The Choirstalls in the Mainz Cathedral by Adolph Menzel.

Watercolor and gouache. 8 7/8 x 11 3/8″ (22.6 x 28.9cm).

In the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Use the “Fullscreen” link below the image and then zoom or download arrow.

Jason Horejs is the owner of Xanadu Gallery in Scottsdale, Arizona.

In addition to running the gallery, Horejs provides art marketing advice from the point of view of a gallery owner — some of it dispensed freely through his red dot blog (named, if you didn’t catch it, for the small red dots that traditionally indicate sold paintings in galleries), and some in a book, “Starving” to Sccessful, that is available through the blog.

His latest entry on the blog is How to Ship Paintings: A Step-by-Step Guide for Artists and Galleries, in which he gives a detailed and painstaking approach to protecting paintings and other two dimensional art from the terrors of the shipping process.

In addition to packing, Horejs covers topics like carrier policies and insurance, as well as things to avoid (like packing peanuts).

From the article:

Don’t Allow Bubble Wrap to Come in Direct Contact with Your Art

When we unwrapped the painting we could see that the bubble had stuck to the varnish. Removing it left an imprint of the bubble wrap on the surface of the entire painting. From certain angles you could see the perfectly spaced imprints of the bubbles. We had to have the artwork re-varnished before we could present it to a client who had already purchased it.

The link between movies and comics is a strong one. Even without the obvious bridge of their wonderful merging in animation, they share numerous qualities.

Both are visual storytelling mediums, and share a common concern with establishing shots, close-ups, framing a scene, conveying the spatial relationship of characters one to the other and other elements of essential visual continuity from scene to scene.

Both involve the element of time and of visual compositions that change over time.

Both have a “director’s” viewpoint, and the impact of choices of lighting, contrast and visual mood cannot be understated in the effectiveness with which a story is told.

Storyboards, which are used to plan movies, television and animation, are in essence a from of comics.

It’s not surprising then that there is crossover between the two fields; a number of comics artists and writers have moved into the fields of film and television and visual development artists have ventured into comics.

Marcos Mateu-Mestre, who I have profiled previously, has moved back and forth — he started as a comics artist for newspapers in his native Spain, moved into production design for animation and is currently a visual development artist working at Dreamworks.

In his excellent book, Framed Ink: Drawing and Composition for Visual Storytellers, which I reviewed here, he applied his expertise in both fields to create a superb framework for narrative illustration.

In his new book, Trail of Steel – 1441 A.D., Mateu-Mestre places those skills in the service of a graphic story about mercenary soldiers in 15th century Spain. The artist provided me with a review copy.

The storytelling, as you would expect, is dramatically cinematic, conveyed in Mateu-Mestre’s wonderfully fluid drawing style. He has an uncanny ability to combine precision draftsmanship and free, energetic rendering. I’ve spoken before about the delight I take in his drawing style.

The real highlight for me, however, is his mastery of tone. To say that the drawings are in black and white and grays is to miss the point. Here is a story told in both subtle and dramatic value contrasts that would not have been as effective if rendered any other way.

Mateu-Mestre uses value here in much the way skilled film directors use black and white film in many classic movies, creating a mood and atmosphere that would actually be difficult to achieve in color. These are images in which color would be a distraction and actually lessen the impact.

He has posted some images from the book on his blog in which he plays with the application of subtle colors to some of the pages (images above, second from bottom). As much as I like them as images and interesting experiments, I much prefer the panels as presented in the book.

Even though this is a story, students of comics (and visual storytelling in general) could consider Trail of Steel effective as a continuation of the lessons in Framed Ink — a textbook use of cinematic comics storytelling and the application of light and dark in narrative illustration.

The book is appended with a few notes on process, preliminary drawings and thumbnail page layouts. It is available as both a European style hardcover album (the best format for comics, IMHO) and a trade paperback.

You can find more mentions of the book on Mateu-Mestre’s blog, along with more of his visual development work, including some beautiful tone and color images from his work on Puss In Boots.

Sadko in the Underwater Kingdom, Ilya Repin.

Link is to large image on Wikimedia Commons. Original is in the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. Sadko is a medieval Russian epic.

[Note: full size version might be considered mildly NSFW.]

The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam is one of the world’s great museums, with a collection rich in famous masterpieces from the likes of Rembrandt and Vermeer, as well as hundreds of lesser known treasures.

The museum’s website, like many museum websites, long left something to be desired. Though numerous images were available, many in high resolution, they were not easy to search or browse, and overall presentation was somewhat awkward.

The museum recently launched a completely redesigned website, with a much better interface, easier access for searching, and in particular much better provisions for browsing and discovering images.

Choose Language at upper right if you would like to change to English, and then “Collection” to either Explore or Search the collection. The Explore section offers highlights, a good place to start, and offers categories like Artists, Works, Subjects and Styles which are then subdivided into subcategories.

The selections within a given artist or subject are no longer presented as tiny scrolling thumbnails, but as large scrolling thumbnails (certainly an improvement).

The individual images are then presented fullscreen, adapting dynamically to the size of your browser window, and overlaid with navigation widgets (I don’t know of a way to hide the latter), including controls to zoom the image. You can also move the image within the browser window by clicking and dragging.

The “i” at the bottom of the screen brings up an information panel with information about the image, links to details and a “Download image” link. To download images, however, requires creating a free “Rijksstudio” account (basically just an email address). You must then, for every image you download, choose the level of rights (“Personal use”) and click an “I agree with terms and conditions” checkbox — every time.

I will be quick to say that the new site is a vast and welcome improvement over their old one, and the images are large and well reproduced, but this kind of nonsensical legal paranoia mars the experience and makes the museum look small minded and disrespectful of their visitors.

(Hello! Almost all of these works are hundreds of years old, therefore in the public domain, and are not subject to copyright by international, or even specifically Dutch, copyright law. The standard here in the US is that photographs that just reproduce public domain artworks are also in the public domain. Perhaps this has yet to be tested in Dutch courts; but the checkbox barrier to downloading, or even viewing the work without the navigation widgets, just seems petty.)

That being groused about, the new site is well worth visiting and exploring, and a Rijksstudio account is worth setting up, if only for the unobstructed view of the high resolution images. Their intention is for visitors to form their own Rijksstudio collections, essentially bookmarked images similar to the collections you can make in the Google Art Project. They go on to offer to sell you prints of the images, or crops of them, in various modes (hence, I suppose, some of the reproduction rights BS).

Though not quite at the level of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s fantastic website makeover, this is still a worthy world-class museum website, suited to a world class museum, and a welcome addition to the web’s list of outstanding art resources. (Now if only the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay would follow suit…)

(Images above: Rembrandt, Vermeer, Aelbert Cuyp, Cornelis Springer)

Peter Fiore is a landscape painter originally from New Jersey and now based in northeastern Pennsylvania.

Fiore’s landscapes are marvels of balanced contrasts of hue and value. Light is an actor here, flitting across the canvas, heightening passages of landscape and foliage, spotlighting the trunks of trees or strands of grass, and leaving other passages untouched.

Often Fiore will play with patches of light in the distance of his scenes, both emphasizing their depth and leading you into them. He also frequently uses light and value contrasts to create a sense of “here” and “there” in his compositions, which gives the viewer an even more visceral sense of presence in the scene.

He frequently uses a motif of two major color groups, for example: blues and golden yellows in his snow covered winter fields and greens and blues in his summer scenes of rivers and fields.

Fiore received his formal training at Pratt Institute and also studied painting at the Art Student’s League. He has since taught at both institutions and currently teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

He also conducts workshops. There are several videos of him working or conducting gallery talks available on YouTube, including a short version (2 minutes) and long version (10 minutes) of one particular plein air session.

Fiore’s work is currently on display in a one man show at the Travis Gallery in New Hope, PA.

This is a terrific gallery just outside of New Hope proper, and Fiore is one of several excellent contemporary realist painters they represent.

The gallery has a selection of work from the show. (Note that the link will be the next current show after this show has ended.) You can also see some photos from the show, which opened in candle light during power outages from the recent storm, on Fiore’s blog.

Fiore also has an alternate blog, Landscape a Day, that is no longer being updated but still has an archive of posts and images. In addition there is a selection of larger images on the Art Renewal Center.

The show at the Travis gallery runs until this Saturday, November 24, 2012. On that Saturday, the 24th, Fiore will be giving a gallery talk and slide presentation at the gallery.

Bacchus and Ariadne by Titian (Tiziano Vecellio).

Gods, mortals, action, romance, leopards, snakes and severed deer heads! (Not to mention a beautifully dramatic landscape and delicate foreground flowers rendered with botanical accuracy.)

In the National Gallery, London. Use fullscreen and zoom controls at right of image.

The already amazing Google Art Project, which brings us beautiful zoomable full-screen high-resolution images of highlights from many of the world’s great museums, continues to get more amazing as more museums are added to the list.

This is particularly valuable as many of the museums featured do not provide large images of works in their collections on their own websites.

One of the more recently added museums is the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

This is the first time I’ve seen the GAP collection highlight choices for a museum for which I am familiar with a not insignificant percentage of the collection, and I have to say the choices left me puzzled and wondering about how these selections are made in general.

While some of the selections from the PMA are indeed representative of the gems in the museum’s world-class collection, others left me scratching my head (above which hovered a though balloon containing a bright neon blinking “WTF?!”).

Again and again I found myself thinking: “They choose this piece when all of these other amazing works are in the collection?”. And I’m not just talking about leaving out some of my personal favorites (they included some and left out many, but that’s to be expected); I’m thinking in terms of works from the same era, medium and genre as some of the works chosen that would have been much better representations of the museum’s collection.

In some ways it’s almost as if some of the best pieces were deliberately held back (and these are in the public domain so it’s not a question of rights), or even as if selections were in some ways made at random.

It makes me wonder now about the selections from other museums throughout the Google Art Project.

At any rate, optimal selections or not, there are enough gems to keep you dazzled and fascinated for a good while, particularly in light of the ability to zoom way in on these images in high resolution.

As usual with the Google Art Project, I’ll give you my Timesink Warning.

(Images above: James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Jan van Eyck, John Singer Sargent, Kano Hogai, Peter Paul Rubens, Eduard Charlemont, Canaletto)