Joseph Zbukvic is a Croation born artist living and working in Melbourne, Australia.

Zbukvic’s atmospheric, emotionally resonant watercolors have a wonderful characteristic of being simultaneously loose and crisp — loose in that he suggests rather than elaborating, and crisp because of his masterful command of edges. He has a highly refined sense of when to define a sharp edge, and when to let an edge disappear into mists of hazy textured color.

His landscapes and cityscapes, often of locations in Europe, are highly evocative of the place, without being rigid in their portrayal of details and specifics. He portrays the kind of visual image we might call up as a memory of a fondly remembered place, both hazy and sharp.

Many of Zbukvic’s paintings are done on location. His palette is often muted and understated, though sometimes punctuated with higher chroma passages. Zbukvick enjoys dwelling on misty atmosphere, rain and overcast shadow, as well as the haze of bright sunlight.

Zbukvick gives highly regarded workshops. This year’s schedule includes dates in France, Spain and Canada as well as Australia. His DVD, Watercolor Impressions, includes scenes from previous workshops; you can see a short excerpt by clicking on the second image on the workshop page.

I also came across this video clip from Inside Joseph Zbukvic’s Sketchbook, related I think to a June, 2008 cover story on him in Watercolor Artist magazine.

In addition to his workshops, Zbukvick also teaches at Charles Sturt University and the Mitchell School of Arts.

Some of the galleries that represent his work have additional galleries in which you will find images not on his site (and/or larger reproductions, particularly the first two listed).

[Suggestion courtesy of Jeroen Coert]

Addendum: Adebanji Alade wrote to let us know about Zbukvic’s book Mastering Atmosphere & Mood in Watercolor: The Critical Ingredients That Turn Paintings into Art. Unfortunately, it is out of print and resellers seem to be asking high prices for it at the moment. Perhaps something to keep an eye out for.

Spanish painter Juan Gallego paints images that are technically floral paintings, though they are unlike any I have seen.

Gallego take his inspiration in close-ups of flower forms that are convoluted, multi-layered and often have a wrinkled or withered appearance.

These are the basis for his large scale compositions (it’s instructive to see a photo of an exhibit to get sense of their size), that border on abstracts. but retain their recognizable forms.

He apparently uses photographic reference, and deliberately plays with the illusion of focus in areas of his canvasses, giving them both depth and and compositional structure, demanding that your eye find his intended center of interest.

Gallego often provides several detail images to accompany the paintings he posts on his blog, in which you can see the painterly handling of the surface, something that would be hard to see in the smaller images. Also, most of the images in the blog, including the detail images, can be clicked on to see a higher resolution version.

He doesn’t seem to update often, but there is enough on the blog to get a good feeling for his work. In the image above, the whole composition at the top shows its painterly characteristics in the detail below it, which is taken from the right hand side of the painting, about a third of the way down.

Born in the Czech Republic, Peter Gric emigrated to Austria at the age of 12, and studied at the Academy of Arts in Vienna.

His paintings are representational, but they largely depict imaginary objects or landscapes, that can at times seem architectural, at times organic and at other times, a combination of the two.

Gric paints in acrylic and sometimes oil, and uses computer graphics and 3D software to help visualize and work out perspective and compositional problems before, or even while painting.

His structural imaginings can take curvilinear forms that seem to be obeying some hidden geometry, as if some stone-like material was assembling itself along invisible lines of force.

Other images show the apparent dissolution of structures or material formations, with walls or cliffs dissolving into a gravity defying shower of stone blocks. His paintings sometimes include female forms that are apparently made of stone and either dissolving or gathering themselves together from inorganic elements.

Gric’s website has his paintings arranged by year, so you can browse back through some of his previous explorations of similar and disparate themes.

There is also a shop with prints of images from various times. Gric has also illustrated a number of book covers, largely in the science fiction genre, and you can see some of them in the “Other Projects” section of his site.

There is a gallery for Gric’s paintings on the beinArt Surreal Art Collective, which is where I encountered his work, as well as an interview with the artist. He is also featured in the first volume of the Collective’s Metamorphosis collections (see my post on Metamorphosis, Volume I).

For those familiar with the English Pre-Raphaelite painters, the phrase “modern Pre-Raphaelite” may sound as much an oxymoron as the Surrealist phrase “Soluble Fish”, in that the Pre-Raphaelites named their group after their desire to return to the “pre-Raphael” purity of the early Renaissance.

John William Waterhouse was never a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, he wasn’t born until the year of their first exhibition, but he was very much influenced by them, took on many of the same literary themes in his paintings and is often associated with them from the perspective of a century and a half into the future.

Unlike the Pre-Raphaelites, who made a point of breaking away from the Royal Academy and deriding it’s leadership, Waterhouse was completely comfortable with the Academy and was active as a member.

For all of his classical training and Pre-Raphaelite leanings, Waterhouse was indeed modern in his time, particularly in his later work, when he moved away from his more tightly controlled early style, somewhat in the vein of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema and other romantic history painters, toward a more open and lively handling of paint.

Influenced though he was by the Pre-Raphaelite painters in subject matter and emotional tone, Waterhouse differed in his approach to painting, specifically eschewing the detailed techniques that Millais at one point complained took a whole day painting an area “no larger than a five shilling piece”, and embracing instead the painterly, open brushstrokes of the French Impressionists and the English painters who had taken up their style. Not that Waterhouse painted in an Impressionist manner, but more of a lively synthesis of Academic and Impressionist inspired techniques, a sort of painterly and richly colored academic classicism.

If Academic painting, plus Pre-Raphaelite literary romanticism plus Impressionist color and brushstrokes sounds like an improbable combination to you, the images above, and many others, will attest to its success. Waterhouse is not only a favorite of mine, but of millions. His images are among the most popular and frequently reproduced in the canon of Western art.

J.W. Waterhouse: The Modern Pre-Raphaelite is an exhibition organized by the Groninger Museum, the Netherlands in cooperation with the Royal Academy of Arts and the Montreal Museum of Fine Art. It is the first major international exhibition of his work, and includes eighty painting and numerous drawings.

J.W. Waterhouse: The Modern Pre-Raphaelite is at the Royal Academy of Arts from June 27 to September 13, 2009, and will be at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts from October 1, 2009 to February 2, 2010.

There are numerous books on Waterhouse, including a new one that accompanies this exhibition. I haven’t seen that one, but I can recommend J.W. Waterhouse by Peter Trippi. The latter volume, while perhaps not the most luxurious with illustrations, shows a curator’s keen eye in their selection and accompanies them with well thought out text that gives them a depth and artistic history many art books lack.

I don’t know if the images I’ve chosen above have any relation to the exhibition, I’ve just picked them to be representative of Waterhouse, both in his most familiar and somewhat lesser known forms.

For more, see my previous posts about John William Waterhouse and The Pre-Raphaelites.

[Via Art Knowledge News]

In addition to receiving a degree in physics from Haverford College in 1944, and an appointment to work on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, Clark Hulings studied art with George Bridgeman (whose books on anatomy are among my favorites) and influential teacher Frank Reilly (see my post on Frank Reilly) at the Art Student’s League in New York.

Health issues prevented Hulings from joining the atomic bomb project and he turned to his love of art for his career.

He started in portraiture, but the demands of sitters made him more inclined to a career in illustration. Even as he established a successful career as an illustrator, his desire to pursue easel painting, particularly landscape, led him to study in Florence, Italy for three years, and on his return to the U.S. he pursued landscape painting while continuing his illustration career.

Hulings eventually transitioned from illustration to gallery painting full time. He became an accomplished and well respected painter. His careful observations and tonally complex compositions make for evocative images from his travels across the globe, but particularly shine in his portrayals of rural Mexican village life, from colorful markets to humble shelters to quiet domestic scenes.

Hulings’ paintings interweave patterns of light, often brilliant white against walls and the sides of buildings, with areas of more subdued contrast that are rich with visual texture.

The intricate interplay of light and texture, and his attention to visual detail, can make his paintings seem tighter than they actually are when seen in reproduction, an impression that is unfortunately not dispelled by the small images on his own site and elsewhere on the web. However, if you take a look at the zoomable image of this painting on the Sotheby’s auction site, you can see the actual loose and painterly quality of his work.

Also unfortunate is the fact the the Flash slideshow on the Painting Gallery section of his web site doesn’t function properly (image sections overlap and cover other sections); however there is an older Image Gallery still linked from the Contact page, that is more straightforward.

There also images on the Store page. In addition, there are books and DVDs available directly from his web site; and others, some out of print, available from sources like Amazon.

There are a few videos on YouTube and Hulings’ Facebook page that are audio excerpts of his lectures at the Art Students League, as well as an additional gallery on Facebook.

[Suggestion and links courtesy of James Gurney]

Odilon Redon (Bertrand-Jean Redon) was a French Expressionist/Symbolist painter and pastel artist whose career in the latter half of the 19th Century was marked by restless experimentation with spare compositions, intense colors and blurred images that suggest more than they reveal.

His dreamlike excursions into shifting mists of color and soft suggestions of form and emotion anticipated the Surrealists fascination with dreams and unconscious imagery.

His textured pastels, often collisions of half hidden shapes and lost edges, presaged the break up of naturalistic forms into geometry that would herald Cubism; and his brilliant intense clashes of undiluted color bridged Impressionism and Fauvism.

Redon was also a lithographer, working in dramatic black and white works that seem to have emotional color under their surface, waiting to be released.

He originally failed his entrance examinations for the École des Beaux-Arts, but later was admitted and studied with Jean-Léon Gérôme. In sharp contrast to Gérôme’s precise renderings, Redon’s images often blend recognizable forms with passages that dissolve into ambiguous intimations of subjects, vague hints of objects and scenes whose definition is left to be filled in by the viewer’s subconscious.

Vasily Surikov (Wassilij Iwanowitsch Surikow) was probably the foremost history painter in Russia. He was active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Born into a Cossack family in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, he studied at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg. Garnering awards and acclaim for his paintings, Surikov moved to Moscow, where he became friends with noted Russian artist Ilya Repin, and along with him, Ivan Kramskoy and others became an exhibitor in the traveling exhibitions by the Peredvizhniki (the Itenerants), a group of painters who chose to distance themselves from the Russian Academy.

Surikov lent his brush to the portrayal of great Russian historical tragedies, political upheavals and the deaths of leaders and political figures, as in Morning of the Execution of the Streltsy by Tsar Peter I (image above, with details).

Surikov would spend months or years gathering background information, costuming details and biographical studies; and producing multiple preliminary sketches to create his large scale historical works. He also often painted the same scene in differing sizes, either as a preliminary or as a variation on a larger or smaller version.

He also produced many individual portraits, landscapes and watercolors.

There is an official (I think) web site in Russian, but the links across the top are to galleries easily accessible to non-Russian speakers.

Two things strike me about painter Ben Aronson’s work, geometry and edges.

The geometry is often prominent, as in his cityscapes and interiors, arrayed not only in the patterns of their own geometric intersections, but in the slashing diagonals of shafts of light and dark, punctuated with floating solids of sun and shadow.

Aronson’s edges, on the other hand, are often subdued, softened and blurred so they are simultaneously clear and indefinite. You know without question that two shapes meet with an edge, you just don’t quite know where. This is most evident in his figurative work; though even here he places his figures within geometrically complex interiors.

These elements combine with even more subtlety in is contemplative still life subjects, often simple arrangements of flowers in a glass, that are little marvels of light, shadow, shapes and playful edges.

Aronson was born into an artistic family, both of his parents active as painters, and his father a well known teacher, as well as inheriting a lineage from his great grandmother who was a painter and illustrator.

In addition to his family influence, and his study with painters like Phillip Guston and James Weeks at Boston University, Aronson takes inspiration from artists both traditional and modernist. His work is represented in a number of museums and private collections.

[Via Painting Perceptions]

For reasons that are beyond me, the image most popularly associated with Whistler is not, as it is with most artists, one of his artistic pinnacles; but, at least in my opinion, one of his least successful and least interesting works, Arrangement in Grey and Black: The Artist’s Mother, known commonly at “Whistler’s Mother”.

How this particular painting became an icon of American art is a mystery I find too uninteresting to pursue. Whistler’s overall body of work, however, his muted tonalist masterpieces, evocative portraits and stunningly beautiful etchings, make him one of the most under-appreciated “famous” artists that I can bring to mind.

While many of his Victorian contemporaries spoke boldly in voices of Academic clarity or Pre-Raphaelite finesse, and the more adventurous shouted with Impressionistic abandon, Whistler… whispered.

Influenced both by the free brushwork of Impressionism and the solid foundation of Academic training (like many of the so-called “American Impressionists”), Whistler, even more than the others, took great inspiration from the spare, open and visually poetic compositions of Japanese prints, which were a popular import into England and Europe at the time.

Though he is considered an American painter, Whistler, like Sargent, spent the better part of his life in Europe (England, actually) and was European in his sensibilities.

The son of an engineer, Whistler went to the West Point Military Academy, where he did poorly but came away with enough acumen from drawing class to be employed mapping the entire U.S. coast for the Military, a job he hated almost as much as school, though the etching skills he acquired would serve him well later.

Whistler despised the way Americans held art and artists in low esteem in comparison to Europeans (a situation that continues to this day, as far as I can tell); and on leaving to seek artistic training in Europe, never returned to the U.S. He subsequently spent much effort, in the course of his continual re-invention of his persona, denying his birthplace in Lowell, Massachusetts — alternately claiming to be a disenfranchised Southern aristocrat or born in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Whistler’s antics, his often arrogant and abrasive personality, dandified appearance and relentless self-promotion can be as misleading as his iconic portrait of his mother in discerning the real painter. For that, seek out his other portraits, like Purple and Rose: The Large Leizen of the Six Marks (one of my favorites in the Philadelphia Museum of Art) or Symphony in White, No 2: The Little White Girl (image above, top); or his beautiful, poetic “nocturnes”, soft harmonies of mist and atmosphere, like Nocturne: Blue and Silver - Chelsea (above, bottom).

In these works, and his masterful etchings (Whistler is my second favorite etcher next to Rembrandt), you can see Whistler as the major figure in art that his rather drab portrait of his mother and overly colorful personal behavior might otherwise obscure.

Fortunately, there are many resources on Whistler, numerous books, including a very nice and inexpensive Dover book of his etchings, and lots of web resources, some of which I’ve gathered for you below.

If you live in or near New York, now is a good time to re-discover Whistler, as the Frick Collection is presenting a beautiful little show culled from their own impressive holdings: Portraits, Pastels, Prints: Whistler in The Frick Collection from now until August 23, 2009.

If you’re not familiar with the “real” Whistler, don’t let him hide behind his mother’s skirts, seek out his quiet brilliance in the paintings and etchings where he composes his visual “symphonies”.

I occasionally make the assertion, in my posts about artists like Jan van Eyck, Antonello da Messina, Albrecht Altdorfer and Matthias Grünewald, that prior to the modern era of motion pictures, artists at various times were the special effects wizards of their day — dazzling those who viewed their works with displays of technical virtuosity, monumental scale and dramatic scenes of exotic landscapes, catastrophic events, and vivid imaginings.

A stellar case in point is John Martin, a romantic painter active in the first half of the 19th Century, who was unabashed in his efforts to wow audiences with his large scale paintings of Biblical and literary events.

His paintings were in a way more artistic versions of “dioramas” or “panoramas”, staged at the time as popular entertainments, that utilized images painted on large cloths, theatrical lighting and sometimes props like potted plants, to amuse the public in a way that presaged movies. The diorama makers, in turn, copied Martin’s work, knowing a good thing to steal when they saw it.

Martin’s paintings are said to have been a significant influence on pioneering movie director D. W. Griffith, who sought to impress audiences with his moving scenes of great drama and catastrophe.

In the latter years of his career, Martin was working on a large scale triptych of Biblical scenes, The Last Judgement, The Great Day of His Wrath (image above, with details, large version here) and The Plains of Heaven.