Sometimes the Stars (Vimeo link) is a short (4½ minute) animation produced by Luke Jurevicius and directed by Ari Gibson and Jason Pamment (for full credits list, click on the “Description” link under the animation on the Vimeo page).

Elegant and understated, deftly realized in tones of gray, the wistful and somewhat enigmatic short follows a young girl’s journey on a train.

The animation was made to accompany a song of the same title, Sometimes the Stars, by the Audreys.

(This is what The Spirit should have looked like.)

[Via Max the Mutt Animation School (@MaxtheMutt on Twitter)]

Robh Ruppel is a well known art director, concept artist, character designer and matte painter for the film and gaming industries.

He was the Art Director for the animated feature films Meet the Robinsons and Brother Bear and did visual development work on films like Treasure Planet, Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Tarzan, Mulan and The Emperor’s New Groove. He is currently an art director and visual development artist for Naughty Dog, a gaming development studio in California.

Since I wrote a post about his work back in 2006, Ruppel has revised and expanded his website, maintained his Broadview Graphics site and continued to add to his now extensive blog, The Broadview Blog.

The galleries on his website are only identified by number until you click into them. The first few are concept art, matte painting, animation and color keys. I enjoy his colorful, atmospheric work on the Meet the Robinsons in particular (images above, top two).

Gallery 8 consists of sketches, largely in a science fiction vein (image above, third down), and Gallery 10 is fantasy art (from somewhat earlier in his career, I think).

Long before the current spate of iPad location painters, Ruppel, along with a few other concept artists like Nicolas Bouvier (“Sparth“), was an early practitioner of digital plein air painting, taking a laptop and Wacom tablet on location to paint from life in applicaitons like Painter and Photoshop.

Now, of course, he’s taking advantage of the much more manageable digital location painting process afforded by the iPad, using apps like Inspire Pro, and iPhone, using Autodesk Sketchbook Mobile.

Gallery 9 on the website is his gallery of Digital Plein Aire (images above, bottom three).

I particularly enjoy his on location digital paintings of room interiors, such as his Vermeer-like painting of a doorway shown above, bottom.

There is a new collection of Ruppels’ work titled Aspect Ratio, available from Gallery Nucleus. It features some of his digital plein air paintings as well as his science fiction themed art. You can see a review/preview of the book on Parka Blogs. Ruppel’s professional work is also featured in The Art of Uncharted 2: Among Thieves (Parka Blogs’ review here).

There is a nicely illustrated interview with Ruppel on CGSociety. There is also an interview with Ruppel on his use of Google SketchUp in Game Design, which includes more shots of his concept design work.

In July of last year the Getty Museum in Los Angeles acquired one of Joseph Mallord William Turner’s great masterpieces, Modern Rome – Campo Vaccino (and a pretty price they paid for it, too.)

Though not part of a special exhibition as far as I can tell, the museum is highlighting the fact that this magnificent work is on display.

The Getty Iris, the museum’s blog, has an interesting post called Labeling Turner, about the often overlooked process of creating a museum label for the piece, in this case a slightly more elaborate one than usual. The post includes photos of the painting in its place in the gallery.

The painting, a prime example of Turner at the height of his abilities, is a sweeping vista of “modern” Rome, i.e. in Turner’s time, 1839. The term “Campo Vaccino” means “cattle field” or cow pasture, the open area of the Roman Forum before it was excavated.

There is a larger image of the painting here as part of the VisualBites article. Wikipedia has a bit of history on the painting.

For more Turner resources, see my post on J.M.W. Turner.

Japanese artist Sagaki Keita creates drawings in which the textures and tones are composed of smaller drawings, down to striking levels of detail and complexity.

The large images are of cityscapes, faces, famous paintings, prints or sculpture, even atomic explosions. The images within the images are of little faces, figures, animals, fish, and assorted bizarre monsters and creatures, legions of them, waves of them (sometimes literally).

The drawings are done in pen and ink on paper mounted on board, some in relatively large scale, others not as large as you might assume. The works section of his website includes the dimensions of the individual pieces.

Even with Google Translate, I could find little other information specifically about the artist and his work, but the gallery includes a number of images with close ups that offer a fascinating glimpse of the nature of the works.

The images I’ve shown above, each with a corresponding detail, are still somewhat small. You can find a nice zoom-in on his interpretation of the Mona Lisa on Darizine, and several images previewed on Colossal.

Some of the images on his site are larger than they appear in the page, like his wonderful interpretation of Katsushika Hokusai’s In the Hollow of a Wave off the Coast at Kanagwa (see my post on Katsushika Hokusai).

It’s worth clicking on some of them to open the images in another browser tab or window to see if they are larger than the size they are represented in the page.

[Via MetaFilter]

Janet Fish is an American painter whose still life paintings seem to radiate color. Using a high chroma palette, in combinations that in lesser hands might fall into the garish, Fish produces harmonious compositions that vibrate with energy and light.

She often chooses as her subjects objects that are translucent, transparent or reflective, in particular colored glass. She surrounds these with flowers, bright cloth patterns and other objects in brilliant hues, balanced with strategically placed rich darks, and somehow manages to tame those wild arrays of color into images that seem at once preternaturally intense and perfectly naturalistic.

Fish is widely recognized and her work is in the collections of major museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.

There are a few catalogs and collections of her work; Janet Fish: Paintings by Vincent Katz is in print and readily available.

Her website includes a gallery of oil paintings as well as a section of screenprints. Fish is represented by the DC Moore Gallery in NY, which also showcases a nice selection of her work online. I’ve listed other galleries and additional resources below.

I’ve had the pleasure of seeing some of her works in person. They are often fairly large in scale and striking.

In rooms in which there are works by several artists, hers inevitably stand out and command your attention. Unlike many contemporary works about which that can be said, Fish’s paintings also reward extended viewing; small areas can be looked at in detail as wonderfully arranged shapes of color and tone. Her command of the arrangement of elements of color can be seen even more clearly in her graphic work.

The Comics Journal is a venerable (30 year) print publication that aimed to bring highbrow criticism and commentary to the oft maligned field of comics.

In the process it has been alternately unbearably stuffy and highbrow, and wonderfully informative and in-depth, often featuring book-length interviews with comics creators. I’ll take the good with the bad and say that it has overall been a welcome addition to the limited world of comics journalism, even as the mainstream media and web journalism have taken up the slack in recent years and expanded the range of writing about comics as an industry and an art form.

The Comics Journal’s own website, unfortunately, has been less than stellar. Despite some excellent blog writing and other occasional standouts, the overall presence has been weak and not well focused.

That looks to be changing, as new editors Dan Nadel and Tim Hoder, editors of the Comics Comics site, have launched a new, redesigned version of the TCJ site, with declared intentions that sound like the site can become a new destination site for those interested in comics on many levels (including highbrow). The first change of note is a new, much better and more usable interface.

The new editors promise that in addition to new material, both short posts and in depth material, the archives from the print magazine will continue to be added to the site, with the remainder of the past issues online by the end of 2011.

[Via Comics Beat, Heidi MacDonald (@Comixace) by way of Eric Orchard (@inkybat)]

Part of a site called Picturing Books, the Picture Book Timeline is a brief overview of illustrated children’s books as they have changed over time.

Not actually presented as a timeline (despite the appearance of my images above), but as a slide show, it steps through some significant titles and artists in the course of the presentation. The images are somewhat small, but large enough to get a feeling for the art and, along with the text describing the books, let you follow up by digging further elsewhere.

There are other resources on the site, but I found most of them less than compelling. The “Artistic Media” and “Artistic Style” sections near the bottom of the navigation include some more book covers and work by various artists. The “Artists and Authors” section, probably the most useful of them, is a list that includes links to the creators’ websites.

(Artists above, links are to my posts: Johannes Amos Comenius, Kate Greenaway, Howard Pyle, John Tenniel, Arthur Rackham, Maxfield Parrish, W.W. Denslow, Crokett Johnson, Maurice Sendak, Chris van Allsbugh, Brian Selznick)

[Vis MetaFilter]

Though he was considered part of the Hudson River School of artists, it was for his evocation of the drama of the landscape in the western United States that Thomas Moran is best known.

His watercolor location sketches of the landscape in Wyoming (image above, 4th down), along with photographs by William Henry Jackson, were instrumental in convincing Congress to create the first U.S. national park at Yellowstone.

Born in England, his family emigrated to the U.S. to an area near (now part of) Philadelphia in 1844 when Moran was 7. He started his art career as an apprentice in an engraving firm, quitting to join his brother Edward who was already established as an artist. He painted landscapes in the area around PHiladelphia (image above, top: Tohickon Creek, Bucks County) and established a reputation as a landscape artist.

At one point, Moran had the opportunity to study in England, where he encountered the dramatic landscapes of J.M.W. Turner. They would remain an influence in Moran’s mature work, particularly in his seascapes.

Moran became an illustrator for magazines. An assignment for an article in Scribner’s Magazine led to his opportunity to chronicle the wild beauty of Yellowstone in the summer of 1871.

On his way to Yellowstone, Moran embarked from the train in Green River, where the otherworldly rocky landscape would become the subject of several future works, including the striking Green River Cliffs, Wyoming, painted in 1881 (image above, second from top). This painting was just acquired by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, a gift of patrons.

Moran painted in many other places, areas of the Rocky Mountains, the grand Tetons (where Mt. Moran is now named for him), Europe, Florida and Long Island, where he later settled and painted many of his dramatic seascapes.

I particularly enjoy his beautiful series of luminescent views of Venice (above, bottom).

Moran’s paintings are large in scale, and the small images I’ve posted above don’t begin to do them justice. If you can’t visit a museum where you can see his work in person, at least look for some larger reproductions.

One of the best selections online is The Athenaeum (note links to three pages of thumbnails linked at top, click image on detail page for larger image). There is also a more quickly accessed selection on Wikimedia Commons. I’ve listed other resources below.

This book on Thomas Moran is well reviewed on Amazon, but I haven’t seen it myself; there is also a book of his Field Sketches.

[News of NGA acquisition via ArtDaily]