In the Conservatory, James Tissot.

See my post on James Jacques Joseph Tissot.

Shintaro Ohata is an artist from Hiroshima, Japan who is both a painter and a sculptor.

Artists who are both sculptors and painters are not unusual. Ohata, however, frequently combines the two mediums in single works in which a painting and sculpture are displayed together as a mixed two dimensional – three dimensional work.

The sculptures are textured and painted in a way that carries forward the colors and textures of a painting. The painting and sculpture are then arranged and lit in a way that gives them additional visual continuity. These form scenes, in which the painting acts as a backdrop for the sculpture and the sculpture acts as a three dimensional projection of the painting.

As remarkable as the effect is in photographs, I would love to see these in person.

Ohata also paints stand-alone paintings in acrylic, in which the figures in the paintings bear an uncanny resemblance to his sculpted figures (above, bottom).

[Via Gizmodo]

The Customs, Antonio Mancini.

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

John Singer Sargent is said to have called Antonio Mancini “the world’s greatest living artist”. Jean-Léon Gérôme called him “a phenomenon”.

Who am I to argue?

Nicolas Delort, a freelance illustrator based in Paris, creates wonderfully textural pen & ink (on scratchboard) illustrations that take inspiration from greats like Franklin Booth and Gustav Doré — with perhaps a bit of Joseph Clement Coll and Virgil Finlay thrown in for good measure.

Delort’s website is essentially just a placeholder at the moment, but his blog is active, as is this Tumblog, and he has just been added to the artists represented by Shannon Associates artists representatives (more here).

Delort has a piece in the As Above So Below group exhibition at Floating World Comics in Portland, OR from February 7 to February 28, 2013. The exhibit is based on a challenge posed by Quenched Consciousness Tumblog (my post here) in which participants reinterpret a panel from Moebius & Jororowsky’s The Incal (above, second from bottom).

There is an interview with Delort on Open Lab Artists.

[Via Irene Gallo]

Francis Livingston is a gallery artist and illustrator based in Idaho who I wrote about back in 2006.

Since then his style continued to develop and change, exploring new themes.

In his latest work, he floats animals through the skies, parks and large scale building interiors of New York, as well as placing other objects like steamships similarly out of context.

In these, he brings the same painterly sensibility as evident in his paintings from life, giving his fantastic visions a kind of immediacy and authenticity that more sharp focused realism could not.

Though he still does not appear to have a dedicated website or blog, Livingston does now have a deviantART page, and he is well represented on the Arcadia Fine Arts site, as well as the site of Lindgren & Smith, artists representatives.

When viewing his work on the Arcadia Fine Arts site, take advantage of the “Full Screen Toggle” feature (link at upper right).

Livingston also teaches online courses in Landscape Painting and Narrative & Genre painting through The Art Department.

Winter Landscape, Holland, Barend Cornelis Koekkoek.

I love these Dutch genre paintings that show folks walking, playing, skating and otherwise engaging in business as usual, particularly on frozen waterways, in the dead of Winter.

In the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Click “Fullscreen” and zoom or download.

Back in 2010 I reported on They Draw and Cook, a project in which illustrators and other artists contribute recipes in the form of illustrations.

In something of a variation on that idea, food site Saveur has been running Recipe Comix, a series in which they have asked a number of comics artists to contribute recipes in the form of comic strips.

The index page shows an excerpt from each strip anda capsule description fo the recipe. ClLick through for the full feature in each case.

(Strip excerpts above: Laura Park, Joe Ollman, Jillian Tamaki, Lisa Hanawalt, Frank Gibson and Becky Dreistadt, Ryan North, Gordon McAlpin, Lucy Knisley)

[Via MetaFilter]

Today is the celebratory inauguration of the President here in the U.S. (the actual one, as required by law, took place quietly on the 20th).

In the news coverage of the event, I caught two mentions of art.

One was the inaugural poem, “One Today” written and recited by Richard Blanco, in which he gave a kind of “one day in America” style snapshot of various kinds of people as they go about the day’s activities, including “…the first brush stroke on a portrait”.

The other mention of art was a painting of Niagra Falls by Danish-American artist Ferdinand Richardt (above, top), which the U.S. Senator from New York, Chuck Schumer, requested the loan of from the State Department offices where it normally resides, to take a place behind the main table at today’s Inaugural Lunch.

Richardt was born in Denmark, where he was known for his extensive body of lithographs of manor houses. After having visited on several occasion, emigrated to the U.S., where he painted numerous canvasses of Niagra Falls as well as other landscapes and cityscapes in around the country.

There is a book of his drawings available used: Fredinand Richardt; Drawings of America.