Thought of You (also on Vimeo) is a short animation by professional animator, storyboard and concept artist Ryan Woodward.

It is a simple but beautifully done dance sequence, with suggestions of a story, but open ended enough for viewers to make their own interpretations. Elegantly animated, the sequence is set to World Spins Madly On by The Weepies.

What I find particularly enjoyable is the way the characters are drawn as gestural figures, as though from quick life studies, or the kind of construction line drawings used by those who must invent the figure from imagination, like storyboard artists, illustrators and comics artists.

I also admire the way he has used variations in finish or solidity of the figures to evoke degrees of presence.

In addition to his own site, which includes examples of his illustrations, storyboards and animatics, as well as other short films, Woodward has created a site for Thought of You and similar experiments called Conté Animated, referring in part to his years of teaching gesture drawing, a history that informs every frame of Thought of You.

[Via MetaFilter]

I think the role of texture, whether physical or rendered, plays a more important part in the visceral presence and visual impact of artworks than is often mentioned. It is frequently overshadowed by the more overt characteristics of a painting or drawing. There are artists, however, for whom texture a major component in their artistic voice, to the point where its presence and power can’t be ignored.

Robert V. Kogge deliberately works with muted color palettes and narrow ranges of value to let the textural elements of his work come to the fore. At one point in his career, Kogge says he found his preparatory drawings for paintings taking on a life of their own, becoming finished works, and he started drawing directly on unprimed canvas with graphite.

He currently works with colored pencil, a medium that lends itself well to expressions of texture, on canvas with washes of colored ink.

Though you will find cityscapes in his oeuvre, it is his still life images that captured my attention. They invite you to enter slowly, revealing their individual elements gradually, each emerging in turn from the composition to take its place in your attention.

Within the subdued color and value range, Kogge finds a wealth of subtle variation, combined with beautiful textural surfaces, both rendered in his images, and expressed through the canvas surface on which they rest.

There is a gallery of his work on American Artist’s Artist Daily, a bio on Contemporary Still Life and a portfolio on Local Artists.

Long time readers of Lines and Colors will know that J.C. Leyendecker is one of my favorite illustrators, and I’m always happy to share Leyendecker resources on the web when I come across them.

Illustrator Chris Sheban, who I wrote about here, was kind enough to let me know about an older post on David Apatoff’s wonderful Illustration Art blog featuring a beautiful sheet of Leyendecker studies here, and another set here.

Be sure to click through to the high resolution images that Apatoff has been kind enough to make available for us. Apatoff also adds his own brief but insightful observations about Leyendecker’s technique, particularly the elements of style and design with which he enlivens even the most ordinary objects and surfaces.

Leyendecker can make folds in clothing as beautiful as other artists make pastoral valleys.

Apatoff has another post titled The Anvil of Art about the young Norman Rockwell trying to figure out how Leyendecker, his artistic hero, accomplished his astonishing level of virtuosity.

[Via Chris Sheban]

Alexis Rockman might be called an unnatural history artist.

Drawing on the visual language of natural history artists, botanical illustrators and and paleontological reconstruction artists, along with a fascination for diorama-style cut-aways and mural-like panoramas, Rockman puts the the time machine in the other gear and moves us into the future, depicting familiar landmarks in the aftermath of ecological or bioengineering disasters.

He also applies his skills to more direct portrayals of the natural world, but it is his fantastic visions, sometimes surreal in their dreamlike juxtapositions of animal and plant life with the artifacts of human construction, that resonate most strongly.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum is displaying a major exhibition of Rockman’s work, covering the span of his career with almost 50 paintings.

Alexis Rockman: A Fable for Tomorrow takes its name from the first chapter of Rachel Carson’s A Silent Spring, the first book to bring the fragility of the ecosystem into the awareness of the general public. There is a gallery on the museum’s site.

Alexis Rockman: A Fable for Tomorrow is also the title of a book created to accompany the exhibition.

Rockman’s own site has galleries of his work from several series and different periods of his career.

There is also a gallery on Wired Science that allows a quick overview of his work.

Alexis Rockman: A Fable for Tomorrow is on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum until may 8, 2011.

John Singer Sargent was American by birth, but spent most of his career and adult life in England and Europe.

In 1884 he exhibited his painting called Madame X at the Salon in Paris. Though famous now, the painting became the subject of scandal at the time, a kind of attention that Sargent didn’t relish, and the unwanted drama left him exhausted.

Sargent retreated to the English countryside, and for several years painted largely to please himself, rather than his usual concentration on society portraits.

Though Sargent could really be called a “painterly realist”, it was during this period that he painted many of the works that have earned him placement among the painters considered to be “American Impressionists”.

In Sargent’s case the experimentation with the broken color, effects of light and plein air painting of the the French Impressionists came directly from his association and friendship with Claude Monet. Sargent visited Monet several times at Giverny, Monet visited Sargent in England, and the two corresponded. Sargent expressed great admiration for Monet and his work.

The Adelson Galleries in New York, which has mounted several impressive Sargent exhibitions in the past, is presenting a show of Sargent’s work from that period, 1883 to 1889, drawing on works from the gallery’s collection and borrowing major pieces from museums in the U.S. and England.

The press release for the exhibition gives some background.

Though he adopted some of the superficial characteristics of Monet’s approach, Sargent never fully painted in the Impressionist style. His experiments, however, are among some of his most recognizable works, like his painting of artist Paul Helleu Sketching with His Wife (image above, top)

Missing here is his wonderful Carnation, Lily, Lily Rose (a personal favorite of mine), though studies (image above, third down, left) and related works point to its importance in this period of Sargent’s career.

Sargent and Impressionism is on view until December 18, 2010. There is a painting on the gallery’s Current Exhibition page, and a gallery of 31 images, with thumbnails here. (This may change when the exhibition closes.)

There is also a good review of the show from the New York Times, with an accompanying slideshow of images.

I am unabashed in my enthusiasm for the work of William Stout, and I’ve written about him previously several times here on Lines and Colors (links below). In particular, I take great delight in his beautiful drawings in pen and ink with watercolor.

I’ve been looking forward to the release of William Stout: Inspirations from Flesk publications since it’s companion volume, William Stout: Halllucinations, was released back in July (my review here).

Stout has been prolific in his career, and there are a number of illustrations and other drawings that are difficult to find in print. Much to the delight of Stout fans like myself, the two books have collected a number of these from various sources and presented them in the kind of beautifully produced and printed art volumes that are Flesk’s specialty.

The two collections are arranged thematically, the first focusing on monsters, trolls, dragons and creatures, the new one on women from fantasy and fairy tales.

In both volumes we see Stout having fun, gleefully drawing on his inspirations from traditional stories and pop culture as well as paying tribute to some of his artistic roots.

In Inspirations, we find Stout working with subjects from Edgar Rice Burroughs, Shakespeare, The Wizard of Oz (Baum’s not MGM’s), Wagner’s Ring Cycle, Rima the Jungle Girl, The Bride of Frankenstein and even a humorous take on his own dinosaur illustrations; in the process creating playful homages to late 20th Century artists like Frank Frazetta and Dave Stevens, and Golden Age masters like Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac and the great but under-appreciated Gustav Tenngren and John Bauer (links to my posts).

In fact, in his Foreward, Stout outlines what he calls his “Rackham/Dulac Technique” in a step-by step walkthough of the process that many illustrators will find enlightening.

Stout has been influenced by a number of great Golden Age pen and ink illustrators, with a variety of approaches, and in his own style he has managed to distill a balance of linework, rendering and application of color that I find particularly appealing. Combined with his accomplished draftsmanship and fervent imagination, he serves up a smorgasbord of visual treats in these collections.

There is a small gallery of preview images on the Flesk site (click on the image to pop up the gallery), along with more detail about Inspirations and the companion volume Hallucinations, as well as the other Stout titles from Flesk: Dinosaur Discoveries and New Dinosaur Discoveries A-Z.

The titles can all be ordered directly from the Flesk online store (or the old way via mail).

The limited edition signed hardback version of William Stout: Inspirations is already sold out from the Flesk site, though you may still be able to order copies of the hardback directly from William Stout’s site.

You can also find more of Stout’s work, in a variety of media, subjects and approaches, in the galleries on his site.