Jos van Riswick is a contemporary Dutch still life painter, living in Nijmegen, Holland, and working in the general tradition of the Dutch still life painters of the past.

Van Riswick is a self-taught painter, originally having studied and then taught physics. He started painting in an Impressionist style; but then, after becoming familiar with some contemporary Dutch realists, started to reach back and study the masters, and moved to a more finished realist style.

His subjects are often fruit, vegetables, china and glassware; items that have been the staples of still life painting tradition, as well as tin boxes, tools, and other household items.

Van Riswick employs a controlled, subdued palette, with careful attention to lighting and shadow in his compositions. Though his handling is fairly finished, he leaves enough painterly surface to convey the appeal of visible, tactile paint. Texture is also an important element in his portrayal of physical objects; he captures the surfaces of wood, metal, glass and, of course, the various food items, with subtle visual clues and brief notation of variations in color and value.

His web site features his studio work. He also has a blog, Postcard from Holland, that features his more immediate small paintings, supplemented with a secondary web site that archives those smaller works.

There is an article on his site about technique, and he also posts videos to YouTube that are in instructional time-lapse records of the process of painting some of his small daily paintings (image above, bottom left, with finished piece, bottom right). These are very direct and simply done, and as such, are some of the more useful still life painting instruction videos on YouTube.

If you look at enough concept art, particularly within the gaming industry, much of it can come to feel repetitive and even formulaic; which why I was so pleased to discover the concept art of Thom Tenery, which is delightfully imaginative, unique and wonderfully realized.

Tenery studied Architecture at the University of Texas, Austin, and worked designing architecture and interiors for a number of years.

He studied illustration and concept design at the Art Center College of Design, and moved into that field. His work is included in the book, In the Future…: Entertainment Design at Art Center College of Design.

Tenery has done work for companies like Sony Entertainment, Propaganda Games and Spacetime Studios; and is currently Senior Concept Artist at ID Software.

His web site has a long, single page gallery of concept art from various projects; which are not identified. His sketchblog, lab luna, has additional concept images, plus sketches, speedpaintings and plein air paintings in gouache.

There is also a gallery on the Tor.com site, and an interview with Tenery conducted by Irene Gallo.

Tenery is featured prominently and is co-author of the new book Alien Race: Visual Development of an Intergalactic Adventure.

[Via SiDEBAR]

Dan Hillier is a UK artist working in the tradition of Max Ernst’s Surrealist collage (see my post on A Week of Kindness, also here).

Using similar source material from reproductions of Victorian engravings, Hillier combines various images, and unlike Earnst, adds some pen and ink modifications of his own, to create disconcerting, horror-tinged images.

There is a gallery of his “altered engravings” on his site, along with pen and ink drawings and other works. Hiller also has a blog in which he posts about his most recent work, including the piece above, bottom, which is a still from an upcoming animation in collaboration with Tom Werber for an indie single by Losers.

An interesting aspect of Hillier’s work is showcased in a blog post about a number of people who have chosen Hillier’s images as subjects for tattoos.

[Via BoingBoing]

The Dog Who Was a Cat Inside and Going West are two more short animated films picked out by Irene Gallo for her continuing weekly list of “Saturday Morning Cartoons” on the Tor Books site.

The Dog Who Was a Cat Inside (image above, top) is wonderfully stylized in an almost cubist design, artfully realized and emotionally resonant. There are wonderful touches in the handling of the background, lighting and scene compositions.

Going West (above, bottom) is an evocative homage to the transportive magic of reading, told with terrific paper cut-out animation.

While you’re on Gallo’s Saturday Morning Cartoon Index, take a look through the rest of her list (time-sink warning). Here are my previous posts about The Saturday Morning Cartoon Index, the Tor Books site and Gallo’s blog, The Art Depatment.

Is it love or is it art?

Only François Boucher, that master of Rococo excess and dazzle, knew what his allegory of painting actually implied. It was meant to be matched with a companion painting, Cupids. Allegory of Poetry, for which I haven’t found a web based image.

Cupids came to have meaning in allegorical painting beyond the stories in Greek mythology from which we inherit our concept of Cupid as the arrow wielding son of Venus and messenger of love.

Here we see two cupids, one engaged in drawing, that most basic of the painter’s skills, apparently being advised, instructed or even criticized by the other. (Whatever you may say about Boucher, who many loathe, but I personally delight in; he was a masterful draftsman. More on Boucher in a future post.)

We also get a clear picture of an artist’s palette, presumably a representation of Boucher’s own, with its orderly arrangement of colors.

This painting is in the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, Russia. There is a link for a larger image to the right of that page, and a much larger version on the unofficial ArtHermitage.org site (full size image here).

Wow. Judging by the work shown in the Student Illustration winners gallery of the Society of Illustrators 2010 Student Scholarship Competition, we are in for a treat as a new wave of talented illustrators readies themselves for professional life.

There is a astonishingly high level of ability on display here, along with imagination and the brash daring of youthful enthusiasm.

The physical show of work chosen from the competition winners will be on display at the Society of Illustrators in New York from May 5 to May 29, 2010.

The Society of Illustrators Competitions site also has galleries of winners from the 2009 and 2008 competitions.

Wonderful stuff.

(Images above: Lisa Ambrose, Alyssa Deville, Shaun Berke, Leon Doucette, Ruth Kim, Samuel Spratt, Toni Foti)

[Via The Art Department]

Scott Hansen, an artist and musician based in San Francisco, has posted an article on his blog iso50 called Overcoming Creative Block, in which he has asked 25 artists, writers, musicians and other creative professionals “What do you do to inspire your creativity when you find yourself in a rut?”.

Along with those responses, there are additional ideas in the post’s comments.

ArtMagick one of those delightful art sites dedicated to a few related genres of painting; in this case some of the more interesting movements in late 19th and early 20th Century art.

According to their own description: “ArtMagick is a virtual gallery dedicated to the continual quest of seeking out obscure 19th century artists and long-forgotten paintings and poems illustrating a ‘magic world of romance and pictured poetry’. The majority of the content in the archive covers the Pre-Raphaelite and Symbolist movements.”

The categories also include selections from the Art Nouveau, Romanticism, Aestheticism and Neo-Classical movements, as well as a selection of “Golden Age” illustration and even a section of “Fairy Painting” (which was a popular genre in Victorian England).

Though far from comprehensive, the site serves as a great place to browse, looking through work by artists you know, as well as perhaps discovering a few you’re not familiar with.

The site also features information about upcoming related exhibitions, museums with relevant collections and related poetry (more closely intertwined with visual arts movements at the time than in most other periods).

You can search or browse by Art Movement, Latest Images or Random Images. In each case, breadcrumb navigation allows you to backtrack to more images by a given artist.

I should give the customary time sink warning. You can get happily lost here for several hours.

(Images above: Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Arnold Böcklin, Gustave Moreau, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, John Martin; links are to the images on ArtMagick. Here are my posts about Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Arnold Böcklin, Gustave Moreau and John Martin.)