Steve Huston studied at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and embarked on an illustration career while still in school. After graduating he worked in illustration for 10 years, acquiring a client list that included MGM, Universal Studios and Paramount Pictures.

He then started to teach drawing, painting and composition at the Art Center, and later in corporate classes at Disney, Warner Brothers and Dreamworks. He has since transitioned into gallery art.

Though he occasionally does landscapes, the majority of Huston’s paintings are of figures. Of these his fascination with the complex geometry of the human form, and the surface topography of musculature, takes its greatest expression in his series of paintings of boxers, wrestlers and laborers.

He presents these in dramatic chiaroscuro combined with areas of smudged, “lost” edges, rough paint textures and gestural expressions of motion.

Huston lists among his influences Titian, Rembrandt and the early American Tonalist painters. I personally see the influence of Thomas Eakins in his work. Huston also cites American comic books for their graphic qualities and exaggeratedly heroic treatment of the figure.

Huston apparently no longer has a dedicated website, but is represented by several galleries. The Eleanor Ettinger Gallery has the largest selection of his work, though the reproductions are frustratingly small.

Skotia Gallery has fewer pieces, but they are presented somewhat larger, along with a bio.

Like many of us who come out of art school with concerns about the viability of gallery art as a source of livelihood, Tom Wheeler had a back-up plan, and devoted part of his attention to computer based design skills. Also like many of who who pursue a dual career path, he found he had a passion for both sides of his career.

He now divides his time between web site design and programming and his in interest in painting and drawing, and he teaches courses in both web design and drawing at the the Art Institute of Portland in Oregon.

His website showcases his work in both arenas of endeavor. In the Fine Art section you’ll find his paintings and drawings. Among the former are figurative, still life and landscape subjects.

Standouts for me are his paintings of creeks and small streams with rocky beds, in which he finds great variety of color and tone in the facets of the rock forms, their surfaces both wet and dry and their shapes as refelcted and refracted in the water.

Wheeler’s site also has resources for his students, which include lists of favored illustrators and realist painters.

Wheeler also maintains a blog which is inclusive of both of his fields of interest.

John Collier was a Victorian neo-classical painter, apparently introduced early on to Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, who did not take him on as a pupil, and influenced later in his career by the portrait paintings of John Everett Millais and his Pre-Raphaelite colleagues.

Judging by the quotes from reviews written during his life and at the time of his death, Collier faced poor critical reception in many circles, particularly in the ability to assign mixed interpretations to his works in a genre that was intended to convey moral lessons. (Of course, by the time he died in 1934, the influence of Modernist critics was beginning to cast any 19th Century art that was not considered part of the path to Modernism as irrelevant.)

Collier was also criticized as less original and less skilled than his contemporaries. Perhaps this is true, but in his best images he captures some of the magic that makes Victorian painting so appealing; with bright colors, rich textures, palpable atmosphere and the added depth of backstory inherent in literary subjects and legends, as in his interpretation of the ride of Lady Godiva (above, top).

He was the vice-president of the Society of Portrait Painters and painted a number of luminaries, including Charles Darwin, Rudyard Kipling and Aldous Huxley, who was his nephew.

Collier was the author of at least three books, A Manual of Painting, A Primer of Art and The Art of Portrait Painting, all of which exist as modern reprints.

Giovanni Antonio Canal, known as Canaletto, is best known for his grand, sweeping views of his home city of Venice, intricately detailed and striking in their architectural fidelity.

Most famous are his depictions of large scale public events, like A Regatta on the Grand Canal (image above, top, with detail, second down). Less well known, but often considered superior, are his earlier works; many of which depict scenes in England, such as The Stonemason’s Yard (bottom two images).

Canaletto had a strong connection to England, visiting several times and counting English collectors among his foremost patrons.

The National Gallery in London has scheduled a major exhibition, Canaletto and His Rivals, for October of this year (13 October 2010 – 16 January 2011).

The gallery has on its website a number of Canalettos’ works from the permanent collection, and has posted them in zoomable versions. Much to my delight, these are not the frustrating kind of zoomable images, in which you must scroll around in a tiny window looking at minute sections of a painting, but the wonderful kind with an option to maximize the window (icon with four arrows at the lower right of the images), allowing you to zoom in on the paintings as large as the resolution of your monitor will allow.

This is a Good Thing, both because it’s wonderful to see Canaletto’s work large in your visual field, and because it’s fascinating to see how different, often surprisingly painterly and even graphic, his work is up close.

Canalletto had a workshop of assistants who contributed to many of his later works. It is also presumed that he may have used a camera obscura to help with his mastery of architectural detail and perspective. If so, he used it, like Vermeer, as a tool in the service of superbly painted works, not in a slavish or mechanical way.

Canaletto was unusual for painters of his day in that he is known to have painted on location, our of doors. He is also noted for his concern with capturing and accurately representing the effects of natural light, in both respects presaging the Impressionists 100 years later.

I first encountered painter Justin Clayton when I included him in one of my early posts about Painting a Day blogs (and a subsequent post). Clayton has since moved away from the painting a day convention, but still posts small still life, landscape and figurative paintings to his blog on a frequent basis.

Clayton’s approach is direct and painterly, often with roughly textured backgrounds in his still life compositions, in which he also shows his fascination with the play of light and shadow.

Clayton studied at BYU, the Los Angeles Academy of Figurative Art and the California Arts Institute; and cites as inspiration painters like William Nicholson, John Singer Sargent and James Abbott McNeill Whistler.

In addition to his blog, Clayton has a website on which his paintings are arranged in thumbnail galleries by date or subject. You can also start with the latest work and click through them in sequence.

He also maintains a secondary blog devoted to his Beach Paintings, in which he continues to post paintings and photographs from a 2007 trip down the California coast, and additional work of a related nature since then.

He is also a member of the Daily Paintworks group of painters, who display their latest work together on a joint page. In addition there are three of Clayton’s process videos available on Vimeo.

The Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition 2009 at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery was, as the name implies, held in 2009, but the exhibition of 49 works selected from the 3,300 entries is on display until September 6, 2010.

The museum has posted the finalists on this page, click on the thumbnails for larger versions.

The portraits encompass a range of styles and media, and the competition is meant to demonstrate the widening definition of portraiture and the role of portraits in art.

The website also has a Portrait of an Artist feature, in which several of the participating artists are highlighted and clicking through takes you to a statement by the artist and often additional images.

(Images at left: Phillip Schirmer, Chuck Close, Margaret Bowland, Jen Bandini)

Enemy of the Impressionists, vilified by the modernists, autocratic teacher of Mary Cassatt, Thomas Eakins and several painters who would later be labeled American Impressionists, and one of the most controversial, successful and popular painters of the last half of the 19th Century, Jean-Léon Gérôme stood out from the labels of Orientalist and Academic that are usually applied to him.

Despite the criticisms that can be leveled at him (and there are justifications for several), Gérôme was above all a masterful painter; and it seems to be in that spirit that the Getty Center in Los Angeles is presenting The Spectacular Art of Jean-Léon Gérôme, an exhibition of his work over a span of 40 years.

The exhibition runs from tomorrow, June 15, to September 12, 2010.

For more, see my previous post on Jean-Léon Gérôme.

[Addendum: The exhibit is co-curated by Musée d'Orsay and the Réunion des Musées Nationaux in collaboration with the museum Thyssen-Bornemisza of Madrid. The exhibition will be at the Musée d'Orsay from 19 October 2010 to 23 January 2011.]

Sandra Wakeen is a Connecticut based painter who transitioned from a career in illustration and commercial art into portraiture, then added still life and landscape to her subjects.

She has traveled and studied in Europe, most recently with Tony Ryder at Studio Escalier in France.

Wakeen’s portfolio website showcases her crisp, sharply focused still lifes, portraits, drawings and landscapes. My favorites are the landscapes that incorporate objects like large vases and similar objects, making them in a way outdoor still lifes. Her other, less extensive website has a few examples of her illustrative works.

After a career as an illustrator with clients in the recording and movie industries, California artist Craig Nelson transitioned into gallery art full time.

Nelson has a lively, painterly approach in his paintings of landscapes, towns and portraits. Some of his recurring subjects include workers in vinyards, the narrow streets and canals of Italian towns, New York City, fishing boats, the California coast and patrons in cafes.

His palette is often high chroma, but at times subdued. He enjoys exploring the play of light and contrasts in value between foreground and background elements.

Nelson graduated form the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and retuned to teach there. He is currently Director of Fine Art, Drawing and Painting at Academy of Art College in San Francisco.

In addition he teaches occasional figurative and plein air workshops and has series of instructional videos and a book, 60 Minutes to Better Painting: Improve Your Skills in Oil and Acrylic.

Mary Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale was an Edwardian period English artist who achieved some success as and illustrator, gallery artist and stained glass designer.

She studied at the Crystal Palace School of Art and then at Royal Academy, and was elected to the Royal Watercolour Society.

She illustrated children’s books, Authurian ledgends and poetry by well known authors including Tennyson and Browning, initially in pen and ink and later in color.

Her gallery paintings were in the spirit of the Pre-Raphaelites, rich with jewel-like color, literary themes and the luxurious detail characteristic of the style.

At a time when women artists were restricted in their access to art instruction and often compartmentalized as lesser than their male counterparts, Fortescue-Brickdale earned the respect of both the fine art and illustration establishments with her outstanding work.

[Via Victorian / Edwardian Paintings]