Last March I wrote about a show called From Impressionism to Modernism: The Chester Dale Collection that was on view at the time at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

The NGA’s page for the exhibit offered a slideshow of 24
images and a PDF of the exhibition brochure, though neither were as satisfying in displaying the works as one might hope.

Though the exhibition is long over, I recently stumbled across an article on the exhibition on About.com, not usually a site I think of as a destination for art images.

I may have to re-think that assessment as the article is accompanied by an 84 image gallery of works, which you can view as thumbnails on the article page (note “Next >” link at bottom for more thumbnails), or by starting with the first image and clicking through.

The images on the individual pages are linked to much larger versions. Though not quite high resolution by the standards of some web images these days, they are large enough to be quite satisfying. I’ve tried to show the relative scale with the detail crop of each of the images above.

(Image pairs above: William Merritt Chase, Jean-Baptiste-Camile Corot, Claude Monet, Henri Fantin-Latour)

Each year students from the graduating class of the remarkable Gobelins, l’école de l’image (Goeblins School of Communications) in Paris are divided into teams that create short animations to be used as introductions to each day’s events at the Annecy International Festival of Animation.

Each year in their minute to minute and a half segments full of wit, style, delightful drawing, remarkable timing and fervent imagination, they reaffirm my confidence in the future of hand drawn animation.

My favorites this year are Oh Gee, Oh Why (above, third down), looking like a cross between Fantasia and Yellow Submarine, and Lights Out (fourth down), a film noir tussle between light and dark.

(Titles for images above [see individual videos for team credits]: Jazzin; Grand Central; Oh Gee, Oh Why; Lights Out; Hello Brooklyn)

Chilean painter Claudio Bravo only studied art formally in the studio of Miguel Venegas Cienfuentes at an early age. Bravo had his first exhibition at the age of 17. In the 1960′s he moved to Madrid where he developed a reputation as an in demand society portrait painter. In the 1970′s he moved to Tangier, where he would live until his recent death on June 4, 2011.

Though known as hyper-realist, I find his work far from “photographic” and particularly enjoy his still life paintings. In his later work, Bravo began to take his fondness for depicting drapery and surfaces of crumpled paper and make them the subjects of large scale paintings, rather than simply aspects of still life or portrait compositions.

I also admire his De Hooch-like glimpses of rooms through doorways, and his paintings of paintings, usually on artist’s easels but in a relatively finished state.

His website is in Spanish, but can be navigated easily enough by non Spanish-speakers. “Obras” is works, and the galleries are divided into years. Note that within most galleries are multiple pages of thumbnails accessed by a row of numbers above the images.

There is also a nice selection of his work on Cuidad de la pintura, with over 180 works, and an additional gallery on Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes.

One of the images in this post on Orange Crate Art shows the scale of his larger works.

There are at least a couple of collections of his work: Claudio Bravo: Paintings and Drawings, and Claudio Bravo And Morocco; though the former is not inexpensive and the latter seems out of print, but may be available used.

[Via Art Daily]

[Addendum: Matthew Innis has posted a nice tribute to Bravo on his blog, Underpaintings.]

Japanese artist Sayaka Ouhito is an illustrator, and perhaps a concept artist. I’m unsure about the latter as I can’t read Japanese and, save for this relatively uninformative interview, there seems to be very little information available about her in English.

Other than that, I know little about her, just my own impressions of the delightful drawing and Miyazaki-like charm that make her work so appealing.

This gallery on her website is the best source for her work, though I found looking through the rest of the website difficult and unfruitful, more because of the lack of clear identification of links than the language barrier.

She also has a blog, which includes some larger versions of works in the previously mentioned gallery, as well as others, but takes some digging through photos of cute animals and such to get to them.

[Via Drawn, also here and here]

Spanish painter Joaquin Mir (also called Joaquin Mir Trinxet or Joaquim Mir i Trinxet) was born in Barcelona and studied there at Escuela Oficial de Bellas Artes (the School of Fine Arts), He was active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and was known primarily for his landscapes.

He worked in a lush, painterly style, often with a bright color palette. Some of his compositions utilize Art Nouveau inspired design elements and others blend representation with elements of abstraction or even drip painting.

Though the biographical information I could find about him was limited, there are a number of sources of images on the web, in particular on Cuidad de la pintura, which has over 300 images of his works (about half of which are drawings or sketches).

When I was in my late teens, earnestly trying to learn the art and craft of comic book illustration, I stumbled across a find in the dusty shelves of a used bookstore that popped my eyes open and sent me home feeling like I had struck gold.

It was a copy of Figure Drawing for All it’s Worth (also here) by Andrew Loomis, and in a way it was gold — a classic instructional art book by a master illustrator that has come to be regarded as a “must-have” by comics artists, illustrators and artists of all kinds, particularly those who must “invent” the figure — draw people in a variety of positions without model or reference.

Those artists, like myself, were lucky to have found a copy. Classic that it is, the book has been out of print for decades, leaving those who understand its worth (if you’ll excuse the expression) wondering when, if ever, the book would be republished.

Used copies in good condition have been selling in the $100 to $200 range (and higher), and though images of the book’s pages have appeared in various places on the internet, they leave much to be desired in comparison to the actual book.

Extracts of Figure Drawing for All its Worth, and its superb companion volume, Drawing the Head and Hands, were published as Drawing: Figures in Action and Drawing: The Head, respectively, from Walter Foster Books some years ago. Large in dimensions and inexpensive, they were worth picking up, but at 32 pages they were more pamphlets than books, representing a small fraction of the original books’ actual content and a poor substitute for the real thing.

So artists were left haunting used bookstores, hoping copies would show up from someone’s attic for which the bookstore owner would not know the value. Having copies of Loomis books became a bit of a status symbol in certain artists’ circles. And why, we would repeatedly ask, have these treasures not been republished?

So it was with a combination of delight and reservation that I responded to the news that Figure Drawing for All its Worth had finally been republished; the question being what kind of treatment it would receive in terms of quality of reproduction.

When I received my review copy of the new edition from Titan Books, not only was I pleased that they have been respectful of the original edition and the importance of the book, I was delighted to see that they have gone well beyond that. This is an absolutely beautiful facsimile edition, superbly reproduced with crisp, beautiful illustrations on softly textured, slightly off-white paper — looking for all the world as if you had just pulled it off the shelf in 1943.

Wow.

Not only that, they have been respectful of the wallets of starving artists everywhere, pricing the hardcover edition at only $40. A steal.

Andrew Loomis was a well respected and influential mid-20th Century illustrator (see my post on the extensive article that appeared in Illustration magazine), but he is better known today for his series of instructional books, of which Figure Drawing for All its Worth and Drawing the Head and Hands are the stars.

Though his instruction is valuable to those studying from life as well as those who are inventing the figure, his emphasis is on constructing the figure, understanding the underlying anatomy and geometry and on perceiving the figure as form, with volume. The figure exists in, and occupies, space. Loomis gives you keys to placing figures in perspective, working with foreshortening, and getting an intuitive grasp of elements of the human body as volumetric forms.

Countless artists (myself included) credit Loomis with opening their eyes to these concepts and revolutionizing their approach to drawing the figure. Loomis has been influential on generations of illustrators and comics artists in particular, as he speaks directly to the challenges they face in constructing figures and placing them in relation to their environment in a variety of positions and views, as well as in dynamic poses showing the figure in motion.

Not only is Loomis knowledgable, insightful and good at conveying what he knows about drawing (which is considerable), his own drawings are elegant, with graceful gestures, economy of notation, fluid lines and crisp rendering.

The combination qualified him to create some of the best art instruction books ever written. Long deserving of being republished, they are as relevant now as they were when first published, if not more so. The text is as sharp and crisp as the drawings, leading you through a course of discovery and offering a solid grounding in the traditional fundamentals of drawing the human form, as well as tips from one of the notable illustrators of the 20th Century.

In short, Figure Drawing for All its Worth is a treasure.

The next best news? Titan is set to release another Loomis Classic, Drawing the Head and Hands, in October!

[Important note: the images of the book interior above are taken from internet scans of older editions and do not give an accurate representation of the superb quality of the illustrations in the new edition.]