For an artist so prolific, from whom over 850 paintings and 1,200 drawings have survived, it’s stunning to realize that Vincent van Gogh’s active career spanned only a single decade, from his decision to pursue art at age 27 in 1880, to his untimely death in 1890.

During that time he produced over 30 self portraits. While not as extensive as Rembrandt’s production of almost 90 self portraits over his much longer career, Van Gogh’s self portraits form a similar kind of autobiography, showing the artist over time in different conditions and states of mind, as well as at different stages of his artistic development.

Van Gogh’s self portraits show his relentless pursuit of his art — practicing, working, striving to improve. It has been suggested that self portraiture is somehow more egotistical than other kinds of painting, but I think for many artists, and Van Gogh in particular, self portraiture was a practical measure, the mirror providing a readily available model when paying a model wasn’t an option.

I’ve tried to find several sources for his self portraits, and list them below. The listing on vggallery.com is reasobnably complete and is in chronological order, but you will find better reproductions among the other sources. Van Gogh Gallery also has a fairly complete listing, with larger images, though without a thumbnail gallery for selecting.

Wikipedia has a nice selection, easy to navigate; but for the most reliable reproductions, see the smaller set from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, some of which are zoomable.

In the course of his paintings from the mirror, Van Gogh has created some of his most striking and memorable works. A number of his portraits are less familiar, and infrequently reproduced, but equally revealing and fascinating.

Those who have been reading Lines and Colors over time may have noticed that despite the deliberate crossing of genres, and the mixture of different aspects of visual art, there is a common thread of art that takes its basic structure from the traditions of representational art,

You may also know that I have often expressed anger at the Modernist art establishment. Not so much at Modernism itself, I have a certain fondness for pre-war European Modernism, and I can simply ignore other Modernist art that I find visually uninteresting, but at the the art establishment, an artistic elite that arose out of post-war American Modernism, and for decades has controlled the museums, galleries, critical press and almost all forms of artistic power in deciding what is of value in contemporary art.

This new art establishment, after the better part of a century in power, still likes to pretend that they are “rebelling” against the restraints of the 19th Century art establishment; and in so doing has waged a deliberate and caustic campaign to denigrate realism and the traditional artistic values that have been the basis for Western representational art for centuries.

I encountered this cultural bias when I was a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in the 1970′s, and was informed by those in the know that traditional realism was dead as far as the powers that be were concerned; and that museums, high-end galleries and critics would never take you seriously unless you were doing non-representational “conceptual” work based on a theory or an “ism” — and something “new” at that. To pursue traditional realism was to be consigned to the cultural backwaters of a no longer valid branch of art.

Populist forces have pushed back in recent years, and representational art has experienced a resurgence, but the forces that place non-representational theory-based Modernism at the pinnacle of artistic achievement, and relegate traditional artistic values as merely the path to that great achievement, and see them as the choking restraints that Modernism has freed us from in the pursuit of artistic “truth”, still hold sway in the corridors of artistic power and commerce.

Contemporary realist painter Scott Burdick has taken on this situation, looking within its story for a common thread that separates Modernism from traditional art, and set out his thoughts in The Banishment of Beauty, a one hour lecture and slide presentation that he gave at the American Artist magazine’s “Weekend with the Masters” event in Laguna Beach.

The slideshow and lecture has been made into a series of 4 videos that can be seen on YouTube. You can also read a transcript of the lecture on Burdick’s site.

While I may disagree with him on certain points, I think Burdick, like Tom Wolfe in his essay, The Painted Word, has pretty much hit on the essential reality of the modern art world.

Burdick has illustrated the presentation with examples of his own work and the work of other contemporary representational painters, as well as examples from great painters from the late 19th Century, contrasting them with examples of 20th Century and contemporary Modernism.

You can access all of the lecture parts here, though you may want to view them individually outside of the bright blue interface: The Banishment of Beauty, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

You may also want to visit Burdick’s website and view his own work, which is exceptional. Burdick has long been on my list as the subject of a future post.

Whether you agree with his contention or not, the presentation is worth following, and you might at least find his arguments a jumping off point for thought and discussion.

[Via MetaFilter]

[Addendum: This post has, as I had hoped, sparked a lively discussion in the comments section. Scott Burdick has been kind enough to write a lengthy comment, answering some criticisms and adding depth to points covered in the video presentation. It's actually much more relevant and interesting than my original post. See the comments here.]

The Golden Age of Illustration, roughly from the last quarter of the 19th Century to the early decades of the 20th, is most often associated with artists from the U.S. and Europe; but terrific illustrators were also working on the other side of the Earth, in Australia and New Zealand.

BibliOdyssey, that ever fascinating and vastly deep cornucopia of visual wonders and curiosities, has an article highlighting some of them, Antipodean Fantasy: Random Australiana (“antipodean” referring to the position of Australia and New Zealand as roughly opposite the British Isles on the globe).

Be sure to click on the images in the post, as BibliOdyssey author peacay has kindly provided us with nice large versions of the images on his Flickr pages.

If you haven’t visited BibliOdyssey, take some time to look around, and be prepared for a major time-sink. For general description, see my previous posts on BibliOdyssey and BibliOdyssey (the book).

You can also get lost on peacay’s Flickr pages, but the blog itself is much more conducive to browsing and discovery (try some of the image links in the lower right column, under the list of Resource Sites).

(Images above: Margaret Clark, Ethel Jackson Morris, Ida Rentoul Outhwaite, May Gibbs)

It has been frequently pointed out that there is a close relationship between comics (or “graphic stories”), and film; in that both are visual storytelling mediums.

The two arts share many of the same fundamental processes in constructing a visual story: scene composition, visual continuity, establishing shots, close ups, downshots, upshots, and so on; they even share a common terminology. The comic panel and the movie (or video) screen both frame the story.

Hence an appropriate name for Framed Ink: Drawing and Composition for Visual Storytellers, a new book from Marcos Mateu-Mestre, whose career spans both art forms.

Mateu-Mestre, as I pointed out in my post on him back in 2006, is primarily a visual development artist for feature animation, with credits that include We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story, Balto, The Prince of Egypt, Toto Sapore, Asterix and the Vikings and Surf’s Up.

He is also an illustrator and comics artist, and he brings his understanding of visual storytelling from both fields to bear in Framed Ink, which is a textbook for an often overlooked but vital aspect of both endeavors, composition.

Illustrators and other artists who work with single images are used to composition as a static aspect of an image, arranging elements to convey the intention of the work as strongly as possible. But in film and comics, composition is dynamic, it changes and flows with the story, and in fact, is vitally important to the process of telling the story.

It is through composition that viewers are given their bearings and understanding where the players are and what their physical relationship is to one another. It is through composition — camera angles, close ups, and other language of the camera — that much of the drama of both mediums is expressed.

After an overview of narrative art, Mateu-Mestre starts Framed Ink with the fundamentals of composing a single image within a story, the techniques of creating drama, focusing interest and expressing emotion with the composition. He demonstrates the use of complexity and simplicity, light and dark, size and distance and point of view to communicate the writer’s intention to the viewer.

He then moves into conveying motion, using sequential frames and changes in the drawings to create motion in the viewer’s mind (or in the case of concept art, to convey the writer or director’s intention for motion to the animators or cinematographer).

His subsequent focus is on continuity, a term you will often hear in reference to film and comics, but one that is often poorly understood, particularly given how vital it is in telling a story with comics. (In my own experience in creating comics, I’ve found continuity one of the most difficult aspects to handle properly, but one of the most important in successfully telling a visual story.)

The last chapter of Framed Ink delves into elements of composition that are specific to comics and graphic novels, as opposed to concept art or storyboards — the composition and arrangement of panels on a page, the relationship of story flow to panel layout, pacing a scene and the placement of word balloons.

Of course all of this is illustrated in Mateu-Mestre’s own drawings, and they are a treat. As I pointed out in my previous post, he has a wonderfully lively drawing style, with springy, zippy linework that seems to be dashed casually off the end of his pen, but somehow lands in exactly the right spot. He combines that with a masterful command of chiaroscuro and a comics artist’s gift for spotting blacks (reminding me at times of Alex Toth), to which he adds intermediate gray tones for a series of panels that look like a cross between classic adventure comics and film noir.

The drawings are beautiful and you could simply enjoy this as an art book, but for those involved with the challenges of visual storytelling, whether in visual development and storyboards for film, or in comics and graphic storytelling, Framed Ink is a must-have addition to an artist’s bookshelf.

I’ve posted a few frames from the book above, for more detail see the “Look Inside” feature for the book on Amazon.

(I noted with interest that Amazon (or the publisher) has used a quote from my previous post about Mateu-Mestre, in which I rave about his drawing style, as part of the Editorial Reviews for the book.)

For an even better look at the inside of the book, see the review on Parka Blogs.

Mateu-Mestre also maintains a Framed Ink news blog specifically for the book, as well as mentions on his regular blog, where you will also find examples of his concept art, graphic novel work and more.

Italian Baroque painter Salvator Rosa was known for his romantic (“sublime”) landscapes, battle scenes and marine paintings, as well as religious, allegorical and history paintings. He was also known as a rebel and free thinker, restless in his pursuit of intellectual and artistic exploration.

Rosa was born and studied in Naples, though he studied for a time in Rome, and was strongly influenced by the Spanish painter José de Ribera.

He considered his marine and landscape paintings as less serious and important than his later religious and historical paintings, but they served him well in his early days of financial struggle, and are looked on more highly in retrospect as innovative for his time.

Rosa’s landscapes were among the first considered “romantic”. In them he pursued exaggerated views of craggy rocks, monumental ruins, overgrown wilderness, windswept mountains and dark caves, as well as picturesque scenes of shepherds on rugged hillsides and wild scenes of sailors, thieves and bandits. He also created works of brooding and dramatic allegory, often with macabre and horror tinged subjects.

He used deep chiaroscuro, dark but rich color and expressive brushwork to create his tempestuous dramas and haunting vistas.

Rosa is believed to have been influential on many landscape painters who followed, including the British Romantic painters and J.W.M. Turner.

In addition to painting, Rosa was a printmaker, poet, writer, musician and comic actor.

While in Rome he became friends with Pietro Testa and pioneering landscape artist Claude Lorraine. He was encouraged to leave Rome when his practice of comic acting made him enemies as well as admirers by satirizing the great sculptor, and powerful local figure, Bernini.

He found a warmer climate in Florence for several years, and returned to Naples for a time, but eventually returned to Rome and settled there, though his dealings with the arts establishment there remained unsettled and rife with controversy, including accusations of plagiarism for his satires (unfounded) and radical intellectual views that brought him under the unfavorable eye of the Inquisition.

There is an exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, Salvator Rosa (1615 – 1673): Bandits, Wilderness and Magic that is on view until November 28, 2010 and promises to be a major review of his work. The page for the exhibit only features a few images. There is a pagefor a video lecture about the exhibit, though I have so far been unable to get it to load successfully. There is a review of the exhibit on the Guardian.

I’ve listed some other resources below. You may have to dig a bit for the best work.

Rosa was a libertine, eccentric and free thinker, and associated with many of the scientific, philosophical and literary figures of his day. Many of his works bring their thought into light, exploring science and rationality as well as imagination, magic and the mystery and power of nature.

[Via ArtDaily.org]

Peter de Sève’s delightfully whimsical, wonderfully styled and beautifully rendered illustrations have become familiar to readers of The New Yorker, for which he has done a number of memorable covers, and other publications like Newsweek, Time, Smithsonian and Atlantic Monthly.

Since I last wrote about him De Sève’s website has been revised and expanded, and now includes a delightful selection of sketches, as well as a section of his visual development art for films.

In addition there is a flip-through preview of his new book A Sketchy Past (though it suffers from one of those annoyingly cutesy page-flipping interfaces).

In addition to my Amazon link above, the book, along with four other Peter de Sève titles, can be ordered from Stuart Ng Books via links from artist’s site.

De Sève has also continued to update his blog, with posts about work in progress, preliminary sketches for New Yorker covers, character development sketches and more.

De Sève blends a cartoonist’s knack for wry humor and visually charming exaggerations with a watercolorist’s command of subtle colors, carefully controlled values and loosely elegant rendering.

His portrayal of animals, large and small, is particularly delightful. He gives them more character than many illustrators give to their images of people.

Vermeer: Master of Light is a short series of videos from the National Gallery of Art in Washington that explores some aspects of Vermeer’s paintings, like composition, color and diffuse edges, that are characteristic of his work and make a Vermeer a Vermeer.

The series can be accessed on ArtBabble.

There are five episodes, plus a compilation that puts them together as one 20 minute video. Each features curators from the National Gallery discussing one of the museum’s Vermeers in terms of a particular aspect of the master’s approach.

You may want to start with The Music Lesson, Part 2 (second pair of images, above), lest you be initially put off by the drier analysis of Woman Holding a Balance, Part 1 (first pair of images, above).

I found it interesting in a discussion of elements that make a work characteristic of Vermeer, that the episode Girl with the Red Hat: Part 3 (third set of images, above) skips any mention of the fact that attribution of the painting to Vermeer has been questioned.

Camera Obscura, Part 4 offers a brief look at Vermeer’s use of the optical device as an aid in seeing.

Woman Writing a Letter, Part 5 (bottom pair of images, above) delves into Vermeer as a master of suggestion, creating the illusion that there is more than he has actually presented, as well as examining his use and mastery of diffuse edges.

The presentation itself is too brief, leaving you wanting more. You can do a search on ArtBabble for other video productions from the National Gallery, or plow into the overall resources there, either by searching or through their indexes of Series, Channels, Artists or Partners.

ArtBabble, as I mentioned in a previous post, is a terrific resource of videos about art, examining and discussing art in a number of categories.. Their motto is “Play Art Loud”.

If you are hungry for more Vermeer, you can spend hours on Jonathan Janson’s amazing resource Essential Vermeer.

Sacramento based illustrator Paul Antonson has for several years done illustration and interactive design for the Wall Street Journal Online. He also has editorial clients that include The Village Voice, New York Press and The Onion. He is a children’s book illustrator as well.

Antonson’s website includes work from various aspects of his career, and fun range of styles, along with personal projects and sketchbooks.

He combines a painter’s skills with a strong graphic sensibility, at times working with graphic patterns, at times riotously complex and at other times moving into a style that harkens to classic children’s’ book illustration.

Antonson is a contributor to the Invisibleman collaborative blog (see my post on Invisibleman from 2006). There you will find more descriptions of his individual pieces and working process, as well as additional artwork.