Though he studied for a short time at an atelier in Paris, English painter Samuel John “Lamorna” Birch was mostly a self taught artist.

Birch was one of the earliest of the second wave of “Newlyn School” artists, a group that included Alfred J. Munnings, Stanley Gardner and Laura and Harold Knight.

Birch is often known as simply Lamorna Birch. He took the name from the Lamorna Valley in Cornwall, where he painted frequently. The name was the suggestion of artist Stanhope Forbes, with the thought that it would set Birch apart from the already established artist Lionel Birch who also painted in Newlyn.

In addition to his many paintings of the cove at Lamorna, Birch had a fascination with small streams, in particular in portraying the surface expression of their currents and eddies in a way that puts me in mind of the wonderful Norwegian painter Frits Thaulow.

There is a book about Birch and the artists around him, A Painter Laureate: Lamorna Birch & his Circle, but I don’t think it’s illustrated.

The best online image source I’ve found for Lamorna Birch is the BBC’s Your Paintings. Click on the main images for slightly larger versions.

Juliette Aristides is perhaps most widely known as the author of the highly regarded books Classical Drawing Atelier, Classical Painting Atelier and Lessons in Classical Drawing.

Though the emphasis there is on her undeniably strong figurative work, it is her still life subjects that I personally find most compelling.

In much of her work references appear to the classical masters to whom she has devoted much study. Her still life compositions often play with these references, as well as blurring the lines between still life, room interiors and suggestions of landscape, creating a fascinating juncture point of the various disciplines.

Her still life paintings at their best also convey that almost mystical sense that still life can suggest of the extraordinary within the ordinary — the sense of something more than immediate appearance being revealed by contemplation and mindful observation.

In all of her painting she exhibits beautifully refined control of value and color, her palette at once vibrant and restrained, and a wonderful mastery of edges.

Her website offers several galleries of still life subjects in addition to figurative work, portraits and drawings.

Aristides conducts a Classical Atelier at the Gage Academy of Art in Seattle. There is additional information on her website. The Aristides Atelier also has its own dedicated website and blog.

She also leads workshops in various locations.

Aristides is represented by the John Pence Gallery in San Francisco, where her work will be featured in an exhibition on view from February 10 to March 12, 2012.

Kris Wiltse is an illustrator and gallery artist based in Washington State.

In her illustration work she favors the unusual medium of block printing, working in linocut, woodcut and scratchboard.

Wiltse also works in watercolor for her gallery art and personal sketching, as well as for a secondary speciality in interpretive signs — informative location signage that depicts birds and other wildlife and flora in and around the area of Puget Sound.

Her website has galleries of each. The sketches and more finished watercolors have a nicely informal feeling, with fresh color and a sense of immediacy.

Her vibrant block print illustrations have served clients that include The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, Wired and Atlantic Monthly, among others.

Her site also includes video watercolor demonstrations.

In addition there are galleries of her illustration work on the site of her artist representatives, Morgan Gaynin, as well as Workbook and Directory of Illustration.

Wiltse also has a Flickr set of sketches and location drawings that is more extensive than the selection on her website. It also includes additional selections of her block prints and photos of her block print process.

These seems to be an unofficial school of painting that included a number of post-Impressionist artists who specialized in painting views of Belle Époque Paris, and took particular interest in contrasting the browns and grays of buildings and overcast skies with the warm yellow and orange glow of windows lit by gaslight.

These included Eugene Galien-Laloue, Edouard-Léon Cortès, Luigi Loir, and somewhat later, Antoine Blanchard.

Cortès was perhaps the best known of them. His paintings of Paris, that often include famous monuments and places in the city, were popular in his time and his work continues to be in demand. Though his contrast of city lights and backgrounds that seem primed to showcase them to best advantage can seem a bit artifical at times, there is an undeniable visual charm to the way he lays out his compositions and in his bold renderings in brilliant patches and splashes of color.

Cortès was born within 20 miles of Paris, studied initially with his father, who was a a painter for the Spanish Royal Court, and later at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Cortès took inspiration from both classical and Impressionist styles, as well as his contemporary “painters of Paris”.

He frequently revisited the same subjects, and even the same viewpoints, painting the scenes in different light and weather conditions, and often painted the City of Lights reflected in its own rain-wet streets and sidewalks.

Perhaps the best online source for Cortès’ images is the the past lots selections of Sotheby’s and Christie’s auctions, which are often zoomable to high resolution.

There is a good selection on Wikipaintings, with good size enlargements. Though smaller, a nice quick overview can be had at Encore Editions, and a more extensive selection, along with biographical background, can be found on Rehs Galleries (and here and here).

American Surrealist painter Dorothea Tanning, who was also a printmaker, sculptor, writer and set designer, was already pursuing her own dream-like compositions when she was introduced to the work of the European Surrealists at their 1936 exhibition in New York.

She then met and became lifelong companions with Max Ernst. Like Ernst, Tanning moved from the dream state explorations of the Surrealists into that shifting netherland between representational and non-representational art.

Her suggestions of recognizable forms draw you in, then drift into half-recognized shapes abstracted from something undefinable, providing fertile ground for the viewer to project their own interpreted content and meaning.

Tanning was prolific, even into her later years. She died on Wednesday, January 1, 2012, at the age of 101.

Her official website has an extensive collection of her work, though the images are unfortunately somewhat small and not of the highest quality.

I’ve listed some obits and other sources below.

I can across Lisa Nilsson’s work in an article on Visual News about her anatomical quilling.

Quilling is a practice that traces back at least to the Renaissance, in which strips of paper are rolled into shapes, usually around a quill — hence the name, and glued together to create designs, ornaments and images.

It turns out that the technique, in Nilsson’s hands, seems to be well suited for the depiction of anatomical cross-sections.

In investigating her website, I found that the Tissue Series, as she titles it, is one of several directions in which Nilsson works. Others include Boxes, assemblages in the tradition of the Dadaists, Small Paintings and Greeting Card Illustration (note that most images are linked to larger versions).

The anatomical quilling seems a natural outgrowth of her studies, which include training in illustration, medieval manuscript illumination, painting and certification as a medical assistant.

Her paintings, which are often quite small in scale — around 5×7″ (13x18cm) to 8×10 (20x25cm), are done in gouache on paper.

A painting in the collection of the Prado in Madrid that was long assumed to be a copy of Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa done at a later time was recently cleaned and restored, revealing a previously unseen background where there was once just dark, and on further examination is now thought to be a copy done in Leonardos’ studio by one of his pupils at the same time as the master was working on the original.

If true, the painting gives us not only an insight into the master’s techniques, as it was apparently revised as Leonardo revised the original, but also reveals a clearer picture of what the original, which has not been cleaned for some time, may have looked like when originally painted.

According to The Art Newspaper, which broke the story, the scholarly paper that suggests the new placement of the painting within Leonardo’s studio at the same time as the original was presented in conjunction with the current landmark exhibition Leonardo da Vinci: painter at the Court of Milan that ends soon at the National Gallery, London.

I’ve linked to several articles below, though most source from The Art Newspaper. The LA Times has posted perhaps the best side by side image of the two paintings.

The copy by the as yet unidentified student shows us not only the brighter colors that probably lie under layers of varnish in the original, but a younger looking subject (assumed to be Lisa Gherardini).

It also makes clearer what I have long asserted to be the source of her famously “enigmatic smile” — mouth corners turned up at one end, but straight on the other [see my previous post: La Giaconda (The Mona Lisa), flipped for your viewing pleasure].

Sean Beavers is an artist who plays with context, juxtaposing his still life subjects in particular, with boxes, paintings of them resting on drawings of similar subjects, or in other backgrounds that accomplish one of the things that art does best — allowing us to see the commonplace with fresh eyes.

Beavers says in his artist’s statement that he thinks of his work as symbolist, in that the subjects of his compositions represent something beyond the objects themselves, and while I don’t claim to have an understanding of the intentions behind his pieces, I do find that element of “more than meets they eye” comes through and adds to the appeal.

I particularly enjoy the series he calls “Stillscape”, in which he paints objects commonly used for still life in the context of shoreline landscapes.

Beavers also paints figurative work and landscapes. The latter tend to be spare and open, often with dramatic cloud formations as their focus.

[Via Jeffrey Hayes]