I initially came cross Oregon born, California based painter Don Gray by way of his daily painting blog Daily Art West, in which he posts his small paintings of varied subjects, sometimes following the model of small indoor still life subjects common to the “painting a day” practice, but more often of outdoor scenes, frequently painted en plein air.

Following links from the blog, I found some of his more finished gallery work and discovered that he is a muralist.

Gray paints his small paintings in both oil and watercolor. His 30 years of painting have taken him through much of the Pacific Northwest; and he has applied his direct realist style to a variety of landscapes, both intimate and grand in scale. He has also developed the figurative work that features more prominently in his murals, which most often are of historical subjects.

Gray has in recent years experimented with moving away from realism in his contemporary work.

Perhaps because I don’t have much personal experience with the western mountains, I connect most readily with his smaller scale landscapes of woods, small fields and creeks. In particular his small plein air paintings of these subjects have a feeling of immediacy and deftness of execution that I find particularly appealing.

Looking back through his blog posts, which are plentiful as one would expect from the painting a day regimen, is a fascinating journey through varied countryside, as well as another sort of journey through the artist’s interest in certain subjects. These fascinations often result in small series — of his brushes, of pillows on a love seat, or the current small series of fruit wrapped in clear plastic bags.

His landscapes show a freedom of subject choice that indicates he is not reliant on the “picturesque”. Gray has developed an enviable ability to see painting worthy subjects in almost anything on which his eye alights.

John Asaro’s web site opens with a statement about a change in artistic direction, from a 30 year career as a painter of “genre scenes” to a new commitment to exclusively painting the female figure.

The site contains little else in the way of information or background and is simply a gallery of work. The paintings themselves, which Asaro calls “figure portraits in arrangements” are striking. Single or multiple figures are indeed arranged compositionally against intense almost flat color backgrounds, with a singular eye to negative space.

The figures themselves, though sometimes colored naturalistically, are more often rendered in high-chroma colors; giving an impression of being monochromatic, but actually resonating with a rich variety of color.

Asaro paints in oil on canvas, and he lays in his bold colors with equally bold brushstrokes, wrapping them around the figures in a way that both emphasizes the forms and creates a vibrant visual texture.

When you look at the detail images that sometimes accompany the main images on the site, you can come away with the impression that the brushwork is so free that it must have been painted quickly, but I think the accuracy of the drawing indicates a more careful application of paint. I think it is confidence born of many years of painting that gives the impression of loose application.

Though his site is devoted to work in the new direction, you can still see some of Asaro’s previous work, which is in demand as limited edition serigraphs, on other sites.

Asaro is apparently represented by Lela Harty Studio/Gallery and on their site, despite a terrible navigation interface which keeps it all but hidden, you can find a long list of sold paintings linked to images. Asaro’s “genre painting” occasionally consists of straightforward landscapes, but most often is of figures in landscape, in the tradition of Sarolla, Anders Zorn and many of the painters labeled “American Impressionists”.

The Lela Harty site also lists a book, Asaro: A New Romanticism, which is out of print and unfortunately expensive used, and a new video, Asaro: A Retrospective, which is available on DVD.

Note: Some of the images in the sites linked here might be considered NSFW.

[Suggestion courtesy of Belinda Del Pesco (see my previous post on Belinda Del Pesco)]

Hungarian born painter Maurice Braun came to the US at the age of four, when his parents moved to New York City.

He demonstrated an interest in art at an early age and was apprenticed to a jeweler at the age of fourteen. On his own, he began to copy works of art from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He studied at the Academy of Design, and then studied for a year with William Merritt Chase at the school Chase founded (the Chase School, later called the New York School). Braun later traveled to Europe, studying and painting in Hungary, Austria and Germany.

Returning to New York, Braun established himself as a portrait painter, also painting landscapes in New England. He was attracted to the then flowering art scene in California, and moved there in 1910. He was drawn to San Diego by the promise of fresh landscapes, brilliant light, and the presence of a branch of the Theosophical Society, whose tenants were informed by the search for commonality in the spiritual traditions of multiple religions. Braun’s work was informed by his philosophical convictions, and in a way somewhat similar to George Inness, his landscape paintings were intended to be more than a superficial representation of the visual world.

Though Braun would continue to travel and paint in many places, he settled in San Diego and is included in the list of painters from the time who are classified as “California Impressionists”. His academic training was melded with the influence of Chase and the European Impressionists, leading to another of those wonderful blendings of academic art and impressionistic freedom that characterize many of the painters considered “American Impressionists”. (Like most of the painters classified that way, I doubt Braun ever considered or called himself an “Impressionist”.)

Braun founded the San Diego Academy of Art and served as its director for many years, but continued to travel to the east coast and exhibit there, establishing studios in New York and Connecticut and traveling back and forth at different times of the year.

Though Braun was a dedicated plein air painter, he did his finished works in the studio, and did not believe in limiting himself to a literal representation of the landscape. He welded intense study of the individual characteristics of the San Diego countryside with his own feeling for composition, form and color and produced an interpretation based on those factors and his philosophical convictions.

Braun’s painting technique varied over time as he continued to experiment, but he developed a bright palette, with clear unfussed-with colors and free brushwork.

In 1938, while researching derivatives of the fungus ergot in search of pharmaceutical applications in the treatment of migraines, Swiss scientist Dr. Albert Hoffman synthesized a chemical called lysergic acid diethylamide-25, which came into common parlance, and common use, in the early and mid-1960’s as LSD. It was a few years later before Hoffman, reportedly accidentally, discovered that the chemical had remarkable psychoactive properties.

Hoffman died on Thursday, at the age of 102, and though his legacy includes a number of other useful pharmaceuticals, it is the synthesis of LSD, and it’s impact on the culture, for which he will be remembered.

There is no doubt that the explosion of frenetic creative activity in music and the visual arts that occurred in the 1960’s owes much of its impetus, directly or indirectly, to the influence of LSD and related psychotropic compounds on the artists and musicians active at the time; an influence that continues to this day and has been absorbed into the fabric of mainstream art and entertainment.

There are a number of artists who are associated with the array of visual art styles that came to be called “psychedelic art”; for some examples, see my articles on Rick Griffin, Robert Venosa, Martina Hoffmann, Alex Grey, Andrew Gonzales and Peter Max. (For a clearer perspective on the influence of consciousness altering chemicals on artistic pursuits, separate from both the overreaching hype and anti-drug hysteria that ensued, see Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception.)

Though he stated that it was not his primary source of inspiration, one of the prominent artists most often associated with the visionary and spiritual aspects of that style is the German painter Mati Klarwein.

Klarwein had been established as a gallery artist for some time, but he entered the popular consciousness when several of his hallucinatory paintings graced the covers of popular progressive rock and jazz albums in the mid-60’s. His painting Annunciation, reproduced on the cover of Santana’s Abraxas LP, and his commissioned cover for Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew became cultural icons of the time.

Born Matias Klarwein, and reportedly named for German Renaissance painter Matthias Grünewald, himself something of a visionary painter, Klarwein studied with Fernand Leger and attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, before encountering the influential fantastic realist painter Ernst Fuchs, who would have a dramatic impact on his path as an artist.

Klarwein’s paintings also show the influence of the Surrealists, notably Salvador Dali, with whom he studied at one time, and share the ability to reinforce fantastic visions with startlingly precise realist painting technique.

His sometimes complex panoramas of bizarre imagery, reinforced with patterns of intense colors (often juxtaposing high-chroma colors with their compliments for the added intensity produced by optical effect), are rich with intricate detail, often carried to extreme levels. His circular composition Grain of Sand is particularly striking in that respect.

Less well known are his sometimes straightforward landscapes and still life paintings.

There are several collections of his work, some of them out of print but often available used, God Jokes: The Art of Abdul Mati Klarwein, Inscapes Real-Estate Paintings by Mati Klarwein, Milk n’ Honey, and a very nice volume that I particularly like, Mati Klarwein: Collected Works 1959-1975.

[Note: the sites linked here contain images that should be considered NSFW.]

Portrait and figure painter Sean Cheetham is another artist whose own blog and web site tell me virtually nothing about him, other than that I like his work. Perhaps that’s the most important thing, but one might hope for a little additional info.

I was able to come up with some through a little digging. It turns out that Cheetham is a workshop instructor at the Los Angeles Academy of Figurative Art. His short bio there mentions that he has BFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, and has exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in London, England and at the Mendenhall Sobieski Gallery in Pasadena.

There is also a short bio on the Morseburg Galleries site that additionally features a gallery of his work.

Cheetham’s own site is just a horizontally scrolling page of unfortunately not-very-large images. Fortunately, the ones in the posts on his blog are linked to much larger versions in which you can begin to get a feeling for the painterly qualities of his work.

Cheetham is an accomplished draftsman, and his painting approach shows a debt to academic painting traditions. His portraits are frank, direct portrayals of his subjects, unapologetic and seemingly without comment.

He doesn’t flatter or criticize, focusing unblinkingly on his subjects and their environment. In the latter, he seems attracted to the textures and colors of gritty urban interiors, the rough surfaces of thinly painted walls, chipped formica, scuffed floors and rough cloth.

Some of his portraits are of individuals with tattoos, and I get the impression that the tattoo art is represented with the kind of fidelity that a painter might apply to the portrayal of a famous painting in the background of a portrait set in an art museum gallery.

Cheetham’s work has also been featured in American Artist’s Workshop magazine. The American Artist site has a gallery of his portraits and online versions of the article Sean Cheetham: Using a “Mud Palette” to Achieve Harmony and the short Sean Cheetham: Common Weaknesses in Figure Paintings

There is also speed painting video on YouTube in which he paints a full portrait.

(Note: some images may be NSFW)

[Suggestion courtesy of Bill Sharp]

I’ve tried in a number of previous posts to look at some of the predecessors of Impressionism, making a point of showing that styles of art progress from previous influences. Like Impressionism, and most other schools or movements in art, Surrealism also didn’t spring full-flowered from the minds of those most closely associated with the movement; it had antecedents both immediate and historical.

One of the key immediate precursors of Surrealism was actually a slightly older contemporary of the Surrealist artists, Greek painter Giorgio de Chirico; who they admired to the point of inviting him to join the movement officially, which he did for a time.

De Chirico’s “metaphysical painting” had a profound influence on better-known painters like Max Ernst, Rene Magritte and Salvador Dalí, whose styles show the obvious adoption of may of his visual inventions. Yves Tanguy, in fact, wrote that his chance encounter with a De Chirico painting in a gallery window was the spark that inspired him to pick up a brush for the first time and become an artist.

It’s hard to view the past in sequence sometimes, but if you look at De Chirico’s work, and then look at the early work of these and other Surrealist painters, and compare dates, you’ll see how influential he was on the visual style we associate with Surrealism.

De Chirico himself was influenced by Max Klinger, Arnold Böcklin and possibly other Symbolists, many of them artists who the Surrealists later adopted as “official precursors” (they were quick to hang the Surrealist sign of approval on artists they felt embodied their ideals).

De Chirico’s work was first noticed in Paris art circles by Pablo Picasso and poet Guillaume Apollinaire, and it was Apollinaire who introduced him to art dealer Paul Guillaume and later to the Surrealist writers and painters. (Surrealism was both a literary and visual art movement, and the literary component was actually primary.)

De Chirico played with the conventions of painting to unsettling effect, intending to create enigmatic images that bridged the chasm between rationality and metaphysics. Perspective was one of his primary tools for this, and he would often make the ground plane “point” well above the horizon, play with the relative size of objects in the distance and set the edges of structures at impossible angles.

In his metaphysical paintings, shadows, sometimes in directions indicating impossibly conflicting light sources, lay across deserted plazas surrounded by colonnades and rows of arches, spaces filled with the kind of haunting, echoing silence that feels almost like a physical thing, and emphasizes the emotional emptiness (leading some to draw comparisons to Hopper’s later paintings).

De Chirico would also place odd mannequins and other enigmatic objects in his compositions, juxtaposing them in odd relationships and sizes, often using overt triads of colors like yellow red and green to reinforce their iconic presence, as in The Disquieting Muses (above).

De Chirico’s metaphysical painting period was relatively short, basically ten years. Preceding it were less overtly enigmatic works, often straightforward portraits and scenes of Mediterranean towns, but sometimes with mythical themes. He eventually broke with the Surrealists and went back to more realistic painting, but never with the same success or critical praise of his metaphysical works.

He subsequently came to resent this, feeling that his later works were better and more deserving of recognition; and at one point created “self-forgeries”, paintings in his older style with false dates, both out of disdain for the critics and for the higher profit they brought him.

Inspiration, like the dreams the Surrealists chased, can itself be an ephemeral enigma.

Addendum: Thanks to Marco Bresciani for informing me about the Giorgio and Isa de Chirico Foundation (in several languages, English version here), which has lots of information about De Chirico and the De Chirico House Museum, adjacent to the Spanish Steps in Rome (which I unfortunately was unaware of when I visited a few years ago).

Marco also points out that, though I describe him as a Greek painter (as he is often referred to), De Chirico was actually Italian, born in Greece to Italian parents, in much the same way that Alfred Sisley was English, though born in Paris.

Yes, I know that Europe and Aisia are actually one land mass, but the Earth’s supercontinent is so vast and diverse that it still makes sense to think of it as two separate continents, particularly culturally. I do think of the “mid-East” or “near-East” as being part of Asia, though (which, interestingly, makes Christianity an “Eastern” religion, not a Western one, but I digress).

A recent scientific discovery, sadly based on a cultural atrocity, has brought to light new evidence that places the development of oil painting in Asia, and several centuries earlier than the previously assumed development in Europe in the 15th Century.

In 2001 the Taliban thought it was in the interest of their God to destroy two huge statues of the Buddha (somebody else’s God, and so, unworthy of existence), in a region of Afghanistan north of Kabul. The statues were up to 180 ft (55 meters) in height. Along with cave murals in the area, that have also been the target of Taliban attacks, they date back to hundreds of years before the European Renaissance.

This kind of violent intolerance fits in with the mindless, hind-brain driven actions common to religious fanatics everywhere, but developed to a particularly extreme degree by the contemptible thugs of the Taliban, members of which have set out on a campaign to destroy treasured artifacts of other cultures that don’t fit into their pin-headed view of what’s “correct”.

The upside was that interest in the sites was sparked among rational human beings, and archeological and scientific investigation was focused, in particular, on the Buddhist cave murals.

An X-ray identification technique, carried out at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble, was able to determine that about a dozen of the 50 or so caves were painted in pigments suspended in drying oil, possibly walnut oil or poppy seed oil, mediums still in use today.

The results of this investigation were just published in the Journal of Analytical Atomic Spectrometry on Tuesday, though they were presented at a scientific conference in Japan in January.

Although these oils had been in use previously in Rome and Egypt, they were used for medical and cosmetic applications, not art.

The cave oil paintings, depicting Buddhas with settings of palm leaves and mythical animals, date back to the middle of the 7th century, making them by far the oldest established examples of oil painting known.

The use of oil painting in Europe most likely was developed independently, but like the “discovery” some time ago that paper, ink and even movable type, existed in China well before their use in Europe, cultural prejudices have to be readjusted as the past continues to change.

As disconcerting as this can be, it reinforces one of the best things about rationality and scientific method; at its best it can break down cultural prejudice with the clear light of scientifically tested fact, in sharp contrast to the willful, self-inflicted blindness of fanaticism.

Religion is better than science at inspiring art (though science and technology are an integral element in the creation of artworks), but rationality is a better protector of art once it exists.

Let’s hope humanity can maintain a balance.

Stanhope Alexander Forbes was an Irish painter who was considered to be the leader of the Newlyn School of painters. This was more of a loose artists’ colony than a concerted school of painting style.

Forbes studied under John Sparkes, and then enrolled in the Royal Academy School, where he briefly studied with Frederick Lord Leighton and Alma Tadema.

He continued his studies in France, where he came into contact with some of the French painters who were beginning to paint “en plein air”. He would eventually devote himself to the demanding practice of plein air figure painting, composing large scale canvasses, often with multiple models, that sometimes took months to complete.

He moved back across the channel and, looking for a place that afforded good light, abundant scenery and village life to paint, settled in Newlyn, which was convenient to Penzance, Cornwall. The new railway station there allowed easy travel to London and its galleries.

Other artists were attracted to the area for the same reasons, similar to the way plein air artists of the time were in France attracted to Barbizon, near Paris, in the US to New Hope, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia and various places in California that were also accessible by rail.

In Newlyn, Forbes painted outdoor scenes of working fishermen and village life, and when the weather was inclement, painted indoor scenes. He usually had at least two paintings in progress at any time, one outdoors and one indoors.

Forbes is often credited as the father of the Newlyn school, and was the most renowned of the painters working there at the time. His style never became “impressionistic” but his brushwork loosened as time went on, and he was devoted to the qualities inherent in plein air painting, saying it afforded “…that quality of freshness, most difficult of attainment by any other means and which one is apt to lose when the work is brought into the studio for completion”.

I’m not certain how the statistic was arrived at, but the figure being bandied about is that 60% of the world’s paintings come from a single village in China.

Dafen (Dafen shequ) is actually more of a suburb than a village, lying outside Shenzhen, a city of 10 million northeast of Hong Kong. In the early 1990’s a group of 20 or so artists moved to the area at the urging and under the guidance of artist/businessman Huang Jiang, and began turning out quantities of replicas of famous paintings by artists like Da Vinci, Van Gogh, Dali, Rembrandt, the French Impressionists and others.

The enterprise became wildly successful and more artists were recruited, a number now believed to be in the thousands. The paintings are sold through a number of outlets, both brick-and-mortar and online (do a Google search for Dafen paintings), while some of them are original in design (think ads for “starving artist sales” and cheap “sofa sized paintings”), most are copies of famous paintings and are clearly promoted as replicas.

While there are replica painting enterprises with similar processes in other countries (notably Russia), nothing approaches the scale of the output from Dafen.

The area has become a gated community, with a large sculpture of a hand with paintbrush outside its gates, and indulges in its identity as an art center, even to the point of facsimile painting “matches”, in which a hundred or more painters compete in creating replicas of the same painting in a timed event (image at left - AP).

The site and journal for REGIONAL, a design and research network whose founders are currently working in Shenzhen, commissioned some of the Dafen painters (many of whom studied at art academies) to turn their painting skills from painting replicas to painting self-portraits. A few of them are posted along with the article Self-Portraiture and emerging artistic consciousness in Dafen ‘Oil Painting’ Village, accompanied by a photo of the artist and one of their representative facsimile works.

The images at top, taken from the article, are of painter Xu ZanPeng, who specializes in Russian Baroque painters, including a detail of one of her replica paintings of Kramskoy’s Unknown Woman (see my recent post on Ivan Kramskoy).

I doubt there is any town in the world into which oil paint, brushes and canvas are trucked in, and paintings trucked out, in such quantities. According to the Chicago Tribune, Dafen shipped over $120 million in paintings last year, which is a lot when you consider that the prices are usually quite low.

I guess it’s good that there’s a large worldwide market for oil paintings, even if it’s not exactly the kind of market for which we might have hoped.

[Link to REGIONAL article via BoingBoing]

David Lloyd is self-taught as an artist. Born in Virginia and raised in Houston, he studied Drama, English Literature and Philosophy at the University of Houston.

Lloyd has developed a style that wavers between painterly realism and a graphic feeling that recalls the modernist influenced styles of mid-20th century illustrators like Al Parker.

Lloyd works in acrylic at a relatively small size (at least in those paintings for which I can find sizes), frequently 8×10″ (20×25cm).

Lloyd’s subjects range from mountainous landscapes to intimate still lifes to portraits and figurative works to illuminated night streets mirrored in rain. My favorites are his quiet interiors, their subtle darks in sharp contrast to brightly illuminated windows.

There is often a sketch-like feeling to the drawing component of his paintings, in which verticals are left casually askew and forms are briefly suggested.

At other times the works can feel more finished, as in the image above; there is always a feeling, though, that he has stopped at the moment when there was “enough” to the image, never pushing into the dangerous territory of potentially overworking the painting.

Lloyd maintains both an Artblog, where he posts recent paintings, and a Sketchblog, in which he posts his sketches which are frequently done in pen and ink on toned paper, occasionally accented with wash.

Lloyd is represented by the Jean Bragg Gallery and the Canal Street Gallery in Houston, as well as making his work directly available through his web site.