Backhaus was one of the painters featured in the 2007 PBS series Plein Air, Painting the American Landscape, and is instrumental in the independently produced series Passport and Palette, which was recently running on the Create TV cable network.

The latter is one of the better instructional painting shows I’ve seen, and I found the episodes with Backhaus to be the most instructive.

Backhaus was born in Wisconsin and attended the Layton School of Art in Milwaukee. He pursued a successful career as an illustrator and designer, earning recognition from the Society of Illustrators in New York as well as national and local awards; but after ten years or so his passion for plein air painting took over and became his primary focus.

He paints with the crisp immediacy often associated with the best plein air painters, using textural brushstrokes and the artful simplification of forms to their essentials to capture fleeting light in the field.

Unlike a number of contemporary plein air painters who feel the need to emulate Impressionist colors, Backhaus exercises restraint in his color palette, refusing to overstate colors simply for effect. Instead he searches out the real light and color of the scene before him, finding compositional drama in value contrasts and richness of color in the carefully noted relationships of adjacent colors.

There is a gallery of work on his website (note at the top a link to a second page). Unfortunately, the images are on the small side. Somewhat larger images can be found on the websites of galleries where his work is represented (listed below).

In addition to pursuing his painting, Backhaus devotes time to a number of workshops and seminars throughout the year. You can see his current schedule here. The next workshop is a 5 day outdoor and studio class at the Hudson River Valley Art Workshops in Greenville, NY from September 26 to October 2, 2010.

He is also leading the Passport and Palette travel workshop in the South of France from October 16-25, 2010. These painting trips will be filmed as part of upcoming Passport and Palette episodes.

Notably, Hans Bacher has added a nice article on Mønstead, with lots of images, to his always terrific One1more2time3’s Weblog (see my post on One1more2time3’s Weblog), Art Renewal Center has added a number of higher resolution images to their set (look for the text links to “View High Res Image”), and All Paintings Art Portal has added an extensive section on Mønstead’s work (click “View Larger Image” text links).

I’ve listed some more new resources below, and added to them the listings from my previous post about Mønstead.

Active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Mønstead was one of those painters who applied an Impressionist influenced feeling for light, atmosphere and color to a foundation of the kind traditional academic draftsmanship that Monet and many of the other Impressionists rejected, with beautiful results.

Mønstead’s sometimes dark forest glades, intimate views of creeks, ponds and reflective pools were often as much about shadow as the Impressionist’s works were about light.

Christensen seems to swim in a rich sea of influences, from medieval, Renaissance and baroque art to Golden Age illustrators like Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, Kay Neilsen, John Bauer, and Gustaf Tenggren. You can even see suggestions of the obsessively detailed fairy paintings of Richard Dadd.

At his most expansive, Christensen’s wonderfully detailed and brightly garbed fantasy world denizens parade across lavishly textured landscapes, awash in saturated colors, sprinkled with luminescent details, carrying with them a trove of references to literature and folklore.

Christensen was born in California and studied at Brigham Young University and UCLA. His work has been featured in a number of publications and books, including Voyage of the Basset, A Shakespeare Sketchbook, Rhymes & Reasons, A Journey of the Imagination: The Art of James Christensen and James Christensen: The Greenwich Workshop’s New Century Artists Series.

I don’t know if the artist has an “official” site; jameschristensen.com is associated with the Jerry W. Horn Gallery, and offers original art as well as reproductions. Unfortunately the images are small and the site is poorly organized, but it shows a broad range of Christensen’s work and styles.

Larger images can be found at the Greenwich Workshop’s online gallery, B&R Gallery, Hidden Ridge Gallery and Swoyer’s Fine Art.

One of the best pages for a quick overview of his fantasy themed work is this unofficial page on 2photo.ru. I’ve listed other resources below.

[Via Monster Brains]

On Beauty and the Everyday: The Prints of James McNeill Whistler is a new exhibition opening this Saturday, August 21, 2010, at the University of Michigan Museum of Art, which has one of the most extensive collections of Whistler’s graphic work in the U.S.

The collection, which you can preview here, contains examples of some of Whistler’s finest and best known etchings.

Unfortunately, both the exhibition page preview (link for “More Images” at bottom) and the above images of the collection (meant to facilitate ordering slide sets) are small.

Etchings by their nature are subtle, with delicate lines against toned papers. This is part of their unique visual charm, but it makes them difficult to do justice in reproduction. There are some larger images on the site of the Frick Collection in New York. You can find impressions of some of the same etchings in both collections.

Some of the best online reproductions I’ve found are on the University of Glasgow’s site for James Mcneill Whistler: The Etchings, A Catalog Raisonne. Unfortunately the Catalog Raisonne mentioned is a book project, and the online resources are from from complete, but what is there is large enough to appreciate some of the subtlety of Whistler’s touch. You have to drill down a bit. Go to “Exhibition”, scroll down, click on the thumbnail to access the detail page, then click again on the image for the large version.

Next best may be the online images from the Freer Sackler Online Collections.

You will sometimes find the same etching in different “states”, impressions pulled form the plate at various stages of the artist’s work on the image.

Whistler was inspired by the etchings of Rembrandt, likely the finest practitioner of the art in history, and to a great degree revitalized the art in his time and placed himself high in the canon of the world’s great etchers and lithographers.

The exhibition at the University of Michigan Museum of Art continues to November 28, 2010.

For more information and links to resources, see my previous posts on James Abbott McNeill Whistler and Whistler’s Etchings. In the latter I give a brief overview of the process of creating an etching.

Etchings of James McNeill Whistler is wonderfully inexpensive Dover book.

I haven’t seen Etchings by Whistler: Sixty Photographs from Original Prints. It’s a facsimile of a book published in 1923 and I don’t know how well it’s fared in the reproduction.

Since 2005 he has abandoned commercial work and devoted himself to gallery painting. As he has restlessly explored the boundaries of exaggeration possible in a recognizable face, he also began to work at large scale and in increasing degree of detail.

His large canvasses are now often highly realistic even when wildly exaggerated. Someare more straightforward, though often rendered with an intensity that makes them seem more exaggerated than they are.

I thought it was interesting that his portrayal of Jimi Hendrix, who went to lengths to present himself as an outlandish individual, is completely straightforward (and wonderfully realized).

I’m not familiar enough with his career to know if Kruger is moving more toward realism, but many of his recent pieces seem to be in that direction.

Krüger’s website is still in progress, but he has a current blog, and two additional blogs devoted to exhibitions and publications.

The artist occasionally leads workshops, and conducted his first in the U.S. early this year. Krüger works in acrylic on panels, at a scale you can see in the workshop image above.

There is a gallery site here that I think is unofficial, but it gives a nice range of his work and a fascinating tour through the degrees of exaggeration and intensity Krüger has brought to his “personality portraits” over time.

There is an article on Empty Kingdom that gives a good quick overview of his recent work.

Known for both his later paintings of California gardens and landmarks, as well as his earlier paintings of New York skyscrapers, Cooper also turned his lush palette and virtuoso brush to other subjects.

His painting of Lower Broadway in Wartime (above, 2nd down, right) is in the museum of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts here in Philadelphia. I’ll sometimes stand and look at it for 15 or 20 minutes at a time. What’s not obvious from these small reproductions on the web is that Cooper’s paintings can be marvels of texture and color mixing, with luminous transitions of one color passage into another within the surface of a single wall.

Areas that appear highly detailed are in fact very painterly, with much more suggested than overtly painted. (I’ve listed links below to previous auction sales on Sotheby’s and Christie’s that can often be zoomed in to levels of considerable magnification.)

Cooper was born in Philadelphia and studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts under Thomas Eakins, as well as training at the Académie Julian in Paris. He taught for a time at the Drexel Insitute of Art Science and Industry (now Drexel University, also home to such noted art teachers as Howard Pyle).

Cooper married Emma Lampert, herself a well known artist, and the couple traveled and painted in Europe and Aisa as well as across the U.S. Notably they traveled to India, at the time far off the track for even the most adventurous American and European travelers, and Cooper returned to create from his location sketches stunning paintings of the Taj Mahal, the palace gate at Udaipur and other locations rarely seen in the West.

After the death of his wife in 1920, Cooper moved to California, perhaps to start over. The move marked a separate phase of his career in which his style and subject matter changed and he exhibited a renewed interest in including figures in his paintings. He taught and later became Dean at the School of Painting at the Santa Barbara Community School of Arts.

There is currently an exhibition of Cooper’s work at the Santa Barbara Museum in California, Lasting Impressions: Colin Campbell Cooper, that runs until October 8, 2010.

As far as I know there is only one in-print book on Cooper’s work: East Coast/West Coast and Beyond: Colin Campbell Cooper, American Impressionist by Deborah Epstein Solon and William Gerdts (Gerdts is a well known authority and author of several books on American Impressionism). The book was from a 2007 exhibition at the Laguna Art Museum. My impression is that this is the same exhibition that is currently at the Santa Barbara Museum.

There is a very nice 10 page article on Cooper and the current exhibition in the August issue of American Art Review, written by Deborah Epstein Solon, co-author of the book mentioned above, and illustrated with numerous images of Cooper’s work. This issue is still on the shelves as of this writing and should eventually be available as a back issue from the publisher. Cooper’s work is also featured on the cover.

Like most American cities of that size, Brooklyn has a world class art museum. Unlike most of those museums, however, the Brooklyn Museum has a unique problem in terms of its identity and public perception, in that it exists in the very large and imposing shadow of the more famous museums of nearby Manhattan. This leaves it unfairly relegated to a public perception of second class status, when in fact, The Brooklyn Museum is terrific and should be prominent on the list of major American art museums.

There was an article on the New York Times site a few days ago, Sketching a Future for the Brooklyn Museum, in which several members of the arts community give their take on the museum’s rather unique position and public relations dilemma.

I had the pleasure of visiting the Brooklyn Museum for the first time last summer, drawn by an exhibition of the works of French Impressionist Gustave Caillebotte (more here), and was surprised and delighted with how much I enjoyed the museum and the works then on display from the permanent collection.

I say “then on display” because, like every major museum, only a small portion of the museum’s holdings can be on display at any one time, and works are rotated into view periodically.

The Brooklyn Museum has a wonderful feature to make even more of its collection available, in that some of its extensive archives are open to the public in the “Visible Storage” center on the museum’s 5th floor (image above, bottom). Here you can get a behind the scenes glimpse of how museums catalog and store their collections, with great class cases on rolling tracks that are frequently rotated to display more of the works in the collections.

The collections are housed in the museum’s impressive Beaux-Arts building, one that would stand out as a prominent cultural center in any city — except New York. Like many major museums, non-flash personal photography is permitted in the permanent collections.

For those who can take the ride out to Brooklyn, the museum is right next to the beautiful Brooklyn Botanic Gardens. The combination is just right for a day’s outing.

For those who can’t get to the museum physically, the Brooklyn Museum website is arranged to encourage browsing through the collections, though it helps to have a starting point. I was personally impressed with the museum’s holdings of Claude Monet (image above, top) and other proponents of Impressionism, as well as American Impressionists, including one of my favorite paintings by William Merritt Chase, his Studio Interior (image above, third down and detail below; also see my post on William Merritt Chase.)

You can spin off of your search by clicking on tags for related topics, like Landscape or Venice, museum sections like the Beaux-Arts Court, or search for artists like John Singer Sargent (image above, second down). Note that the search box in the right column of the collections pages returns different results than the general search box at the top of the pages.

Unfortunately, the website’s pop-up code for the enlargements is a bit awkward, but the images are large enough to enjoy and the interesting mix of the collections can lead you off in search of fascinating artists and subjects.

As you browse through the collections, you’ll cross paths with a number major works that will whet your appetite for a visit, putting the Brooklyn Museum on your map the next time you’re in New York City.

The painting is regarded as the masterpiece in the oeuvre of Thomas Eakins, who was in turn considered the greatest American painter of his time. The painting has been described as the most important American painting of the 19th Century.

It is a dramatic, large scale canvas, 8ft by 6½ft (240×200cm), showing the pioneering surgeon lecturing students as he performs an operation. Among the recognizable figures portrayed is a self-portrait of Eakins, who sits, sketching or writing, to the right of the tunnel railing (above, bottom right).

The young Eakins, who while a student at The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts had also studied anatomy at Jefferson Medical College where Dr. Gross taught, wanted to create a grand canvas, perhaps partially to cement his reputation as an artist, in what may be seen as a homage to Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp; but also, it has been suggested, to compare the role of an artist with that of a physician, both of which were emerging as more respected professions at the time.

Eakins spent a year on the canvas; reportedly, he badgered the retired Dr. Gross so often for additional sittings that the latter found the painter supremely annoying.

Eakins was hoping to exhibit the painting at the important Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876, but it was rejected by the Committee of Selection. It was eventually displayed in another part of the Exposition, in Ward One of the U.S. Army Post Hospital, representatives of the Medical College having pulled strings as they felt the painting improved the image and status of the school.

General reception was the the painting was artistically strong, striking in its realism, but inappropriate and graphic in subject matter; a critic for the New York Tribune describing it as: ‘… one of the most powerful, horrible, yet fascinating pictures that has been painted anywhere in this century..”. The reaction from the public was perhaps anticipated by Eakins’ portrayal of a woman covering her face in revulsion in the painting’s left foreground.

At the end of the Centennial, in 1878, the Alumni Association of Jefferson Medical College purchased the painting for $200 (perhaps roughly $3,000 in current dollars) and donated it to Jefferson Medical College (now Thomas Jefferson University), with the intention that the portrait of their teacher and mentor would be a permanent part of the cultural legacy of the school.

In 2006, a lazy and arrogant board of directors of Thomas Jefferson University decided it was their privilege to sell off part of the cultural heritage of the school, and the city of Philadelphia, rather than sully their delicate hands with the actual work of fundraising.

To this end, they connived a secretive deal with Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton, as part of her corporate raider style acquisition of works from financially weakened institutions from various cities to stock her ego monument, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas. (Not the most art collections didn’t start as ego monuments of rich people.) In the attempt to surreptitiously remove the Gross Clinic from Philadelphia, they were shamefully aided by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. which would have shared ownership of the work.

Fortunately, news of the board’s machinations leaked and the impending deal flared into scandal as Jefferson students and alumni, the city and its arts community mounted opposition, and eventually, though the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, mounted a $68 million fundraising campaign to keep the painting in Philadelphia.

This was at the cost of the Academy having to sell off Eakins’ The Cello Player (also here) to an unidentified buyer (a painting I personally liked more than the Gross Clinic, though not considered nearly as important), and the PMA having to sell (or “deaccession”, to use the current weird euphemism for museums selling off art) Eakins’ Cowboy Singing and two Eakins sketches.

For more, see my posts from the time, Eakins’ The Gross Clinic – held for ransom? and The Continuing Saga of the Thomas Eakins Gross Clinic Art-as-Commodity Scandal.

The Gross Clinic is now part of a special exhibition at the Philadelphia Art Museum, centering on it’s recent restoration.

In addition to other indignities, The Gross Clinic has been subjected over time to several disastrous attempts at “restoration” (out of five overall). These were often performed by perhaps well intentioned individuals who lacked a knowledge of Eakins’ appraoch and technique, as well as the aesthetics of his time.

The worst was a “cleaning” sometime between 1917 and 1925, in which an attempt to “brighten” the painting removed several layers of Eakins’ glazed color, unbalancing the painting’s deep chiaroscuro and changing the overall nature of the image. In 1940 a restorer attached two pieces of plywood to the back of the canvas, ostensibly to “stabilize” it, resulting in straining of the canvas as the plywood warped.

In 2008 the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts undertook and assessment, and in 2009 a modern restoration project, in which the painting was in the hands of knowledgeable restorers and Eakins experts. This has led to a number of articles and reviews with headlines in which The Gross Clinic is described as being “in surgery” or “operated on”. (I have of course refrained from such silliness, mainly because they beat me to it.)

The conservators were faced with the challenge of restoring areas of paint that had been removed by previous hands, and rebalancing the color of the painting to Eakin’s original intentions. In this effort they were armed, fortunately, with a photograph of the painting prior to the first cleaning, along with a preliminary color sketch and an monochromatic version (a collotype) by the artist. The most important factor, however, is probably their deep understanding of Eakins, his works and original techniques.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art has several web pages devoted to the exhibition, An Eakins Masterpiece Restored: Seeing The Gross Clinic Anew, the conservation project and the painting itself.

The exhibition, which includes the preliminary color sketch and a later painting by Eakins of a similar subject, The Agnew Clinic (also here), to which The Gross Clinic is often compared, runs to January 9, 2011.

Hopefully this is one of the brighter chapters in the painting’s eventful history.

This painter was not working in the time of the Barbizon School and the Impressionists, however, but in the blossoming days of the internet, as an early participant in painting/blogging and the nascent practice of “painting a day”.

Before “painting a day” acquired its current connotations of artists latching on to the term as a way to drive eyeballs, and hopefully purchasers, to their web based storefronts and auctions, the regimen of painting one small painting a day had a different purpose. It was (and still is for those who practice it in the right spirit) a form of artistic discipline, a way to focus and hone one’s painting skills and artistic vision.

Our English painter in Provence, Julian Merrow-Smith, thought of it as a project, painting a small painting every day over a period of time, and posting each day’s painting on the internet for sale and comment, a practice he admired in the hands of its originator, Duane Keiser.

Merrow-Smith’s small paintings were essentially the size of postcards, and the act of posting them on the web akin to sending them out to someone, thus his project took on the name “Postcard from Provence”.

Now, five years and over 1,300 paintings later, in a small abstract of that project, winnowing down the work of those years into 140 selections, Merrow-Smith has released a book of paintings titled, simply enough, Postcard from Provence: Paintings by Julian Merrow Smith.

The book, as one who has been following Merrow-Smith’s work for some time might expect, is beautiful, and wonderfully produced. Representative of the project as a whole, the paintings are divided more or less equally between still life subjects and landscape. The book design is elegant and simple; the printing well balanced, the colors rich and vibrant (and, for those who are into such things, the book is printed in one of those ink and paper combinations that smells wonderful).

In addition, there is a conversation with the artist in talks with Michael Gitlitz, that delves into his history, the origins of the project and his approach to painting.

The book can be ordered, signed and numbered, directly from the artist, or without signature, through Amazon in the UK and Alibris in the US. There is also a list of selected bookshops in the UK that have the book on shelf.

There is a preview widget on the book page of the Postcard From Provence blog, that allows you to step through 50 pages of the book. Be sure to choose the “full screen” option.

I have long been a bit frustrated with the reproductions of Merrow-Smith’s work on the web, in that they feel small, even though the paintings themselves are small.

Here they are displayed in the high resolution of print (much sharper than images on the web, as I frequently remind my readers). With only a few exceptions, they are also, much to my delight, presented at their actual size.

In print we can see, in a way that is not clear in the low resolution images on the web, the painterly brush strokes, sensual textures and deft painting handling that Merrow-Smith has worked so hard to acquire and now wields with apparent ease.

In selecting the paintings for the book he has not done what I might have hoped. I’ve mentioned before that I see his story as one of artistic growth and struggle, told over that five year period in the sequence of over a thousand paintings, and I might have wanted a temporal sequence showing that advancement.

In retrospect, of course, that would have been a bad and unworkable idea in the limited space of a book. (That story is there, however, on his site in the form of his archive of paintings.) Instead he has taken the much more reasonable course of selecting some of the best of those paintings, which is to say, mostly recent ones [Correction: see this post's comments].

These are the fruits of his labors, the result and reward of the daily painting discipline, and they display the current state of his abilities, his deft draftsmanship, crisp and lively paint handling, superb sense of chiaroscuro, firm command of composition and negative space and, most dramatically, his evocation of color and light.

In a way, the book has a storybook feeling to it, as if a writer had decided to depict the life of a painter in Provence and the paintings had been chosen and arranged to communicate that perfectly; here is the painter on the edge of the vineyard, bursting with greens on the edge of shadow; here is the painter at the foot of the hill, distant mountains washed in haze; here is the painter in his house, this evening’s fish waiting to be prepared, scales glistening in the kitchen light; here is the onion, hints of transparency in its film of skin; here the garlic, rounded in deep chiaroscuro; here the simple glass of wine, reflective and refractive, the day’s fruit from the local market or the artist’s garden, ripe with color.

Here is the artist and the bits of his life he has chosen to share with us, whether in sunlight or on a kitchen counter, sparkling with the colors that Provence has revealed to him.

The Illinois born, Brooklyn based artist names many of her works as such, “Self Portrait as Big World”, “Self Portrait as Broken Home”, “Self Portrait as Animal Bed” and “Self Portrait as Fabulous Droppings”; others are part of a sequence with more direct names, “Tender Trapper”, “Boy in Flight” and “Budding Boy”; but the sense of enigma, hidden meaning waiting to be sought out, and the elaborate Baroque meets Magic Realism detail of her compositions is common to all.

Heffernan’s paintings carry echoes of the Early Renaissance, Botecelli, Bruegel and Bosch, along with the more overt stylings of 17th Century Baroque painting and the profusion of shapes, colors and patterns with which the Baroque style gave meaning to our contemporary use of the word.

These are mixed with the dream state juxtapositions of the Surrealists, by which I don’t so much mean Dali and Magriette, as Ernst, Tanning and Tanguy; and the intensely chromatic rendering of contemporary Magic Realism. All of these affections and influences are assembled and woven into a dense and intricate tapestry of styles that becomes uniquely her expression, and by extension, her self portrait within her self portraits.

Heffernan studied at the University of California, Santa Cruz and received her MFA in painting and printmaking at the Yale School of Art and Architecture. She is an Associate Professor of Fine Arts at Montclair State University in Upper Montclair, New Jersey. She delivered this year’s commencement address at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Though the artist doesn’t appear to have a dedicated web presence, you can find her work well represented by several galleries, particularly the P-P-O-W Gallery in New York (also here). There is a post on Escape Into Life that features several works large enough to get a quick overview (more here). There is a brief interview with Heffernan on ArtSlant.

Quoted in an article on Montclair State University Insight Online, Heffernan says she seeks out her imagery in the semi-waking state on the edge of sleep in a process she calls “image streaming”. In this she shares some of the true intentions of the Surrealists, who were most interested in inspiration from dreams and the unconscious mind.

(Painting titles above: “Budding Boy”, “Self Portrait as Big World”, “Boy in Flight”, “Self Portrait as Booty”)