Iain McCaig is one of the film industry’s foremost concept designers. He is widely known for his beautiful concept art for the Star Wars and Harry Potter films, among others.

When I last wrote about McCaig in 2006 I pointed out how impressed I was with his beautiful concept drawings in the Art of Star Wars books: The Art of Star Wars, Episode I – The Phantom Menace, The Art of Star Wars, Episode II – Attack of the Clones and The Art of Star Wars, Episode III – Revenge of the Sith.

In the time since my post, the Gnomon Workshop has released 4 volumes of instructional DVD’s: Visual Storytelling with Iain McCaig; and in 2008 a new book was released Shadowline: The Art of Iain McCaig (image above, second down).

Still, I’ve been hoping for more of an online presence for McCaig. Unfortunately, the “Coming Soon” sign on iainmccaig.com has remained in place for the last several years.

The good news is that McCaig now has a blog, the bad news is that it is not frequently updated and does not contain a great deal of material.

The good news is that one of his recent posts points out that McCaig will be giving a rare free workshop next Saturday, August 14th, 2010, at the Art Institute of California in San Bernadino (image above, bottom).

The workshop, called “Showtime” begins at noon. The event is free, but seating is limited and admission requires that you RSVP to (909) 915-2100.

There is also a Facebook page for the event (may require login).

It has often been pointed out that the borough of Brooklyn, if it were not part of New York City, would stand on its own as one of the largest metropolitan areas in the U.S., perhaps 4th or 5th largest.

Like most American cities of that size, Brooklyn has a world class art museum. Unlike most of those museums, however, the Brooklyn Museum has a unique problem in terms of its identity and public perception, in that it exists in the very large and imposing shadow of the more famous museums of nearby Manhattan. This leaves it unfairly relegated to a public perception of second class status, when in fact, The Brooklyn Museum is terrific and should be prominent on the list of major American art museums.

There was an article on the New York Times site a few days ago, Sketching a Future for the Brooklyn Museum, in which several members of the arts community give their take on the museum’s rather unique position and public relations dilemma.

I had the pleasure of visiting the Brooklyn Museum for the first time last summer, drawn by an exhibition of the works of French Impressionist Gustave Caillebotte (more here), and was surprised and delighted with how much I enjoyed the museum and the works then on display from the permanent collection.

I say “then on display” because, like every major museum, only a small portion of the museum’s holdings can be on display at any one time, and works are rotated into view periodically.

The Brooklyn Museum has a wonderful feature to make even more of its collection available, in that some of its extensive archives are open to the public in the “Visible Storage” center on the museum’s 5th floor (image above, bottom). Here you can get a behind the scenes glimpse of how museums catalog and store their collections, with great class cases on rolling tracks that are frequently rotated to display more of the works in the collections.

The collections are housed in the museum’s impressive Beaux-Arts building, one that would stand out as a prominent cultural center in any city — except New York. Like many major museums, non-flash personal photography is permitted in the permanent collections.

For those who can take the ride out to Brooklyn, the museum is right next to the beautiful Brooklyn Botanic Gardens. The combination is just right for a day’s outing.

For those who can’t get to the museum physically, the Brooklyn Museum website is arranged to encourage browsing through the collections, though it helps to have a starting point. I was personally impressed with the museum’s holdings of Claude Monet (image above, top) and other proponents of Impressionism, as well as American Impressionists, including one of my favorite paintings by William Merritt Chase, his Studio Interior (image above, third down and detail below; also see my post on William Merritt Chase.)

You can spin off of your search by clicking on tags for related topics, like Landscape or Venice, museum sections like the Beaux-Arts Court, or search for artists like John Singer Sargent (image above, second down). Note that the search box in the right column of the collections pages returns different results than the general search box at the top of the pages.

Unfortunately, the website’s pop-up code for the enlargements is a bit awkward, but the images are large enough to enjoy and the interesting mix of the collections can lead you off in search of fascinating artists and subjects.

As you browse through the collections, you’ll cross paths with a number major works that will whet your appetite for a visit, putting the Brooklyn Museum on your map the next time you’re in New York City.

After retiring from her 35 year career as a designer and illustrator, Michigan based artist Susan Murtaugh took up digital art, creating digital paintings in applications like Sketchbook Pro and Brushes on the iPod and Modbook (a third party Apple tablet computer) and now the iPad.

Murtaugh doesn’t appear to have a website or blog, but displays her work in her Flickr galleries and is a regular contributor to fingerpainted.it, a blog devoted to digital painting on touchscreen devices.

Her topics range from portraits and still life to classic cars, matchbooks to florals. You can see her design background in the playful patterns with which she occasionally fills her backgrounds, as well as her design-oriented layouts.

What I find particularly appealing about her digital painting technique is her use of stylized texture, particularly when she uses textural elements in the role of brush strokes in defining forms.

There is an interview with Murtaugh on Photoshop Cafe that includes a step through demo. She also has a portrait tutorial using Sketchbook Pro on the AliasDesign site. She is a participant in thefingerpainters live digital painting demos.

[Via Telegraph]

Concept and visual design artist Mark Selander studied industrial design in college, and took that experience to work for Will Vinton Studios (now known as Laika) creating models, sets and concept art, and then to Microsoft Games, where he worked as a concept artist for six years.

He now works as a freelance concept artist, designer and illustrator for the entertainment industry, gaming, toy design and illustration. His website, titled Machines and Humans has galleries of his work divided between environments, machines, characters, illustrations, sketches and graphics.

He also maintains a blog titled Rockets and Rabbits.

Recently, Selander launched a site called Commutapult (image above, top), a take off on the utopian transportation fantasies that have sparked the pages of Popular Science and Popular Mechanics for years.

In it he gives us genuine looking illustrations and infographics of a proposed urban commuting system for his hometown of Seattle, in which commuters are hurled in ballistically launched pods, their cups of “hyper caffinated Commutacinno™” rotating in gimbaled holders, until caught in great funnel and lowered into the transportation hub; allowing the highways to be replaced with idyllic green pedestrian pathways.

Spot on.

[Via Metafilter]

They Draw and Cook is a great idea, a series of short recipes submitted by illustrators and other artists who cook (or cooks who illustrate), accompanied by or in the form of illustrations, and served up fresh daily in blog form.

The entries are varied in both illustration style and approach to food and drink, making a nice stew of topics and images. The images are reasonably large (much larger then my small previews above); and the entries include the location of the artists, who are from around the globe, as well as links to their websites or blogs; so They Draw and Cook also serves as an illustration blog with links to lots of artwork and portfolios.

Note that it may be easy to miss the link to older posts, as it is small and not quite at the bottom of the page (above the “Submit a Recipe” section).

They Draw and Cook is maintained by the brother/sister design and illustration team of Nate Padavick and Salli Swindell, who comprise Studio SSS. Salli also writes the wonderfully titled blog manic expressive.

It looks like the authors are planing a print version of the idea, their submission requirements include permission to use the material in print and ask the artists to consider the gutter in their design.

Padavick and Swindell also maintain a charming offshoot blog, Kids Draw and Cook.

(Images above:
Alya Mark
Emilia Szewczyk
Krista Hamrick
Jennifer Lorton
Abz Hakim
Johnathan Hawker
Aneu Martinez
Michael Robertson)

[Via Metafilter]

Portrait of Dr. Samuel D. Gross, more commonly referred to as The Gross Clinic, is a painting with a history.

The painting is regarded as the masterpiece in the oeuvre of Thomas Eakins, who was in turn considered the greatest American painter of his time. The painting has been described as the most important American painting of the 19th Century.

It is a dramatic, large scale canvas, 8ft by 6½ft (240x200cm), showing the pioneering surgeon lecturing students as he performs an operation. Among the recognizable figures portrayed is a self-portrait of Eakins, who sits, sketching or writing, to the right of the tunnel railing (above, bottom right).

The young Eakins, who while a student at The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts had also studied anatomy at Jefferson Medical College where Dr. Gross taught, wanted to create a grand canvas, perhaps partially to cement his reputation as an artist, in what may be seen as a homage to Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp; but also, it has been suggested, to compare the role of an artist with that of a physician, both of which were emerging as more respected professions at the time.

Eakins spent a year on the canvas; reportedly, he badgered the retired Dr. Gross so often for additional sittings that the latter found the painter supremely annoying.

Eakins was hoping to exhibit the painting at the important Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876, but it was rejected by the Committee of Selection. It was eventually displayed in another part of the Exposition, in Ward One of the U.S. Army Post Hospital, representatives of the Medical College having pulled strings as they felt the painting improved the image and status of the school.

General reception was the the painting was artistically strong, striking in its realism, but inappropriate and graphic in subject matter; a critic for the New York Tribune describing it as: ‘… one of the most powerful, horrible, yet fascinating pictures that has been painted anywhere in this century..”. The reaction from the public was perhaps anticipated by Eakins’ portrayal of a woman covering her face in revulsion in the painting’s left foreground.

At the end of the Centennial, in 1878, the Alumni Association of Jefferson Medical College purchased the painting for $200 (perhaps roughly $3,000 in current dollars) and donated it to Jefferson Medical College (now Thomas Jefferson University), with the intention that the portrait of their teacher and mentor would be a permanent part of the cultural legacy of the school.

In 2006, a lazy and arrogant board of directors of Thomas Jefferson University decided it was their privilege to sell off part of the cultural heritage of the school, and the city of Philadelphia, rather than sully their delicate hands with the actual work of fundraising.

To this end, they connived a secretive deal with Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton, as part of her corporate raider style acquisition of works from financially weakened institutions from various cities to stock her ego monument, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas. (Not the most art collections didn’t start as ego monuments of rich people.) In the attempt to surreptitiously remove the Gross Clinic from Philadelphia, they were shamefully aided by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. which would have shared ownership of the work.

Fortunately, news of the board’s machinations leaked and the impending deal flared into scandal as Jefferson students and alumni, the city and its arts community mounted opposition, and eventually, though the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, mounted a $68 million fundraising campaign to keep the painting in Philadelphia.

This was at the cost of the Academy having to sell off Eakins’ The Cello Player (also here) to an unidentified buyer (a painting I personally liked more than the Gross Clinic, though not considered nearly as important), and the PMA having to sell (or “deaccession”, to use the current weird euphemism for museums selling off art) Eakins’ Cowboy Singing and two Eakins sketches.

For more, see my posts from the time, Eakins’ The Gross Clinic – held for ransom? and The Continuing Saga of the Thomas Eakins Gross Clinic Art-as-Commodity Scandal.

The Gross Clinic is now part of a special exhibition at the Philadelphia Art Museum, centering on it’s recent restoration.

In addition to other indignities, The Gross Clinic has been subjected over time to several disastrous attempts at “restoration” (out of five overall). These were often performed by perhaps well intentioned individuals who lacked a knowledge of Eakins’ appraoch and technique, as well as the aesthetics of his time.

The worst was a “cleaning” sometime between 1917 and 1925, in which an attempt to “brighten” the painting removed several layers of Eakins’ glazed color, unbalancing the painting’s deep chiaroscuro and changing the overall nature of the image. In 1940 a restorer attached two pieces of plywood to the back of the canvas, ostensibly to “stabilize” it, resulting in straining of the canvas as the plywood warped.

In 2008 the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts undertook and assessment, and in 2009 a modern restoration project, in which the painting was in the hands of knowledgeable restorers and Eakins experts. This has led to a number of articles and reviews with headlines in which The Gross Clinic is described as being “in surgery” or “operated on”. (I have of course refrained from such silliness, mainly because they beat me to it.)

The conservators were faced with the challenge of restoring areas of paint that had been removed by previous hands, and rebalancing the color of the painting to Eakin’s original intentions. In this effort they were armed, fortunately, with a photograph of the painting prior to the first cleaning, along with a preliminary color sketch and an monochromatic version (a collotype) by the artist. The most important factor, however, is probably their deep understanding of Eakins, his works and original techniques.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art has several web pages devoted to the exhibition, An Eakins Masterpiece Restored: Seeing The Gross Clinic Anew, the conservation project and the painting itself.

The exhibition, which includes the preliminary color sketch and a later painting by Eakins of a similar subject, The Agnew Clinic (also here), to which The Gross Clinic is often compared, runs to January 9, 2011.

Hopefully this is one of the brighter chapters in the painting’s eventful history.