Philippe Bouchet is a French illustrator and concept artist, who signs his work “Manchu”. He has a new book called Manchu Starships due to be published soon from Delcourt/SerieB. I’m unsure whether it will be readily available in the U.S.

Bouchet works in Acrylic on heavy paper at a fairly large scale (20 x 25 inches, or 50 x 65 cm). I know little else about him; his blog is in French but has a number of other images, including preliminary sketches, storyboards, and even walk-through sequences.

The Concept Ships blog has published a nice set of large images from the new book.

[Via MetaFilter]

As the US continues to re-issue its paper currency in new designs that are devoid of visual interest, removing most of what was good about the old engravings and making our dead presidents even deader, other nations around the world indulge in beautiful, colorful designs on their currency.

In addition, paper money from many countries features poets, artists, scientists, explorers and literary figures instead of just political figures; not to mention turtles, tikis, and tropical forests.

Psdtuts+, a tips and tutorials site aimed at Photoshop users, has collected a few interesting examples of colorful and artistically interesting paper money from around the world in an article titled The Art of Currency: Unique Notes from Around the World.

It’s art you can fold over and put in your pocket.

I found when I wrote a post on Edward Gorey last year that though there are scattered sources for his illustrations on the web, there is little in the way of a dedicated repositiory of his work.

This has in some degree been addressed courtesy of a wonderful Flicker set by Marci and Deth of Edward Gorey Book Covers from books they’ve collected.

There are 69 covers, covering (if you’ll excuse the expression) a range of subjects, from John Bellairs stories to Shakespeare plays to H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds (I happen to have a copy of the latter, with interior illustrations by Gorey as well).

It’s a great collection, with large versions of the images in most cases, showcasing Gorey’s wonderfully idiosyncratic illustration, and in many cases typography chosen (or hand drawn) by Gorey as well.

[Via Tom Gauld by way of Irene Gallo]

James Elkins is the E.C. Chadbourne Chair in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the author of several books, including Why Art Cannot Be Taught: A Handbook for Art Students and The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing.

Elkins has a particular fascination with how we look at things, from paintings to everyday objects. His new series on that subject for the Huffington Post opened with How to Look at a Mondrian.

The second column in the series is How Long Does it Take To Look at a Painting?, in which he considers the time individuals devote to looking at a painting, from the cursory (the Louvre reports that people look at the Mona Lisa for an average of 15 seconds) to the kind of extended interaction with a painting that takes place over the course of a lifetime.

He focuses in particular on a beautiful little 15th Century devotional painting, Weeping Madonna by Dieric Bouts.

(His description of the painting, particularly the handling of the eyes, prompted me to think of another painting, very different in some ways, similar in others, by Rogier van der Weyden.)

Elkins invites comments on the post (login necessary) from readers who have had experiences with spending long periods gazing at a painting, getting lost in the work, or returning to it repeatedly.

Donald Pittenger has posted a wonderful Sorolla Museum: Pictorial Report from his recent visit to Madrid on his blog Art Contrarian.

The Museo Sorolla, unlike a number of museums for individual artists that consist of their house and/or studio arranged as much as possible as it was when in use by the artist, also houses numerous works by Sorolla.

The studio setup includes not only his easels and palettes, but the the painting Sorolla was working on when he suffered the stroke that left him unable to continue.

Pittenger has chronicled his visit to the museum with a number of photographs of the house and studio, along with details of some of the paintings, which he has been kind enough to post in fairly high resolution.

The latter include a rare treat, an unfinished work, in which we see some parts finished in Sorolla’s mature style, side by side with passages that are still in the early stages of development; giving us a glimpse of his working methods.

For more, see my post on Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida.

Douglas Martenson studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he now teaches painting. He is also a lecturer in Drawing at the PennDesign School at the University of Pennsylvania.

In the galleries on his website, you’ll find his recent work devoted to landscapes, architectural exteriors and room interiors.

I find his room interiors, of which there are additional examples in the “More Paintings” section of his site, particularly appealing. Often staged at night with table lamps providing pools of light and interesting relationships between objects and shadows, his interiors have a wonderfully tactile quality, a vibrant suggestion of the materials and surfaces of the household objects, and a naturalistic feeling overall.

He also focuses frequently on single windows, both from inside and outside, offering up fascinating explorations of light and shadow in the process.

His landscape subjects tend toward spare, open vistas of sea edge and field, with skies often dominant.

As you go back in time in “More Paintings” and “Early Work”, you’ll find more figures in interiors, as well as citscapes.

Don’t miss the Recent Drawings section, in which he explores interiors, objects and figures.

Martenson’s work is currently the subject of a show at the Gross McCleaf Gallery here in Philadelphia, and the gallery has a number of his works previewed on their website. The show is on display until November 30, 2010.

Illustrator and designer Dan McPharlin gives little information about himself, his work or his clients on his website, which essentially just offers a download of a PDF portfolio from 2006 (also lacking in background information) and a link to his Flickr stream, which serves as his actual portfolio on the web.

In the latter you can browse through his larger photostream, or focus on a set devoted to Selected Work.

He has apparently illustrated covers for a number of audio recordings. Some of his work is graphic and design oriented, but the pieces I find most interesting are his science fiction themed illustrations that have a wonderful feeling of 1960′s Ace/Berkeley science fiction book covers.

There is a brief interview with McPharlin on Sci-Fi-O-rama, from which I glean that he works digitally.

The Athenaeum is essentially a virtual museum, in some ways similar to the Art Renewal Center (my post here) or the Web Gallery of Art (my post here), but with its own focus and strengths.

As of this writing, The Athenaeum lists their online collection of art images at 43,339 (with 14 added in the last seven days), making it one one the largest art resources on the web, perhaps second only to the Art Renewal Center.

The Athenaeum is one of my favorite online sources of images from art history; they frequently have good selections of a given artist’s work, reproduced large enough to enjoy and with well balanced color (which can be a problem on some art image repositories).

You can search the archive via Google with the search box on the home page or the “Visual Arts” landing page.

You can also browse alphabetically by artist name, or even name of the work.

In the lists for individual artists, be aware that there are frequently multiple pages of thumbnails, linked from small numbers at the top of the list. You can sort these lists by title, date and medium and toggle the order of each.

Click through the thumbnail or title link to the detail page for the work, and click on the image again for the large reproduction.

You can also browse a museum list; these lists can be sorted by title, artist or date. In the museum listing details click on “Artworks at this museum” at the top to see works in the Athenaeum archive from that museum’s collections.

This can be a fascinating way to browse, in that it produces an interesting mix of artists and styles.

The above images, for example, are all from the collection of The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (from top: Edmund Tarbell, Raphaelle Peale, Thomas Eakins [no longer in the collection, alas], Cecilia Beaux, Winslow Homer and Theodore Robinson).

(See also my posts on Edmund Tarbell, Thomas Eakins, Cecilia Beaux and the web site of The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.)