James Christensen’s paintings range from straightforward portraits to fantasy tinged depictions of angels and Renaissance ladies to phantasmic tableaux of fantasy subjects that look as though the books in a children’s library had been run through a fan and reassembled by a cross-eyed surrealist.

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]

Indiana born, Seattle based illustrator, painter, comic book artist and 3D gaming environmental artist Jamie Burton studied at the John Herron School of Art in Indianapolis, and then at the Joe Kubert School of Art in New Jersey, where he prepared for subsequent work as a comic book inker for DC Comics.

Burton transitioned into concept and environmental art for the gaming industry, but still likes to let his imagination roam freely with his paintings and poster designs.

His website has sections for paintings, illustrations, ink drawings, sketches and posters. In the paintings section you will find examples of his wonderfully wild and offbeat depictions of characters, animals, environments and all manner of flights of fancy.

There is also a Merchandise section on his site with prints and originals. He also has a blog where you can find pieces not included on his site, and sometimes larger versions of works that you will see there.

Burton uses a high-chroma palette, often casting entire elements or groups of elements in an almost monochromatic scheme, punched up with lots of complimentary color relationships and set off with deep value contrasts, to make his pieces “pop”. He works in a variety of media — pencil, ink, acrylic, oil and digital.

In his paintings he mixes in areas of patterns, frequently with an Aztec or Mayan feeling, suggestions of masks and bizarre costumes, to create a fun visual mix, zapped with electric colors and delivered with a good dose of humor.

Since I last wrote about illustrator and concept artist Marc Gabbana back in 2005, his website has been revised and expanded with many more of his wonderful concept illustrations for films like Matrix Reloaded, Martix Revolutions, Star Wars Episode I and II, Monsterhouse, War of the Worlds, Beowulf, and the recent Disney production of Dicken’s A Christmas Carol.

Gabbana has a versatile style, ranging from atmospheric realism to highly rendered but delightfully cartoony flights of sci-fi whimsey. He also works in a variety of media, preferring digital for his recent concept illos, but working in acrylic, pencil, ink and marker for older pieces.

One of the things I enjoy most about his acrylic paintings and some of his more playful digital paintings (images above, middle), in addition to his terrifically fun use of brilliant colors and dynamic value relationships, is his approach to texture. Look for the detail crops of some of his robots and machines in which he delights in the pitted surfaces of worn metal.

His portfolio also includes illustrations for advertising, various publications, comic book covers, model kits and other products, as well as personal images in which he lets his imagination run wild.

Gabbana now has a blog, called Black Hammer, and has just released two instructional DVD’s through Gnomon Workshop, Visual Development with Marc Gabbana Volume One and Volume Two. You can see a couple of excerpts from them on Sketch Theatre.

He also did the recent cover for Airbrush Action magazine’s 25th Anniversary issue (May-June, 2010, digital version orders here), that includes a ten page article on Gabbana. In addition he created the illustration for the Spectrum 15 Call for Entries (images above, top, see my posts on Spectrum 14 and Spectrum 13).

As you explore his site and look back through the film concepts, be sure not to miss Gabbana’s beautiful pen and marker concepts for the Star Wars movies (above, bottom).

Let us celebrate the wonderful cheesiness and eye-popping kid-allowance-bait futurism of these 1960’s and 70’s magazine and plastic model kit box illustrations by Japanese illustrator Shigeru Komatsuzaki.

Giant destroyer robots! Undersea super tunnel! Space Train! Thunderbirds! And, of course “Frog car boat”!

Not only has the Pink Tentacle blog made these marvels available for your edification and amusement, they have provided a small link under each one to a larger image; certain to leave you stupefied in bizarro geeky retro Japanese pop culture wonderment overload.

Yowza!

[Via MetaFilter and Popular Science]

Tuomas Korpi is a Finnish illustrator and matt painter who, like many in his field, paints digitally in Photoshop.

His site has little or no biographical information, but has a number of his paintings arranged into genres. I found the work most interesting in the Illustrations section, which includes a variety of subjects including digital still life, and the Sketches section, which includes both briefly noted and more complete digital paintings, as well as some pieces in traditional medial like pastel and gouache.

Despite the lack of other information, he includes the titles of the works and notes the medium, and you can find more detailed comments for individual works on his space at CGSociety, where you will also find some of his pieces reproduced in higher resolution.

Korpi has an effective approach to controlled color and atmospheric perspective that gives his work, even those pieces that are more quickly suggested, a feeling of place and mood.

He has two process videos on YouTube, and has generously made his Photoshop brushes available for download from his Sketches page.

There is a brief interview with Korpi on Dark Wolf’s Fantasy Reviews, in which he expresses a particular admiration for 19th Century Finnish painter Albert Edelfelt..

Massachusetts based fantasy artist Scott Fisher counts among his clients Simon and Schuster, Warner Brothers. Tor Books, Lucas Film Harcourt and Wizards of the Coast.

For the latter he has done a number of illustrations for their iconic Magic: The Gathering game, for which his work has a pleasantly different look than many of his contemporaries.

In the images of his that I like the most, he often divides the backgrounds into roughly geometric patterns, swathed with color and infused with interesting textures.

His subjects are then set against these patterns, with stylized garments swirling through the compositions, interweaving with areas of contrasting or blending values in the backgrounds.

Fischer’s website has examples of these, as well as his his work in concept design, book covers and a selection of personal work.

Fischer also works in a very different style in his alternate role as a children’s book illustrator. His work in this field is so different form his other illustrations that he has a separate section of his website with example of his illustrations for both younger and older kid’s books. He also does readings and performances for schools, and is the author of his own children’s book titles, Twinkle and Jump!.

François Baranger is a French concept artist, illustrator and comics artist. He has done concept design for both gaming and film, and his film credits include Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, parts I and II, and Prince of Persia, though you won’t yet find art from those films in his online portfolio, as they are still under a non-disclosure agreement.

You will find art for Arthur and the Invisibles, a new film by Luc Besson, director of The Fifth Element, and Ek-Tor an interesting but cancelled project, also by Besson.

There are also galleries of Baranger’s work for other film and game projects, as well as fantasy and junior books illustration, and comics.

Baranger uses both digital and traditional media, along with some 3-D rendering. His concept work appears largely like digital painting, in which he maintains a nice feeling of a painterly surface and often utilizes limited, almost monochromatic palettes to great effect.

The pieces of his that I enjoy most are concept illustrations for environments, both interior and exterior, in which he can be very evocative of place.

[Via io9]

Despite his lack of formal art training, Victorian painter John Anster Fitzgerald became accepted by the Royal Academy, exhibited at the British Institution and established himself as well-known portrait painter and illustrator.

However, “Fairy Fitzgerald” earned his nickname as a “fairy painter”, a popular niche genre in Victorian painting that focused on the depictions of fairies and their otherworldly kin, and the sometimes escapist and imaginative settings evoked by the literature from which the ideas are derived.

One might imagine that this was in some ways the Victorian equivalent of the appeal of contemporary fantasy art, which has revisited related themes with regularity.

Fitzgerald’s take on the subject, though whimsical in some respects, was often darker than that of his contemporaries, with influences from Bosch and Brueghel raising their twisted little heads amidst the flowers and moss of the forest floor.

In some ways, this is an appropriate undercurrent for the subject, given the often dark and grisly nature of many of the original fairy tales and folklore that were the basis for the motifs.

Fitzgerald utilized brilliant color, strong value contrasts and richly textural detail to give his work a visual appeal much suited to his subjects and the appetites of his audience.

His work experienced a revival in the 20th Century, to the point where forgers were discovered to be creating numerous fake Fitzgeralds.

MicroVisions is a yearly auction of small (5×7″, 12×17cm) paintings by noted science fiction and fantasy artists, arranged by Irene Gallo and Dan Dos Santos, the proceeds of which go to the Society of Illustrators student scholarship fund.

This year’s participating artists include Scott Altmann, Scott Bakal, Rick Berry, Bill Carman, Jon Foster, Donato Giancola, Michael Kaluta, Tim O’Brien, Omar Rayyan, Allen Williams, and Boris Vallejo (links to my posts on the artists).

The auction is now live on eBay and runs until next Wednesday, May 26, 2010.

(Images above: Michael Kaluta, Bill Carman, Donato Giancola, Allen Williams)

[Thanks to Bill Carman for the heads-up.]

Frank Frazetta was one of the best and most renowned fantasy illustrators in the history of the genre. Frazetta died yesterday, May 10, 2010 at the age of 82.

Frazetta began his career as a comics artist, starting as a teenager as an assistant to other artists. He worked for smaller comic book publishers, producing a number of memorable “funny animal” comics (see my previous post on Frank Frazetta’s Funny Animal Comics), and a number of adventure titles.

He was eventually given the opportunity to crate his own comic title, Thun’da, King of the Congo, but his run on the comic was only two issues. He then went to work in newspaper comics, doing “ghost work” (uncredited assistance) on Dan Barry’s Flash Gordon. He continued to work for comic book companies, including EC Comics and DC Comics, and contributed covers to the Buck Rogers comic books.

In 1954 Frazetta went to work for Al Capp, assisting on his extremely popular Li’l Abner strip, he also continued to work on his own newspaper strip, Johnny Comet. On leaving Capp’s studio he did work for the Warren horror comic magazines, Creepy and Eerie, contributing many of those publications’ most memorable covers. At the same time he contributed to Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder’s Little Annie Fanny strip for Playboy (see my post on Will Elder).

From there, Frazetta moved into paperback cover illustration and achieved his greatest renown for his lushly painted covers for novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and in particular, Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian books.

In addition to the influences of his colleges at E.C., like Al Williamson, Roy Krenkel and Wally Wood, Frazetta picked up on the techniques of the great 19th century pen and ink illustrators like Joseph Clement Coll and became a first rate pen and ink draftsman.

In his painting, Frazetta carried forward the traditions of the great swashbuckling adventure illustrators like Howard Pyle, N.C. Wyeth and Frank Schoonover, bringing them into the modern era with a touch more menace, implied violence and sex. In the process Frazetta became tremendously influential on a new generation of adventure fantasy artists, many of whom are working today.

Frazetta’s figures, beasts and monsters seem to inhabit a world in which gravity exerts more force than normal; and that great sensation of weight translated into a suggestion of immense power, either heroic or menacing.

Frazetta’s color palette, again with a direct lineage to Pyle and Wyeth, was often dark and moody, punctuated by bright passages for emphasis. His use of theatrical lighting for dramatic effect gave his compositions an immediate visceral impact.

To my mind, it is in the bridge he forms between those Golden Age illustrators and the newer generation that grew up in awe of his barbarian images that Frazetta is most notable, carrying forward traditions of great adventure illustration in a lineage he happily acknowledged in illustrations like Galleon (image above, bottom), a direct homage to Pyle’s Attack on a Galleon (see my post on Howard Pyle).

Frazetta remains extremely popular and there are a number of books that collect or feature his work, and there is a video interview with the artist on DVD, Frazetta: Painting With Fire.

There is a museum devoted to his work that was run by the family. I don’t know what its status will be going forward. The museum site doesn’t have much information, but it does have a selection of Frazetta’s work in the form of prints.

I’ve listed some other resources below.

[Note: Some images are NSFW.]