Dan P. Carr is a Virginia based illustrator whose online illustration portfolio, as far as I can tell, consists of a Flickr set, and whose blog covers a number of delightfully rambling topics, from posts on choosing colors for palettes, to the names of colors in Old English, to vintage Cream videos, to Yeats poems, to Chicken recipes, all interspersed with reproduction of his very nice small still life paintings.

These, usually of fruit and vegetable subjects, are vibrantly colored, richly textured and have a painterly immediacy that is very appealing. Oddly, they are often linked to Flickr versions of the image that are essentially no larger than they are shown in the blog post.

His blog hasn’t been updated for a while, but past posts indicate that he has lapsed before and then returned with new posts. In the meanwhile there are plenty of idiosyncratic musings and delightful still lifes to keep you browsing through past posts for a while.

The website of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is large and sprawling and full of amazing stuff, much like the museum itself. Also like the physical museum, wandering around and exploring is often rewarded with unexpected delights and treasures.

One of the treasures on the Met’s website is the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. Essentially a site of its own within the larger museum site, the Timeline is an ongoing project, sponsored by three foundations and created and maintained by the museum’s curatorial, conservation and education staff, that currently catalogues 6,000 works and places them within the contexts of time, place and thematic essays.

The Timeline’s features can be explored from any of these directions, as well by links to world religions, and directly searched via search box or index. You can search for artists or works of art, and many are featured in pages devoted specifically to the artist or work, as well as within the larger thematic essays.

Most of the articles have images that can be enlarged or zoomed, and are linked to further images and information within the museum’s larger object database.

From the Timeline’s front page you can flip through panels of works, timelines or thematic essays, or use the drop-down menus at top for access to dedicated pages for same, across geographic areas via world maps, or find works of art through a detailed search box.

Once drilled down to a topic, you can also follow the links in the “Related” section to any number of additional lines of browsing.

A major time sink as well as a tremendous resource.

Frank Frazetta was one of the best and most renowned fantasy illustrators in the history of the genre. Frazetta died yesterday, May 10, 2010 at the age of 82.

Frazetta began his career as a comics artist, starting as a teenager as an assistant to other artists. He worked for smaller comic book publishers, producing a number of memorable “funny animal” comics (see my previous post on Frank Frazetta’s Funny Animal Comics), and a number of adventure titles.

He was eventually given the opportunity to crate his own comic title, Thun’da, King of the Congo, but his run on the comic was only two issues. He then went to work in newspaper comics, doing “ghost work” (uncredited assistance) on Dan Barry’s Flash Gordon. He continued to work for comic book companies, including EC Comics and DC Comics, and contributed covers to the Buck Rogers comic books.

In 1954 Frazetta went to work for Al Capp, assisting on his extremely popular Li’l Abner strip, he also continued to work on his own newspaper strip, Johnny Comet. On leaving Capp’s studio he did work for the Warren horror comic magazines, Creepy and Eerie, contributing many of those publications’ most memorable covers. At the same time he contributed to Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder’s Little Annie Fanny strip for Playboy (see my post on Will Elder).

From there, Frazetta moved into paperback cover illustration and achieved his greatest renown for his lushly painted covers for novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and in particular, Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian books.

In addition to the influences of his colleges at E.C., like Al Williamson, Roy Krenkel and Wally Wood, Frazetta picked up on the techniques of the great 19th century pen and ink illustrators like Joseph Clement Coll and became a first rate pen and ink draftsman.

In his painting, Frazetta carried forward the traditions of the great swashbuckling adventure illustrators like Howard Pyle, N.C. Wyeth and Frank Schoonover, bringing them into the modern era with a touch more menace, implied violence and sex. In the process Frazetta became tremendously influential on a new generation of adventure fantasy artists, many of whom are working today.

Frazetta’s figures, beasts and monsters seem to inhabit a world in which gravity exerts more force than normal; and that great sensation of weight translated into a suggestion of immense power, either heroic or menacing.

Frazetta’s color palette, again with a direct lineage to Pyle and Wyeth, was often dark and moody, punctuated by bright passages for emphasis. His use of theatrical lighting for dramatic effect gave his compositions an immediate visceral impact.

To my mind, it is in the bridge he forms between those Golden Age illustrators and the newer generation that grew up in awe of his barbarian images that Frazetta is most notable, carrying forward traditions of great adventure illustration in a lineage he happily acknowledged in illustrations like Galleon (image above, bottom), a direct homage to Pyle’s Attack on a Galleon (see my post on Howard Pyle).

Frazetta remains extremely popular and there are a number of books that collect or feature his work, and there is a video interview with the artist on DVD, Frazetta: Painting With Fire.

There is a museum devoted to his work that was run by the family. I don’t know what its status will be going forward. The museum site doesn’t have much information, but it does have a selection of Frazetta’s work in the form of prints.

I’ve listed some other resources below.

[Note: Some images are NSFW.]

Born in the U.K. and now residing in Canada, Dan Seagrave began his career with an album cover for a local band. That expanded into a series of notable covers for other bands, though within a specific genre.

Seagrave has continued to produce art for music groups, but his intricate, intensely detailed and highly imaginative art has spawned a market for posters, reproductions and appearances in books and magazines. He is also in demand for painting murals, including a 20 x 20 foot (6 x 6 m) ceiling painting for the Hard Rock Cafe in Ottawa.

He normally works in acrylic on panels, for the pieces shown above at a size of 24 x 36 inches (61 x 91 cm). The images on his website are frustratingly small, given the size and level of detail in his work, though he does provide a detail view feature for many pieces that allows you to scroll around a larger image in a small window, as for the detail images above. Be sure to check out the Temple Series, as well as the Posters and Store sections.

(Note: when visiting Seagrave’s website, if the site doesn’t automatically open a secondary pop-up window with the actual content, click on the “Dan Seagrave” heading.)

There are also images on the the beinArt Surreal Art Collective, but the best are probably the images on the Tor.com site,. These are a bit larger and give you a somewhat better taste of what the full images look like.

Seagrave uses curved perspective, freeform distortions, atmospheric perspective, a refined command of texture, and judicious applications of bright color within otherwise controlled palettes to create his beautifully rendered whirls of controlled chaos.

In an interview on Voices From the Dark Side, Seagrave indicates that his Temple series paintings are part of an ongoing series, and may even be the basis for a film; though I’m hoping that in the interim some of his work finds its way into a print collection.

Art Inconnu is a terrific blog that has been going since January of 2008, but one that I have been unaware of until recently.

“Inconnu” is a word meaning a stranger or unknown person. Maintained by an anonymous “Curator”, Art Inconnu is devoted to “little-known and under-appreciated art”, sometimes obscure, sometimes just artists who seldom receive the spotlight.

The blog focuses primarily on 19th and 20th Century European paintings, but occasionally ventures further back. There is a nice mix of styles. Though the Curator’s tastes lean further into 20th Century modernism than mine, there were many artists of interest as I thumbed through a few pages.

There are occasionally articles accompanying the posts, though many are simply a collection of images by the artist, but most include titles of the individual works and dates of the artist’s life.

There are also collections available from the right sidebar, in which the Curator has assembled works by several lesser-known artists on a particular theme.

(Images above, with links to the Art Inconnu posts: George Lambert, Tavik Frantisek Simon and Stanislaw Kamocki)

California illustrator Tyler Jacobson recently graduated from Academy of Art University in San Francisco, and has embarked on a career as an illustrator, with an eye to working as a concept artist for the film and gaming industries.

His clients include Wizards of the Coast, Dungeons and Dragons, NBC, Texas Monthly and Simon and Schuster.

Jacobson works in both traditional and digital media, sometimes mixing the two where appropriate for the desired result. There is a brief description of his process, featuring a step-through of the image above, top, on the Richard Solomon site.

He recently was awarded the Jack Gaughan Award for Best Emerging Artist, and some of his work has been selected for the upcoming Spectrum 17.

His website portfolio is divided into three sections for illustration, sketches and fine art. Both illustration and sketches feature work from a Moby Dick project, though I don’t know if it’s commissioned or personal, and the fine art section includes both portraits (above, lower right) and figurative work.

Both his illustrations and gallery paintings show his attention to value and chiaroscuro in creating drama, along with the use of carefully controlled color ranges punctuated with more intense areas of high chroma color.

On Jacobson’s blog you will often find many of the images in his portfolios, but often reproduced a bit larger and with commentary about their creation.

Massachusetts still life painter Ted Polomis appears to craft the arrangements of objects for his compositions with as much care and skill as he paints them.

His subjects include vintage metal and wooden toys, the time-worn surfaces of which he renders with intimate fidelity, and “classic objects”, vases, glassware, fruit and vegetables, painted with exacting finesse.

One is tempted to label Polomis as a “realist”, but such labels tend to shut our eyes rather than open them. In his apparently faithful rendering there is an affection, an emotional dimension to his appreciation of the objects he paints.

To me there is an emphasis on the “still” in “still life” in Polomis’ work, with a sense of stopped time. He extends an invitation to engage the objects in a contemplative way, lingering on the simultaneously soft and sharply defined edge of a fruit, looking more deeply into the reflections on a glassy vase, or seeking out the negative shapes carved out of the background by the objects in his arrangements.

The color harmonies of his compositions are also notable, and obviously the result of careful thought. Serene blues are set off with bright oranges; golds, greens and grays are laid gently against one another; and white objects, notoriously difficult to handle, are given a muted sheen of color, a range of subtitles within the surface tones.

Before graduating from the Art Center College of Design, Dominick Domingo interned at Disney Feature Animation, training in numerous roles in the animation process. After graduating, he worked with them as a concept artist and background artist, in both Los Angeles and Paris.

His credits with Disney include Lion King, Pocahontas, The Hunchback Of Notre Dame, Tarzan, and Fantasia 2000. He also maintained a roster of independent clients, including ORION Pictures, Parker Brothers, Milton Bradley, the Pacific Design Center, Comedy Central, Wizards of the Coast and several book publishers.

Domingo helped to found the animation program at Laguna Art Institute, was an instructor at L.A. Academy of Figurative Art and is currently an instructor at Art Center.

In 2001 he attended the New York Film Academy and shifted his attention to directing live action film, and has directed several independent short films. He currently divides his time between illustration, concept art and directing.

Domingo’s lively, wonderfully stylized concept art has a feeling of enthusiasm and energy. The energetic nature of the drawing is sometimes restrained with carefully controlled color palettes, or enlivened by the dramatically theatrical use of light and shadow and judicious application of texture.

He uses a blog page as a portfolio, and you can view a variety of images from his professional projects including character design, as well as personal work, figure drawing, portraits and landscape paintings.

[VIa John Nevarez]