Visionary art might be loosely described as an attempt to express the inexpressible, to make manifest a visual statement of an inner mystical or visionary experience that is almost universally categorized as one that cannot be directly described in conventional terms.

Still the desire of artists to create some form of expression in response to such experiences is a strong one, and has produced some fascinating visual art, often astonishingly intricate, intensely colorful and suggestive of transcendent states of consciousness.

Whether that appeals to you or not is a matter of personal preference, of course, but the art itself is notable as a specific and unique genre; with many visual and compositional characteristics descended from tantric art, mandalas, thangkas and other sources of imagery from India, China, Japan and Indonesia.

Alchemeyez is a 3-day conference on the Big Island of Hawaii on June 10-13, 2010. Attendees include an extensive list of widely recognized names in visionary art circles, including several I’ve profiled previously on Lines and Colors: Robert Venosa, Martina Hoffmann, Alex Grey and Android Jones.

Though there isn’t a great deal of art featured directly on the conference web site, the page that lists the participating artists features a representative piece by each artist, a short bio and, when available, a link to the artist’s web site, where you can find additional examples of their work.

(Images at left: Robert Venosa, Martina Hoffmann, Alex Grey, Luke Brown)

California based plein air painter Calvin Liang was born in Canton, China, studied at the Shcnghai Academy of Fine Arts and went to work designing and creating sets for the Canton Opera Institute.

Liang moved to the U.S. and shifted his attention to animation, working for Walt Disney Studio and Nickelodeon. He became interested in painting the California countryside and gradually transitioned into landscape painting.

I haven’t found a dedicated site for Liang, but he is represented with a bio and online gallery of both sold and available works on the Greenhouse Gallery of Fine Art.

Whether painting the California hills and missions, traveling in the American West or in Europe in Florence and Venice, Liang brings his scenes to life with a crisp, economical notation, defining structures with geometric shapes, lost and found edges and muted earth tone palettes.

Many of his brush strokes can bee seen as discreet chunks of color with a physical presence, laid down with apparent abandon, but blending into a unified composition.

When I first wrote about Chicago based illustrator Chris Sheban back in 2007, he had little presence on the web except on his rep’s site and on Workbook.

A friend of mine let me know that Sheban now has a website.

Although there is still no bio, client list or information on technique (I’m not even sure what medium[s] he’s using, though I believe it’s at least partially colored pencil or chalks), the good news is that the portfolio on his site contains many more of his wonderful, whimsical illustrations.

Sheban’s warmly colored, richly textured images have an immediate appeal, backed up by his sometimes unorthodox compositions and a playful experimentation with light and shadow.

Don’t miss the fact that his portfolio goes on for several pages via the arrows to the side of the thumbnails, and there are fun pieces in the “Sketches” section as well.

[Suggestion courtesy of Jack Harris]

[Addendum: Chris was kind enough to write and let us know a little bit about his process. He starts with a dark watercolor underpainting an works over that with Prismacolor pencils and occasionally touches of pastel. He works back into darker areas with watercolor. The grainy surface texture is achieved through the use of and Arches 90 lb cold press surface. Chris assures me he is working on adding some bio and process information to his site in the near future. It's certainly worth checking back periodically to see if there are new portfolio additions as well.]

Pencil vs. Camera is project by Belgian painter, illustrator, caricaturist and photographer Ben Heine, in which he draws part of a scene, usually in a fanciful interpretation of it, and then takes a photograph of the drawing held up against the original scene or photograph.

The drawing is usually on a ragged-edged, odd shaped piece of paper, creating a more interesting intersection between the photograph and drawing. In some cases he plays rather fast and loose with his rendition of the scene, in others, his drawing is quite faithful.

Heine has posted the 13 drawings that are (so far) part of this project to a Flickr set, as well as posting them on his blog.

You can see most of the images to date on the page with his 13th image (mildly NSFW).

[Via Metafilter]

I was delighted to learn that Zip and L’il Bit, a series of webcomics by Trade Loeffler that I first wrote about in 2006 when I discovered the first story, The Upside-Down Me, and again in 2007 when Loeffler published the second adventure, The Sky Kayak, has returned after a long hiatus in a new story, The Captain’s Quest.

Loeffler handles his comics with some of the feeling of an extended children’s book, and a style that seems to harken back to a more genteel time in comics, particularly newspaper comics.

In spite of the apparent simplicity of his drawings, his use of line is sophisticated, and I recommend taking advantage of the zooming feature, which allows you to click on any panel in a given page to enlarge it, and then click through the rest of that page from there.

As of this writing, there are 7 pages in the new story, and a new page is added on Sundays.

[Via Drawn!]

Despite the way he has for years been dismissed by critics as a facile but emotionless society painter, I’ve long felt that John Singer Sargent was one of the great painters in the history of Western Art.

Though he still doesn’t get the respect I think he deserves, Sargent’s star has risen in recent years. It would have been hard to imagine, say 20 years ago, that the Museo Nacional del Prado would ask the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to loan Sargent’s masterpiece, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, and display it next to the acknowledged masterpiece by the painter many consider the greatest in the history of painting, Diego Velázquez’s The Family of Felipe IV, also known as Las meninas.

The connection, of course, is that Las meninas is the inspiration for Sargent’s painting. Sargent was a great admirer of Velázquez, and painted a smaller scale copy of Velázquez’s most revered work, along with a number of the master’s other paintings, during his trip to Spain in 1879.

The paintings are obviously similar in some ways, they are of figures in a dark interior, each featuring a group of young sisters, and share obvious similarities in value and color. The paint handling is of course different, as is Sargent’s more modern composition; and perhaps most telling, there is an obvious difference in intention. Sargent’s subjects, though of a reasonably well to do family, are far from royalty, and not even posing in their Sunday best, but dressed as though for a normal day.

I would love the opportunity to see these two works together (I had the pleasure of seeing Sargent’s work when it was in New York a few years ago), but unfortunately a trip to Spain is not in the offing.

The Prado has a page about the loan, The work: a reflection of Las meninas, that also features a video.

You can make your own comparison with the zoomable versions of the works on the sites of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Museo Nacional del Prado. They require scrolling in the little zoom boxes, however; so if you just want reasonably large versions of the two works, you can try these for Las meninas and Daughters.

I don’t think that the Prado is putting Sargent on a level with Velázquez, and neither am I, few painters could withstand that comparison; but I believe they are acknowledging that Sargent has a place in the canon of Western art worthy of making a comparison between the two works, certainly more than that of a “facile society painter”.