I’ve written before about Karin Jurick, both about her own wonderful paintings and her ongoing group painting blog, Different Strokes From Different Folks in which numerous artists paint their own interpretation of the same photographic resource in periodic challenges.

I also wrote last year about the Different Strokes From Different Folks Portrait Swap, in which participating artists supplied photographs of themselves and were in turn supplied with the photograph of another participating artist; each artist painting the portrait of another.

Jurick has decided to repeat the challenge again this year, (in what may become a tradition), with a Different Strokes From Different Folks Year End Portrait Swap.

This time there are 180 participating artists. The photographs have all been assigned, but the artists still have until December 31st to submit their finished portrait.

A good number of them are already posted on the Different Strokes blog, however, and it’s a fascinating mix of painting styles and approaches. The images usually have a somewhat larger version linked to them, as well as a link on the artist’s name to their own site of blog.

The participants include Adebanji Alade, who I recently profiled and Karen Hollingsworth, who I profiled in 2006.

Jurick has also posted a pair of videos on YouTube, here and here, in which some of the portrait paintings are shown with the source photograph.

(Images above, artist credit, row 1: Sharon Margolies, Paula Cravens, John Wolff, row 2: Akiko Watanabe, Dana Copper, Steve Prenner, row 3: Karin Jurick, Karen Hollingsworth, Amanda Carder)

Adebanji Alade was born in Nigeria, and trained at Yaba College of Technology (a renowned art college in Nigeria). He extended his studies at Heatherly’s School of Fine Art in Chelsea in the UK. He currently lives in the UK and works from a studio in Chelsea.

I first encountered Alade’s work through his blog, which he has subtitled: “My art, my passion for sketching”, and passion for art is something that he demonstrates in abundance.

His web site has galleries of his work in several categories, portraits, drawings, illustrations, landscapes, religious themes and African influenced work. It is on his blog, however, that I find the best showcase of the two aspects of his work I find most interesting, his landscapes, particularly cityscapes, and his “Tube” sketches.

Alade fills sketchbooks with drawings of fellow passengers on London’s public transportation; page after page of direct observation and impromptu portraiture, fascinating faces and glimpses into other lives, shared momentarily in the process of getting somewhere.

He sometimes takes his Tube sketches and develops them into paintings. He has a secondary blog, subtitled “The people I sketch everyday” in which he chronicles this process. There is also a gallery on his web site devoted to the sketches.

Alade works in a variety of media, oil, acrylic, watercolor, graphite, carbon pencil and pen and ink. For his landscapes, he works from sketches and photographs in the studio as well as being a dedicated plein air painter. Both his studio work and location painting evidence the same dedication to direct observation displayed in his Tube sketches.

He often posts preliminary sketches and the paintings developed from them on his blog, and occasionally posts photos of himself painting on location. I always find it interesting to see photographs of the location for a painting, as well as the artist’s setup, not only for the arrangement of easel, palette and painting tools, but for the sense of scale and feeling for the environment in which the artist was working.

In addition to his web site and blogs, there is a brief video of Alade at work and being interviewed on the Winsor & Newton site.

There are hundreds of art instruction books out there, with a wide range of topics, approaches and degrees of value, but Imaginative Realism: How to Paint What Doesn’t Exist by renowned painter, illustrator and Dinotopia artist James Gurney, is exceptional in several ways.

Before I go too far, I’ll point out that although this is essentially an instructional book, it also works well simply as an art book; and fans of fantastic art in general, and Gurney’s work in particular, will quickly find it a “must-have”. (See my previous posts on James Gurney, also here and here. As a side note, Gurney is part of the Enchantment Artist’s Symposium and Exhibition at the University of Hartford’s Joseloff Gallery, 6 November 2009 to 17 January 2010.)

First, this book is unusual because of its topic. Most art instruction books concern themselves with drawing and painting aspects of the real world, and this is certainly the most fundamental and important factor in representational art. But for those in working in areas that demand the creation of images of things that do not exist, whether of real but extinct animals, scenes form the historic past or visionary imaginings of undiscovered worlds, the challenge is to take those fundamentals of drawing and painting from life and extend them into the realm of the imagined.

This is increasingly important for contemporary illustrators, movie and gaming concept artists, animators and comic book artists. Figures, faces, animals, creatures, scenes and entire worlds need to be conjured from the the artist’s imagination and made visually manifest.

Gurney tackles the skills needed in this kind of art head-on. He goes through an extensive array of topics, from generating ideas to initial sketches to models and maquettes, through materials, mediums, techniques, perspective, composition and finishing. In the process he covers elements like imagined architecture and landscapes, vehicles, dinosaurs, history painting, characters, creatures and aliens. The topics are arranged in short, but densely informative two-page topics and sub-topics, lavishly illustrated with Gurney’s own work and occasional nods to the masters.

Steeped in the traditions of classic representational art and the firm artistic foundations of 19th Century academic art in particular, Gurney starts from his interest in those traditions and opens with a brief look at the history and origins of imaginative art, with an acknowledgement of the value of studying the work of artists that have defined the field.

The topics are at once wide ranging and surprisingly consistent. I say that because of the other, perhaps most important, stand out characteristic of this book, its rather unique origin.

There are several approaches to the creation of art instruction books. We can eliminate those that are mediocre or downright terrible and concentrate only on books we would consider valuable.

Among these there are books that are proposed by editors in publishing houses, and fulfilled in a perfunctory, but capable manner by artists and writers chosen for the task. There are books that are proposed by the artists themselves in an effort to leverage their knowledge into financial stability beyond its application in their own work. There are books that are created from the artist’s inclination to take on the role of a teacher.

Rarest of all, there are art instruction books that are born out of the artist’s sheer enthusiasm for what they have learned and the desire to share it with any who are inclined to benefit from that knowledge. Imaginative Realism is one of those rare gems.

The contents of this book didn’t originate as a book project, but were gleaned from posts to Gurney’s superb blog, Gurney Journey, in which they have been offered up for free over the course of the last few years.

Over the extent of it’s run, Gurney’s blog has evolved from chronicling a book tour into a personal journey of artistic exploration and discovery; in the course of which Gurney has shared his insights into painting, composition, color, light and a variety of keen observations about the nature of creating art. As you can imagine, in the course of writing Lines and Colors I have occasion to visit hundreds and hundreds of artists’ web sites and blogs. Gurney Journey is one of the exceptional few that I return to on an almost daily basis.

The book started as an idea in a blog post, and further posts followed it’s creation and eventual publication. In this one, Gurney explains his intention in creating the book.

The resulting book is beautiful. It’s printed in a nicely oversize format on heavy stock, with printing values that make the hundreds of illustrations jump off the pages. The reproduction standards follow in the tradition of the superb reproductions and excellent printing evident in Gurney’s popular Dinotopia books (particularly the most recent one, Journey to Chandara), and his refined use of color is vibrantly present.

I also haven’t seen many art instruction books as information dense as this one. Not that the book feels visually cramped in any way, the book design is clear and elegant, but every one of its 200+ pages can be mined for nuggets of art technique gold. This is likely due to the origin of the book in blog posts collected over a long time, rather than a book project that had to be filled out from its inception. Instead of having to put together enough material to create a substantial book, Gurney probably had a job sifting through that wealth of material and deciding what to leave out.

Gurney even goes the extra mile and gives an insightful overview of art careers based on the techniques he outlines in the book, including paperback covers, film design, storyboards, concept art, video game design, toy design and even theme park design.

The one glaring omission is comics, perhaps because it’s an art form in which Gurney doesn’t personally work, and, though he pays plenty of attention to drawing, his emphasis is on painting. I do work in comics, however, so I’ll take in on myself to point out that virtually all of the concepts in the book can be applied to the creation of comics in addition to the other areas mentioned.

The last way in which Imaginative Realism is different from most other art instruction books is the feeling it carries of a start-to-finish labor of love; from its origin in the artist’s enthusiasm for the subject, to the fulfillment from a lifetime of experience, observation and work, to it’s refined finish, crafted like one of Gurney’s own paintings. It is instructive not only in how to draw and paint from the imagination, but in how to create an outstanding art instruction book.

In short, an absolute treat.

Donato Giancola, the renowned science fiction and fantasy illustrator that I wrote about previously last year and in 2005, has a new instructional DVD (more details here), published by Massive Black Media, in which the camera follows him through the creation of “The Mechanic” (larger version here), an painting that was created specifically for the demonstration.

While you might expect a painting developed for an instructional DVD to be more quickly realized than Giancola’s highly finessed professional work, he turns in a work worthy of the 18 Chesley Awards he has garnered, showcasing his strengths not only as an imaginative science fiction artist, but as a strong figurative painter, steeped in the techniques of traditional oil painting.

The demonstration goes from initial sketches to reference photography through the step by step creation of the finished painting. The two disc DVD is $60 and runs 5 hours, but there is a 6 minute+ trailer on YouTube, that is instructive in it’s own right, in addition to giving a good taste of the quality of the DVD.

Giancola presents his thoughts with clarity, explaining his process in some detail, while the director alternates between time-lapse segments, in which some of the more extended periods of painting are condensed, and real-time segments in which the most salient parts of Giancola’s painting process are demonstrated.

California artist Bill Perkins helped co-found the Plein-air Artists of California in 1983, and has been a member of the Plein-air Painters of America since 1985.

Perkins is a recognized teacher. He has taught at the Art Center College of Design and Associates in Art and is currently an instructor at Los Angeles Academy of Figurative Art.

I wrote about Perkins in 2007, when I emphasized his career as a concept artist and art director for companies like Walt Disney Feature Animation, Warner Brothers, Dreamworks, ILM, and 9th Ray Studios.

Perkins has a production design studio called High Street Studio. Unfortunately, there is not a site devoted to his plein-air painting. His Bill Perkins Studio site hasn’t been updated since June of 2008. There is an article about both aspects of his career on Articles & Texticles.

Perkins will be giving a one and two day “Plein Air Painting Workshop with Models” in the Pasadena area on September 19th & 20th, 2009.

According to Thomas Brillante, who is apparently helping to co-ordinate the event, “This workshop covers plein air techniques with focusing on changing light and capturing light. There will be lots of demos through out the day and personal instruction.”

The workshop will be limited to about 12-14 artists a day. Contact information is on the flyer posted here.

Kentucky artist Bill Guffey has come up with a great idea for a Virtual Paintout, in which participants use Google Maps Street Views as the subjects for paintings in traditional media.

Guffey actually talked with the Google Maps team and received their approval to the idea of creating paintings from Google Maps Street Views and selling them. The only caveat is that if the original source photographic view is shown along with the painting, that credit be assigned for the photograph (Google logo and copyright visible in the photograph). There is no claim of restriction on the paintings themselves.

This addresses the issue with using photographs by others as source material for artists, in that photographs themselves can be works of art, and are copyrightable.

The issues there are somewhat murky, involving interpretation based on verisimilitude and the legal status of the source photograph. An interesting example of this is the controversy surrounding the use of an AP photo for Shepard Fairey’s “Hope” poster of Barack Obama, and the subsequent suit by the AP.

The OK by Google over use of their maps photography for paintings obviates the issue of permission in individual cases where paintings are made using traditional media (though I’m sure that digital manipulation of the source photographs to make a digital work is another issue entirely).

Guffey, who has been using Google Maps Street views in a series of this own paintings, such as his State Series, realized that this opened the door to a Virtual Paintout, using Google Maps views of a particular place as the theme to create a virtual version of a traditional paintout gathering.

This is in some ways similar to the themed group painting and blog posting projects like Karin Jurick’s Different Strokes from Different Folks, in which the source inspiration is a single photograph (see my posts on Different Strokes from Different Folks and Different Strokes from Different Folks Portrait Swap).

Previous Virtual Paintout locations included Baltimore and Seattle. The most recent completed Virtual Paintout location was Amsterdam, from which I’ve pulled a few examples at left (top to bottom: Phil Holt, Sharon Williamson, Carol Morgan, Bill Guffey).

The new, current Virtual Paintout location is Paris (ah, Paris!). This one starts now and runs to the end of May. The blog post provides a map and a link to the larger original map on Google. You would use the latter to access Street View.

If you haven’t used Google Street View before, prepare to be amazed. On the full size map, drag the small icon of a person from the upper left view control bar into the image to see a street view from that location. Mouse across the image to rotate the view or look up and down. Move the figure in the inset map to move the view, or click back on the minus sign in the upper left to pull back to map view.

Find a location you like, perhaps take a screenshot for further reference and start painting. (Are there any views in central Paris that are not potential views for a painting?) There are more complete instructions, including how to submit your painting to the Virtual Paintout blog, in the blog’s right hand column.

You can see more of Guffey’s own work, much of which has a painterly plein air feeling, even when painted from Street View photographs, on his blog and web site.

I first came across Antony Bridge in the form of his time-lapse YouTube videos about pochade painting, when I was doing research on pochade boxes.

In them you can see Antony painting at various locations in the English countryside and towns, using his small hand-held pochade box, as well as painting small self portraits.

I followed links to the site at pochade.co.uk where he displays and sells his paintings with other pochade artists like Carl Melegari and Ben Spurling, interviews artists who do pochade painting, (including Carol Marine, who I wrote about here), shares a blog with other painters on the site, and also sells the small hand-held pochade boxes he uses. These are made on a small scale basis by a UK carpenter and designer who works under the name of Red Top designs.

More recently, Bridge and Carl Melegari have chosen to display and sell their work on a joint site called The Pochade Gallery, with a current painting by each artist on the home page and an archive of both artist’s work. (The arrangement of the archive is a little confusing at first glance, take note of the artist signatures above the left and right sets of three columns.)

Antony Bridge (image above, top) studied illustration and, when not pochade painting, works as a freelance designer creating title sequences for TV productions as well as doing event branding. His pochade paintings range from hillsides and town scenes to still life and interiors. He also has a series of self portrait studies.

Ben Spurling (image above, bottom) was also trained in illustration. His painting subjects lean toward coastlines, mountains and dramatic skies, in addition to smaller scale subjects and still life.

They both have a passion for traveling the countryside, pochade box at the ready to capture a fleeting scene. As the description of pochade painting on the pochade.co.uk site declares: “Who needs a camera?”

I wrote previously about Karin Jurick’s Different Strokes from Different Folks cooperative painting blog, in which participants all paint their interpretation of a given photographic subject.

In a fascinating variation for the Year End Challenge, participating painters were asked to submit a photograph of themselves from the shoulders up. These were then swapped, distributed out to different artists in the the artistic equivalent of an office gift swap (sometimes called a “pollyanna”), and each artist painted another artist’s portrait.

The resultant paintings are a fascinating array of portraits, in different styles, approaches, mediums and degrees of accomplishment.

I find the idea of artists painting artists particularly fascinating.

(Please see the Different Strokes article for artist credits for the images above.)

Occasionally artists will become particularly fascinated with the work of one of their predecessors, and study the work of that artist in depth. Such is the case with Jonathan Janson, and artist originally from (if I’m not mistaken) Seattle, now living and working in Rome.

Janson has a deep and abiding interest in the work of Johannes Vermeer, one of the most enigmatic and fascinating figures in the history of art. The result of that fascination is twofold.

One happy result is that Janson has gifted us with Essential Vermeer, an astonishingly extensive and beautifully crafted web resource on Vermeer and his work, that is the high mark for any web resource devoted to a single artist (see my previous post on Essential Vermeer). The only close second, in fact, is Janson’s other, somewhat similar, site: Rembrant van Rijn: Life and Work (see my previous post about the site under its old title, Rembrandt: life paintings etchings drawings and self portraits).

In addition, Janson has created an extensive sub-site devoted specifically to the study of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, and has recently started a blog called Flying Fox, focused on Vermeer, exhibitions and loans of his works as well as other related topics. (The name Flying Fox is from an inn in Delft that was likely central to Vermeer’s world.)

I liken Janson’s Vermeer and Rembrandt sites to the 21st Century equivalent of artist monographs, but bringing to bear the advantages of web technology to extend the lines of information deep into the resources of the web.

Another difference between these sites and traditional monographs is that monographs on artists are usually written by art historians, who study art from a certain perspective, but rarely the perspective of a working artist. The advantages of the latter viewpoint are particularly evident in Janson’s study of Vermeer’s Painting Techinque.

Janson not only brings the perspective of a painter to his writing and research on Vermeer, but moves the knowledge in the other direction, to the second result of his fascination with that artist, in the way it has transformed and informed his own painting.

Many of Janson’s recent works are in-depth and in-practice explorations of Vermeer’s techniques, some of which he has codified in a book, How to Paint Your Own Vermeer: Recapturing materials and Methods of a Seventeenth-Century Master.

Janson’s own explorations of Vermeer’s approach even extend to humorous recasting of some of Vermeer’s famous compositions into his own modern counterparts, a practice that can be simultaneously hilarious and poetic, as in his Girl Playing a Guitar, in which a purple Stratocaster takes the place of Vermeer’s more demure instruments in Woman with a Lute and The Guitar Player.

You can see the same humorous but beautifully painted approach in Janson’s adaptation of Vermeer’s composition from A Lady Writing (see my post on A Vermeer Comes to California), as Young Girl Writing an Email (image above, larger version here), in which Vermeer’s elegant box (perhaps a music box?) has been replaced with a boom box and his quill and inkwell with a laptop. Janson has retained the pearls on the table, and, of course, that wonderful earring.

Vermeer can be surprisingly painterly at times, belying the apparent “realism” of his paintings, and can also be remarkably “soft”, despite the perception he gives of intricate sharp detail. Also, perhaps because of his use of a camera obscura, Vermeer seems in general preoccupied with matters of focus, both in terms of degrees of visual sharpness and compositionally. Janson explores both of these aspects of Vermeer’s work in his own compositions, the soft edges and painterly touches being particularly evident in Girl Writing an Email (details above).

On Janson’s site you can see other examples of his Vermeer inspired interiors as well as his contemplative Seattle landscapes and watercolors.

There is currently a show of Janson’s work at Galleria dell’Incisione in Brescia, Italy until January 30, 2009.

Janson’s fascination with Vermeer has put him on a path of exploration that reaches into the past and future at the same time, in the process throwing a contemporary light on the master’s approach, and giving us a unique perspective from an artist who has done his best to look at a great painter from the “inside”, while revealing his own sensibilities and unique artistic vision.

In addition to her own painting and blogging regimen, the indefatigable Karin Jurick (who I have written about previously here, as well as in my posts on “painting a day” painter/bloggers here and here) has a new project in which she participates, guides and hosts a collaborative painting blog based on a simple but fascinating concept: multiple artists’ interpretations of the same scene.

Different Strokes from Different Folks starts with the premise that multiple artists paint a painting from the same photograph. Jurick provides the photograph and gets the ball rolling in each case with her own interpretation, leaving subsequent submissions open to any artists who wish to participate.

She emphasizes that the intent is to paint the scene and not the photograph, which is basically a digital stand-in for the physical impossibility of all of the artists painting on location together. Each artist looks for their own composition and interpretation of the subject.

Each session starts on Wednesday evening and is open for a week. The results are posted on the blog with links to each participating artist’s web site or blog. The original photograph is posted first, followed by Jurick’s starting piece and followed by subsequent submissions in sequence.

Those interested in participating should read the instructions on the blog’s sidebar carefully. Submissions are limited to traditional media, must be sent directly to her email address, with a specific subject line, as a JPEG file (not as a link and no blurry photos) and accompanied each time by the artist’s name and web site or blog address (regardless of previous submissions).

The result is a fascinating look at how different artists interpret the same scene in paint, and once each session has ended they participating paintings can be viewed as a group, as well as in the blog post (weekly results links on the sidebar).

Jurick also posts her own painting, and often a composite poster of the others, on her own blog.

As of this writing, the subject is the Cloud Gate sculpture (locally known as “The Bean”) in Millennium Park in Chicago.

(Image above: left column: Karin Jurick, Emma Pierce, Dean Haven, Nancy Rhodes Harper; right column: Alice Thompson, Tommye Easterlin, original photograph)