though no new books have become available there is a wonderful new portfolio of some of his best graphic work.

Auad Publishing, a small imprint that specializes in beautifully produced books of the work of classic illustrators and comics artists (see my post on Franklin Booth), has created a faithful reproduction of a 1935 portfolio of lithographs, Frank Brangwyn, R. A.: The Way of the Cross.

This is a lovingly produced set of 20 plates, printed in letterpress (rare these days except for high end art reproductions) on 11″x14″ 80lb textured stock, in a deluxe fourfold portfolio.

The beautiful production values are quickly overshadowed by the power of Brangwyn’s drawings; powerful both in the sense of the emotional drama of their depiction of the Stations of the Cross, an in Brangwyn’s masterful drawing style and striking compositions.

In his work as an illustrator, Brangwyn acquired a great sense of design, and his classical training gave him the solid, finely honed draftsmanship that is the foundation of his influential style, but it is his own emotional investment in the subject, and his remarkable mastery of chiaroscuro, that bring the drawings to life.

The portfolio has an essay by Dr. Libby Horner, who is probably the world’s foremost authority on Brangwyn and his work. Dr. Horner created the frankbrangwyn.org web site (which is not heavy on images, but has lots of useful information about the artist, including a list of books he illustrated and links to other Brangwyn resources).

In Brangwyn’s drawings you can see the influence of Rembrandt and other great printmakers, and the drama of his own style that so heavily influenced the great illustrator Dean Cornwell (also here) and many others.

There is a small preview of the Way of the Cross portfolio on the Auad Publishing site, from which I’ve borrowed the images above (click on the image in the page for a pop-up gallery).

The small images here and on the Auad website don’t do the portfolio justice, but those who are already aware of Brangwyn’s accomplishments will want to be aware that the portfolio is limited to 700 numbered copies.

As much as I happen to enjoy paleontological reconstruction art, which is essentially paintings of no longer extant animals, I have to say that I usually don’t respond well to contemporary wildlife art.

Too often it feels staged and artificial, and seems to lean on over-rendering and sentimentality in place of more solid artistic concerns. Of course there are plenty of exceptions to those (perhaps unfair) generalizations. Ralph Oberg is a case in point.

His paintings of landscapes in the western mountains of the the US and some of the larger wildlife of the area are fresh, painterly and immediate. The impression I had when I first encountered his work was that he was a landscape painter who happened to include animals, rather than a wildlife artist.

That impression was borne out when I read his biography. After attending Colorado State University on an art scholarship and studying at the Seibel School of Drafting in Denver, Oberg briefly worked in commercial illustration and then devoted himself to wildlife painting for ten years. He then became interested in plein air painting, and has dedicated himself to that practice for the past ten years, only recently reintroducing the study of animals into his work.

The result is a lively combination of plein air and alla prima techinque with a knowledge of animal anatomy and characteristics that come from long study.

Oberg uses an almost impressionistic application of paint that gives even his more finished studio canvases the feel of outdoor painting; and his wildlife subjects are rendered with the same painterly approach. Oberg’s years of plein air work have honed his sense of color and ability to suggest complex textures with an economy of brushwork.

His animals are represented naturalistically, incorporated into their settings rather than staged against a backdrop of landscape. Oberg avoids the overly dramatic poses of animals sometimes found in the genre, and incorporates them into his compositions as though they were as much a natural part of a landscape as rocks or trees; which, of course, they are.