Visual art is often presented as something that exists in its purest form “for art’s sake”, removed from any purpose other than to exist as art, sometimes seen as a rare and noble sort of abstracted “expression” of something.

This is the impression that is glibly, and I believe wrongly, put forth by the 20th Century Modernist art theorists; whose influence still permeates the museums, galleries and auction houses that form the foundation of the modern “art world”.

It is from the bulwarks of these notions that art snobs feel immune in presenting their vehemently held belief that illustration, for example, is “not art”, as an accepted art standard, rather than as the shameless class warfare it actually represents.

The notion of “art for art’s sake” is belied by centuries of art history, throughout most of which art has had purpose and meaning; whether to reinforce the doctrine of the church, enlighten and educate the upper classes, display power and wealth, illustrate literary or religious texts, decorate spaces, entertain the public, open windows to other times and places, tell stories, entertain, amuse, horrify, dazzle, illuminate, instruct and/or inform.

Visual art has all of those functions, and many more, and its multicolored threads are inextricably woven into the patchwork cloth of our day to day lives.

We are constantly interacting with graphics, symbols, images, drawings, logos, signs, maps, charts and all manner of visual marks that have differing degrees of impact on our decisions as we find our path through a labyrinth of choices.

Most of these, though decidedly visual and readily seen, are “invisible” in the sense that we take them for granted, are often oblivious to their influence on us, and rarely stop to think about their veracity, accuracy or effectiveness; or the intention with which they were prepared and presented.

Enter Edward Tufte, who has made his mark, so to speak, by doing just that. Though an artist to a degree, Tufte is noted primarily as a thinker about the visual presentation of information.

His groundbreaking, dryly titled book, The Visual Display of Qualitative Information (also here), became a classic that opened eyes and minds to the way that statistical graphics in particular (the use of charts, graphs, and what are now called “info-graphics”), affect the way we accept, understand and interpret information.

Using a range of widely disparate examples, he shows not only how such graphic displays can be used and misused, both intentionally and through incompetence; but how they can be thoughtfully designed to convey information superbly. He also demonstrates how well designed informational graphics can be much more information dense than text based statistics (a picture is worth a thousand numbers…).

Tufte, a Professor Emeritus at Yale University, followed up with several other books, two of which, Envisioning Information (also here, image above) and the new Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative (also here), are also considered classics in the field of the visual display of information, which he helped establish as a recognized field of study.

He illustrates his points with such diverse examples as 16th century maps, modern info-graphics, 20th Century propaganda graphics, a cosmonauts hand drawn cyclogram of a 96-day spaceflight, and Charles Joseph Minard’s strikingly visceral chart of the devastation of Napoleon’s army through its advance on and retreat from Moscow (image at top, large version here).

Tufte is a harsh critic of Microsoft’s PowerPoint, in particular, as an exemplar of the way visual information is clouded and obscured in useless presentation dressing, or “ChartJunk”; which affects, he asserts, not only the way we perceive visual data, but the way we think. (Wired magazine, in a fun juxtaposition, published Tufte’s essay, PowerPoint is Evil (which was expanded into a short book The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within, also here) back to back with David Byrne’s article Learning to Love PowerPoint, in which Byrne explores the ubiquitous presentation application as an art medium.)

Conversely, Tufte is a fan of well done displays of information, and has a high regard for the work currently being done in newspaper info-graphics, which he feels are well in advance of the presentation of such information by government and academia. In particular he points to the beautifully done info-graphics of Megan Jaegerman for the New York Times (above), which Tufte features prominently on his site.

For someone who is such an incisive thinker about information display, I have to say I’m disappointed in Tufte’s own web site (I tend to be cranky about that); but there are lots of gems to be found if you poke around enough, like the articles linked in the Ask E.T section, the “Graphic of the Day” list on this page, his video critique of the iPhone interface, and articles about all kinds of visual thinking; like this article about the notion that Cezanne’s early cubist landscapes were, in fact, a response to the inherently cubist geometric arrangement of older European towns (image below). (This is something I noticed myself when I was in Arles).

Tufte is a highly regarded lecturer, those who have attended his lectures usually have very high praise for them, and he is about to tour several U.S. cities with a one day course on Presenting Data and Information. It starts on July 28, 2009 here in Philadelphia and winds up on December 10, 2009 in San Jose, California.

It would be difficult to show how influential Tufte’s thinking has been among those who are working to improve the way that data and information are conveyed, both in print and electronically. To do so effectively, I’d have to draw you a well designed, information dense chart.

I’ve written before about The Tale of How, a short, wonderfully original animation by The Blackheart Gang, featuring the artwork of Ree Treweek.

I’ve also talked about Shy the Sun, a commercial production company featuring members of the Blackheart Gang, including Treweek and Jannes Hendrikz, which has been producing marvelously eccentric ads for companies like United Airlines and Bakers Precious Biscuits.

Art from The Tale of How, which is planned as part of a larger ongoing project called The Household, has now been published as a coffee table art book, in a deluxe slipcase version that includes a DVD with the animation and reproductions of a print series.

The book is available directly from the Blackheart Gang web site, I don’t know if it will be available in other distribution channels. There are additional images from the book here.

The print series will also be made available for purchase on their site (”soon”).

The original Tale of How animation is visible here, and there is now a short Making of the Tale of How video on the site.

For more on Ree Treweek and The Blackheart Gang, see my previous posts listed below.

Brett Helquist is best known for his illustrations for the popular A Series of Unfortunate Events children’s books by “Lemony Snicket” (Daniel Handler).

Helquist was born in Arizona, grew up in Utah, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from Brigham Young University, and currently lives and works in New York City.

He cites as his inspiration some of the all time great American illustrators like Howard Pyle, N.C. Wyeth and Dean Cornwell (also here).

Helquist’s first job was as an intern for illustrator Robert Neubecker, he then went on to do editorial illustrations for newspapers and magazines. Lemony Snicket’s The Bad Beginning, the first in the series, was his first book illustration assignment.

Since then he has done both cover and interior illustrations for many other books in the series, as well as many in the Tales from the House of Bunnicula series written by James Howe, and cover illustrations for the recent reprinting of the Green Knowe series, along with a number of others. (It’s easy to miss the small navigation to the second page of his portfolio.)

In addition, Helquist is both the author and illustrator of Roger, the Jolly Pirate (above, bottom, right).

Yesterday’s more or less paleontology art themed post (DinoMixer: on creating art for an iPhone app) reminded me that I have been wanting for some time to write a post about Chezk artist Zdeněk Burian, a pioneering paleontological reconstruction artist, natural history painter and book and magazine illustrator.

Zdeněk Burian (pronounced, according to William Stout via Jim Vadeboncoeur: “Zeh-DEN-yeck BURR-ee-yahn”), was, along with Charles R. Knight and Rudolph Zallinger, one of the most influential paleontological artists in the history of the field.

His detailed compositions showed prehistoric landscapes populated by fantastical animals that were simultaneously dramatic and, given the scientific knowledge at the time, painstakingly accurate. In spite of their attention to scientific detail, his paintings are lively, colorful and painterly, often with dramatic skies alive with roiling clouds.

Many of his dinosaur paintings have become iconic, well known even beyond the paleo art community; and he created images of many other periods of prehistoric life, including prehistoric mammals, extinct giant birds, ancient seas, early humans and human ancestors.

Burian studied at the Academy of Graphic Arts in Prague and begain selling illustrations while still in his second year, though not successfully enough to support himself or to prevent dropping out of school. Taking up odd jobs to support himself, he continued his own study, working on “adventure illustrations’ and eventually getting work illustrating western adventure fiction.

He was apparently not only prolific, but quite fast, a fact that was exploited by unscrupulous publishers, who demanded much and paid little.

Burian’s early interest in prehistoric life and paleontology, fueled in part by an admiration for Charles R. Knight’s paintings, bloomed when he partnered with paleontologist Josef Augusta to do prehistoric life reconstructions that provided art for numerous books, articles and museum exhibits.

It’s estimated that Burian created over 15,000 works — drawings in various media, paintings and illustrations, including illustrations for over 500 books.

Burian’s work was not widely seen outside Czechoslovakia until the 1960’s, when a series of books, many of them aimed at a popular audience, were published in the U.S. A number of his books are still available in various states of new or used.

Those who are mostly familiar with modern images of prehistoric animals, particularly dinosaurs, will find his images of upright iguanodons, tail-dragging tyrannosaurs and and giant sauropods with languorously curved necks and ground-hugging tails oddly quaint, but they were rigorously correct according to the best paleontological reconstructions of the day (interpretations of the appearance of long-extinct animals based on fragmentary fossilized bones, trackways and bone fragments is a constantly shifting landscape, new evidence is literally being uncovered daily).

What doesn’t get outdated, however, is Burian’s command of painting technique, his dramatic compositions, evocative landscapes and viscerally tactile suggestions of the textures of prehistoric life.

William Stout, himself a paleo artist of note (see my posts on William Stout) has published a Zdenek Burian Sketchbook - Volume One: Prehistoric Life, a nice companion to his Charles R. Knight Sketchbooks (here’s a mention of both on Paleoblog).

Regular readers will know that I rarely feature my own projects or work on Lines and Colors, but once in a while I’ll be indulgent (as on my birthday, which happens to be today), particularly if I have a project going that is of interest.

I tend to be involved in many things — web site design, web comics, Flash animation, cartooning, sketching and painting, among others.

I also have a long running fascination with dinosaurs and paleontological art. Recently, I had the opportunity to combine several of those skill sets and interests; and, along with a two friends of mine, programmer Leon Stankowski and artist/sound designer Bruce Gulick, created an application for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

If you ever wanted to put a tyrannosaurus head on a pachycephalosaurus body and add a stegosaurus tail — there’s an app for that!   It’s called DinoMixer.

DinoMixer is an amusement, in which kids and dinosaur art fans of all ages can mix and match dinosaur heads, bodies and tails to make crazy mixed-up dinosaurs, or un-mix them to match up the real dinosaurs.

I designed the app and did the illustration for it, which proved to be an interesting process.

Any form of illustration has its intended method of final display, from paperback book cover to CD jewel-box to computer monitor to console game screen. The iPhone is its own display paradigm.

If you haven’t seen one in person, the screen is very nice, it’s 480×320 pixels displayed in a relatively small area, so the the actual pixels-per-inch resolution is sharper than most computer displays (160ppi vs 103ppi or less for monitors) and the color is excellent; so even though the screen is small, the image is detailed and sharp. It’s a nice platform to do art for.

I had to do a little digging to find out the preferred image format. Though the iPhone will display a variety of image files, PNG is the native image file-type for the device. PNG (Portable Network Graphics) is an underrated and terrific image format that allows both a wide color gamut of millions of colors and a full channel of alpha transparency.

Beyond those basics, though, I had given myself a challenge simply in the design of my particular app. To make the dinosaur parts match up, I had to divide the screen proportions into a grid, one that would accommodate the disparate body sizes and shapes of the various animals, and allow them to meet up at critical junctures where the illusion of joining them together could be accomplished. In addition, I wanted the dinosaurs to be relatively large on the screen, and use the small area to best advantage.

Fortunately, I’ve had this idea in one form or another percolating in my brain pan for several years (originally intended as a web feature, in dHTML or Flash), so the grid was a matter of adaptation to the iPhone screen proportions and refinement. But it was still quite a challenge to draw the animals so that they fit the grid, matched against one another and still retained a degree of scientific accuracy (there is no one quicker to notice discrepancies than a 10-year old dinosaur fan).

Once the dinosaurs were penciled to fit within the grid, I inked them, and in saying “penciled” or “inked”, I’m speaking of the digital equivalents, using a Wacom tablet and Corel Painter. I then applied digitally painted color and texture using Painter and Photoshop, in much the same method as I have used for the 15 years I’ve been doing my Argon Zark! digital web comic.

The use of ink lines filled with color wasn’t just a choice from my comfort with the technique, but vital, I realized, to producing the sense of unity necessary to make the dinosaur “mixes” work — the outlines connect precisely at their juncture points and form a whole.

I also took pains to blend the colors to an extent. While I wanted the colors of the dinosaurs to vary, to provide eye-pleasing variety, I also wanted some relationship between them. Though it’s difficult to see in the reduced resolution images, I found that working multiple colors into each dominant color, a technique often used by painters to produce overall harmony, was useful in giving the different colored dinos a bit of additional visual “glue”. Each of the dominant colors had accents and highlights of several of the other dominant colors within them.

In addition, I had to design a background that would showcase the animals and also connect them to the ground with a shadow, one that would meet the feet of all of the different shaped dinosaurs and serve as a universal shadow for all of them.

Lastly, I was not just creating illustrations that mixed and matched with one another, I was creating an application, and interface, with room for branding and functional controls, and the images had to work within that.

The final images, in particular the dinosaur heads, bodies and tails, had to be saved out as set-sized PNG files with transparent backgrounds, that would line up precisely with one another and allow the background to be seen behind them.

I created the original art at a much higher resolution than the target screen (3000 x 2000 pixels), both to give myself lots of leeway in creating detailed art, and to allow for repurposing the images (perhaps for T-shirts or other uses). I do the same with my web comic, create the original art at many times its intended display size.

10 dinosaurs (divided into 30 parts), a background, splash screen, nav bar and application icon later, I’m happy to say the resulting app works well, and has been getting good reviews. The seemingly simple premise took a lot of work (I conservatively estimate 200+ hours just on my part), but part of that was uptake on learning how to design and publish an iPhone app.

You can see the DinoMixer web site here, which includes screen shots as well as a short video, and those who use iTunes can see the DinoMixer app page in the iTunes App Store (link opens in iTunes).

I just submitted a new upgrade version of DinoMixer (v1.1) to the App Store yesterday, with features that include an additional dinosaur, multiple backgrounds and a dinosaur name box that pops up when you match a dinosaur correctly. If all goes well, it should make its way through the App Store approval process and be released in about a week.

Like many iPhone and iPod Touch apps, DinoMixer will be contine be upgraded with free revisions that add features and functionality. In my case, I’ll be drawing and adding new dinosaurs and backgrounds (as well as other features) for weeks to come. I can also update or revise the existing art whenever I want to invest the time and effort. It’s an illustration project with no set end or limit, something that makes it particularly appealing.

Influential illustrator Bob Peak had an impact a generation of illustrators and helped define the design and format of modern movie posters.

Active in the middle of the 20th Century, Peak transformed movie posters from staid photographic collages or glamour shots to expressive excursions into a variety of design directions, from detailed rendering to spare graphics to freeform watermedia.

Peak did over 100 movie posters, starting with West Side Story in 1961, and created many memorable posts for movies like Apocalypse Now (above, top left), and the original Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

He also had a number of commercial clients and did editorial illustration for a variety of magazines, including a series of highly regarded covers for Time magazine and TV Guide. In addition he did artwork for gallery display, such as his portrait of Expressionist painter Egon Schiele (above, lower right).

The Society of Illustrators elected him to the Hall of Fame in 1977. Peak also taught at his own school, the Art Students League and Famous Artists School.

Peak’s methods were as varied as his graphic approach, utilizing, oil, acrylic, charcoal and mixtures of them. He chose colors, textures and design approaches that he felt appropriate for the subject.

Bob peak’s son Matthew Peak is also an artist and designer and poster artist of note, and maintains a web site devoted to his father’s work with extensive galleries. There is also an official site. Leif Peng has a nice set of Bob Peak illustrations on his Flickr set.

Gallery Nucleus in Southern California is hosting a major retrospective of Peak’s work titled Bob Peak: Father of The Modern Hollywood Poster. The show runs until June 25, 2009.

Walter Crane was one of the premiere English illustrators. He was active during the “Golden Age” of illustration, from the late 1800’s to the early 1900’s.

Crane’s elegantly designed, deliberately retro illustrations for children’s books were influenced by his admiration for the work of Edward Byrne-Jones, and undoubtedly by the other Pre-Raphaelite painters, as well as by the Japanese prints that were favored in English and European society at the time.

Crane in return was also influential, both on his fellow illustrators, and on the wider Arts & Crafts Movement, with which he was integrally involved, having founded the Arts & Crafts Exhibition Society in 1888.

Crane was also a designer for textiles and wallpapers, and created gallery art, much in watercolor, and was an associate in the Water Colour Society.

His book illustrations range from graphically designed book pages, somewhat in the vein of Howard Pyle’s self-authored tales, to a more fully rendered style akin to his compatriot Arthur Rackham; though the artist who most often springs to mind for me in comparison is Edmund Dulac.

One of the best resources for Crane is the ArtMagick site, which has a bio and several pages of images. Wikimedia has quite a few book pages. You can read his entire illustrated Baby’s Own Aesop on MythFoklore.net, and a much shorter Beauty and the Beast on Bedtime Stories. Fontcraft has a font called Walter Crane, developed from examples of his hand lettering.

There are a number of books available with his illustrations and ornamentation.

Pruett Carter was an American illustrator active in the first half of the 20th Century.

Carter was noted primarily for his work in women’s magazines, an area of publishing that was particularly fertile ground for illustrators at the time, but also a rapidly changing filed, in which the demands from art directors moved rapidly from one style to another.

Carter, who initially shared an impressionistic approach with his teacher Walter Biggs, was able to move smoothly into new styles as the century progressed. His negotiation of the changing currents of illustration fashion were no doubt helped by his experience within the industry, having been an art director for Good Housekeeping and Atlanta Journal for a number of years.

He also successfully transitioned from painting in oil to painting in gouache, the fast drying nature of which became an advantage in the production of illustrations on a tight deadline.

His other clients included Ladies Home Journal, Woman’s Home Companion, and McCall’s. Carter was also an influential teacher, He taught illustration in New York at the Grand Central School of Art and in Los Angeles at the Chouinard Art Institute.

Carter’s romance themed illustrations always had an element of dramatic tension, a moment waiting to happen, that made them seem as likely to be illustrating a crime story as a romance.

Lionel Dillon and Diane Sorber met while attending Parsons School of Design in New York in 1954. Their initial rivalry evolved into competitive friendship, a romantic relationship and eventually what has become a lasting marriage and artistic partnership.

They call their collaborative artistic approach the “third artist”, viewing themselves as a single artist composed of the greatest strengths of the two individuals, and more capable together than either could be individually. Though not unique, this kind of artistic cooperation is rare and difficult to manage, usually because of the issues artists have with clashes of ego.

The Dillons seem to have found key to working through these issues and have managed a very successful creative relationship. Usually credited as “Leo and Diane Dillon” or “The Dillons”, they are now widely recognized in American illustration and have garnered numerous awards for their illustrations for children’s books, science fiction and fantasy novels and mainstream works; including two Caldecott Medals, several New York Times Best Illustrated Awards, Boston Gobe/Horn Book Awards, Coretta Scott King Awards and the Society of Illustrators Gold Medal.

There is an interview with the Dillons on Locus in which they discuss the evolution and methods of their collaborative process.

Their work delves into a broad swath of cultural influences, and utilizes an equally wide array of media, techniques and stylistic direction, always in an effort to bring relevance to the nature of the work that the illustration is meant to accompany.

Looking over illustrations from the course of their career you will find work that is highly stylized and very graphic, work that is rendered in naturalistic detail and work that combines varying degrees of stylized design and realism.

Their illustrations can be wonderfully specific to the topic of the work, as in their fancifully appropriate illustrations for Nancy Willard’s Pish, Posh, Said Hieronymus Bosch (image above, top).

The Akron Art Museum in Ohio is currently showing an exhibition called The Global Artistry of Leo and Diane Dillon that runs from now until June 21, 2009.

The Dillons don’t seem to have a dedicated web site, but I’ve assembled some resources below.

There was a book of their work published in 1981, The Art of Leo and Diane Dillon, but it’s out of print. It looks like Ken Steacy is publishing a new one.

Of course, you can also look for some of the many other books they’ve illustrated.

[Exhibition listing via Art Knowledge News]

Perhaps you’ve seen his unforgettable drawings in the introductory animation for the PBS Mystery! series (animated by Derkek Lamb); perhaps you’ve seen one or more of his over 75 published books; or perhaps you’ve somehow encountered stray examples of his wonderfully eccentric pen drawings, filled with enigmatic figures in long coats or longer dresses, as likely to hold a knife as a croquet mallet (though either could be equally suspicious of being a murder weapon), and children of questionable intent and even more questionable future; and, of course, perhaps you’re already a devoted Edward Gorey fan.

Gorey himself was something of an enigmatic figure, considered eccentric by some, with a perhaps undeserved association with grim, morbid or horrorific work, when in fact his work has always been whimsical, with just a twist of macabre humor.

Gorey’s wonderfully retro drawing style, at times spare, but often filled with luxurious swaths of pen and ink texture, lends itself perfectly to his off-kilter view of the world and the charming denizens with whom he populates it.

His small, utterly charming and disarming picture books (which you may or may not consider children’s storybooks, depending your thoughts about books in which terrible things happen to the children involved), are wonders of wordcraft as well as spellbindingly drawn. The seemingly simple haiku-like captions make you pause, and pause again, while a slow motion laugh arises, ghost-like, from the bottom of your brain pan and finds its way to your mouth as you stare.

Gorey is sometimes associated with Charles Adams, the two were acquainted and shared the same literary agent as well as admiration for each other’s work. An association I like to make is with the wonderfully off-kilter cartoons of B. Kliban, who I’m certain must have been influenced by Gorey, (as he was by Saul Steinberg), and who, in turn, was a prime influence on the Far Side’s Gary Larsen (along with Gorey, Adams and Gahan Wilson - it all comes around, folks).

Gorey said his fascination with the macabre began at age 5 when he discovered Bram Stoker’s Dracula, was “scared to death” and began to teach himself to draw. Though he worked in Doubleday’s art department for years, his own book ideas were rejected by publisher after publisher until The Unstrung Harp made it to press and began a string of successful titles.

He later did set designs for the Broadway version of Dracula, in which the entire sets were large reproductions of his pen drawings, intricately detailed castle interiors and drawing rooms; and entirely black and white, except.. one object in each set was brilliant blood-red.

You can now buy a fold-out and fold-up toy book version of the sets as Edward Gorey’s Dracula: A Toy Theatre: Die Cut, Scored and Perforated Foldups and Foldouts.

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a major repository of Gorey’s work on the web, so I’ve gathered some scattered resources below, though most of them are not representative of his best work..

If you haven’t exposed yourself to Gorey’s brain-tweaking and eye delighting books, I might recommend Amphigorey, an inexpensive collection of several of his small books (which was followed by several other collections in similar format). There are, of course, many other titles.

If you live within reach of Southeastern Pennsylvania, you can still catch a terrific show of Gorey’s originals, Elegant Enigmas: The Art of Edward Gorey, at the Brandywine River Museum until May 17, 2009. (Here is a review of the show, and background about Gorey, from the Philadelphia Inquirer.)

The Edward Gorey House, in his former home in Yarmouthport, MA, is open to the public on a regular basis.

Addendum: Michael Connors of Morguefile has written to add this link to reproduction of Gorey’s Gashleycrumb Tinies, his “Alphabet Book” (delightful!).