The Hudson River School is a collective name for two generations of painters working in the areas in and around the Hudson River Valley in New York who transformed American Art, and landscape painting in general, in the early part of the 19th Century.

Painting the American Vision is the title of a new exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA that showcases these artists with 45 of their works drawn from the collection of the New York Historical Society.

The show includes works by Thomas Cole, Albert Biersadt, Frederic Edwin Church, Asher B. Durand and others, both familiar and less well known.

The museum’s page for the exhibition includes a slideshow of 12 paintings from the show, and there is a press release that goes into more detail about some of the artists and paintings.

You can also see a slideshow and description of the exhibit on the website of the Carter Museum of Art in Texas, where it was on display last year.

You can also visit the site of the New York Historical Society and view their extensive collection of Hudson River School paintings.

Painting the American Vision is on display at the Peabody Essex Museum until November 6, 2011.

(Images above: William hart, Asher B. Durand, Louis Rémy Mignot, Thomas Cole, George Peter Alexander Healy, Asher B. Durand)

I’ve long held that the most challenging subject for representational drawing and painting is the human figure, and in particular, the face. This is because we recognize, and can detect small inaccuracies in faces and the human form more easily than in any other part of the natural world.

If you draw a tree, and keep to a general approximation of that tree’s shape, smaller branches extending from larger, ect., few individuals who are not trained botanists would call you on minor inaccuracies relative to that species or the depiction of that individual tree. Draw an arm, hand, leg, or in particular a face incorrectly, and almost anyone will immediately recognize it as wrong.

Humans are hard wired for recognizing other humans, especially faces. We can look at photographs of a person as a child, adolescent and adult, stages in which major features like the relative size of the eyes and face to the size of the head can change dramatically, and still recognize it as the same person. Likewise, we can easily identify family resemblances among different individuals. Our ability to discriminate minute differences in facial features is remarkable.

Computer algorithms are getting better at it, as in the face recognition features in photo management software, but are still lacking.

Enter caricaturists, artists who, even more than portrait painters, must identify those characteristics that set one face apart from another. (Portrait painters can focus on accuracy and a sense of the sitter’s personality, caricaturists must find the identifying characteristics and exaggerate them.)

Writer Ben Austen has a article in the August Wired magazine, What Caricatures Can Teach Us About Facial Recognition in which he explores these ideas. He also describes a project at MIT analyzing hundreds of caricatures from dozens of caricature artists in an attempt to codify how they see facial differences into machine algorithms. It’s called the “Hirschfeld Project”, after noted caricaturist Al Hirschfeld.

To accompany the article, Wired had four noted caricaturists create caricatures of the article’s author — Court Jones, Daniel Almariei, Glenn Ferguson and Jason Seiler (image above, top) .

For those interested in the process, and in digital painting technique, one of the most interesting features is a video at the end of the article showing Court Jones working through several preliminary sketches and a finished digital painting of his caricature of Austen in Photoshop, while discussing his process (images above, middle and bottom).

Illustrator and animator Michael B. Myers has given us his vision of what the characters from the LOST television series would look like if they were designed for an animated series.

As unlikely as that possibility may be (except perhaps in alternate reality timeline limbo) it’s fun to have his nicely stylized treatment of some of the major characters from the series — even the smoke monster. (What, no Juliet?).

You can also find more of Myers’ digital painting, studies, sketches, posters and T-shirt designs on his website and on Behance Network.