“Predictable” is a word that, sadly, often applies to the contents of modern newspaper comics pages (what remains of them). In February of 2004 readers of the San Francisco Chronicle suddenly found themselves confronted with a new feature on the comics page called “All Over Coffee” by Paul Madonna that set that notion nicely askew.

As an East Coast resident, I don’t get the Chronicle, but I can imagine that, for some, the feature was a source of confusion, despite the paper’s introductory article; but for others the reaction must have similar to the one I had when I first encountered All Over Coffee on the web: “Wow. What is this?”

The feature consists of a drawing, usually a beautiful pen and wash drawing of buildings, streets, rooms or architectural elements in San Francisco (and sometimes Paris, Amsterdam and elsewhere) accompanied by a short bit of writing, a few lines to a few paragraphs.

The writing consists of seemingly random musings, comments, suggestions, observations and generally enigmatic phrases written into and juxtaposed against the subtle beauty of the wash drawings. The “strip” ostensibly revolves around two unseen characters, Maurice and Sarah, whose abstracted thoughts and conversations form the text.

The drawings themselves are sometimes as wonderfully quirky and thought provoking as the writing, bits of seemingly incongruent architecture, flashes of streets, textural patterns of rooftops, storefronts, house sides, museum interiors, apartment lobbies, alleyways, cornices, telephone wires and TV antennas, often wrapped in geometric shadows and rendered with an intense affection and attention to detail

Is it art? Sure. Is it literature? Yeah, that too. Is it poetry? Sometimes. Is it comics? Well, no (in that it’s not sequential storytelling as far as I can discern). Is it fascinating and rewarding? Almost always.

Madonna’s wash drawings are simply wonderful; his sensitive linework, sure draftsmanship, masterful applications of wash and keen eye for light and shadow produce images that are uncannily evocative of place, even for those of us who have never been to San Francisco.

Even though I have been to Paris, I don’t find those images any more or less resonant than the ones of San Francisco; the “place” he evokes isn’t as much a geographical location as the immediacy of one’s own surroundings, the sense of noticing the scene, and the moment, in which you find yourself.

Combined with text that, almost regardless of its actual content, has the common thread of causing you to slow down and contemplate, the final piece produces a poetic suspension of the ordinary; or more accurately, a reframing of the ordinary as extraordinary.

Madonna’s drawing style manages to retain some of the informality of travel sketches (and some of the journalistic immediacy of sketchbooks by Robert Crumb and Chris Ware), even while refined to the point of a finished work. He seems to have found a delicate “just right” spot between the two. He exercises that balance within individual drawings, with passages of intense detail against blank walls and great negative shapes of skies, often criss-crossed with telephone wires, window frames and the edges of architectural forms in a rich and playful compositional geometry.

His website opens in rather newspaper like columns with news, announcements and links to various features and projects. All Over Coffee has it’s own section.

There is a book collection of All Over Coffee that is available from Amazon or directly from the publisher, City Lights. As announced on the All Over Coffee main page, a new collection, Everything Is Its Own Reward (the name of which is taken from this panel) is due in April of 2011.

Madonna has also provided illustrations for other books, including A Writer’s San Francisco: A Guided Journey for the Creative Soul by Eric Maisel, and Nikko Concrete Commando by Delfin Vigil (a magazine-like MagCloud publication, click on “Show Preview” on the page).

The bulk of the All Over Coffee images available online are in the Purchase section, in which you can purchase either original art or fine art prints of All Over Coffee pages. You will find some redundancy between the two, but the features are numbered, and I doubt you will object to seeing a given piece more than once.

In his presentation of the images on the site, Madonna gives the date and location of each drawing and a brief comment on the piece and its creation.

All Over Coffee is also, of course, a continuing feature in the San Fancisco Chronicle and its online edition SFGate. You can follow the online version here and access the archives here.

In whatever form, in print on online, take Paul Madonna’s invitation to slow down, look around and maybe contemplate a bit, all over coffee.

[Vis Escape into Life]

Long time readers of Lines and Colors will know that I have long been an admirer of the work of William Stout. Stout is well know as a paleontological artist, film concept designer, illustrator and comics artist.

His style ranges as widely as his areas of endeavor, but I take particular pleasure in his ink and watercolor drawings.

Stout has a terrific pen and ink style, and his black an white illustrations pop with judiciously applied texture and finessed line work; but when he combines that skill with his talents as a painter, he creates images with visual charm that I find wonderfully appealing.

There have been a number of his illustrations that I’ve encountered over time, scattered here and there for different publications or purposes, that I’ve long wished were available in some more complete form.

I was delighted, then, to receive a review copy of a new book from Flesk Publications that is the first of a pair of editions collecting some of Stout’s best ink and watercolor images.

William Stout: Hallucinations collects his images of characters from film, pulp fiction, pop culture and even Aasop’s Fables, all rendered with that wonderful snap and zing of his pen style and the rich depth of his watercolors. Dragons, fauns, trolls and monsters fill the pages, along with character from the Wizard of Oz and John Carter of Mars.

There are sample images that can be viewed on the Flesk site. You can see more of Stout’s work on his own website.

It’s actually no surprise that I like Stout’s ink and watercolor style so much, in that the list of artist that Stout credits in the introduction with influencing this style are also among my favorites from the great Golden Age of illustration: Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, William Heath Robinson, John Bauer, Gustaf Tenggren and John R. Neill.

Flesk Publications is offering the book in two editions, a hardbound, signed limited edition of 500, and a paperback edition.

The companion volume, William Stout: Inspirations, which collects his ink and watercolor images of women from fantasy and fairy tales, will be released in September of this year.

Both Flesk Publications and William Stout will be at this week’s Comic-Con international in San Diego, CA.

Grzegorz Wróbel is an architectural designer from Poland. He paints street scenes and, as you might expect, architectural subjects, in beautiful crisp watercolor paintings.

He evidently developed a drawing and watercolor style for the purpose of architectural presentation, but also engages in watercolor painting of existing scenes, either for his own satisfaction or as gallery art.

Wróbel has a deft command of his medium, painting with clear, fresh color, a beautifully handled mixture of sharp and blurred edges, wonderful applications of subtle texture, and a solid grounding of draftsmanship and composition.

Wróbel knows how to draw the line (so to speak) between too much rendering and just enough, precise drawing and loose interpretation. He has keen eye for selecting the most important elements in an architectural scene and emphasizing those, while producing an overall composition alive with appealing color and value transitions.

For a quick introduction, see this article on Empty Kingdom, which is where I discovered Wróbel. It features several of his images reproduced fairly large.

For more see the extensive galleries on Wróbel’s deviantART page, which apparently serves as his website. There you will find, in addition to his townscapes and street scenes (many of which are linked to larger versions), more traditional landscapes, a few fantasy subjects, figurative work and even paintings of monster trucks.

There are a couple of step-by-step walkthroughs that give some idea of his technique.

There is much to be said for the simple, direct observation of our immediate surroundings, and the artistic expression of that observation.

I find the results often have a visual charm that comes from the unassuming honesty of the act of observing and recording, unrestrained by the intention of “creating a work”.

I see some of that simplicity of intention and directness of observation in the small gouache paintings of Massachusetts painter Laraine Armenti.

You will find them as you browse through her blog, simple observations that look as though she has cast her eyes about the room and made a subject of whatever they find.

Her direct, often delightfully graphic gouache studies are frequently accompanied by ink drawings of the same scene. I don’t know if these are preliminary or are actually done after the gouache paintings, but they are apparently done in the same session.

You will also find small landscapes on both her blog and her website, often in oil, as well as small still life paintings in oil (images above, bottom).

Armenti majored in etching at the Rhode Island School of Design, but also studied art history, painting and photography; and went on to pursue a three year study of the figure in the studio of Ronald Rizzi. She established an 18 year career in illustration and graphic design before transitioning into gallery art.

Alexander Creswell is a well known English watercolorist, carrying on in the traditions of the country in which watercolor first reached acceptance as a major art medium.

He is noted for his association with British royalty, painting the Windsor Castle Royal Collection fire and restoration in a book Out of the Ashes and traveling as official artist with the Prince of Wales.

The images on his website are found in the sales gallery. He places emphasis on his watercolors and drawings of sailing yachts, showing them first in the gallery. Though these are beautifully done, they are not subjects I find personally compelling.

I much prefer his urban landscapes of Venice, Florence and other places in Italy, as well as France, the UK and locations in the Middle East. These owe much to John Singer Sargent’s luminous watercolors of Venice, but of course this is a Good Thing.

You can skip ahead to the landscapes by going to page 10 in the numbered navigation at the bottom of the pages. It reverts to sailing subjects again after a while, and picks back up in Italy around 21 and again around 27 (this may change as new images are added to the galleries).

You can also see a smaller selection of his urban landscapes on the Portland Gallery site.

His watercolors capture that wonderful brilliant sunlight associated with the Mediterranean basin, whether in the intricate buildings of Venice or the rough stones of ancient ruins in Oman, rich with shimmering colors and light-filled compositions.

Unfortunately, most of the images on his site are watermarked, though not so egregiously as to make them unsuitable for viewing.

Creswell also does large scale banners and hangings of his watercolor images that are used like murals. The gallery for these is accessed through an alternate entry from his site’s home page.

I think it’s unfortunate that so much of contemporary architectural illustration has been ceded to the faux photorealism of 3-D rendering. While I actually like well done CGI, when it comes to portraying architecture I very much prefer the beautiful crisp renderings of talented artists working in traditional media.

A case in point are the watercolor renderings of Australian artist John Haycraft. His sharp, clear representations of buildings and cityscapes carry a bright colorful flair that can’t be duplicated in 3-D, even by the same talented artist. On the Haycraft Duloy website there are galleries of both types of rendering.

In addition, there are some pen sketches and location watercolors of places like Venice and the Amalfi Coast. His envisioning of architectural subjects include aerial views of airports, large scale developments and even large areas of cities.

Haycraft studied with American watercolorist Charles Reid. There is a liveliness in his casual sketches that carries over into the more formal work.

A collection of his work was published in 2007, Where Was I? A collection from 60 years of drawing and painting.

[Suggestion courtesy of Paulo Mendonca]

Scott Brundage applies his delightfully cartoony watercolor illustration style to editorial illustrations for clients like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Southern Living Magazine, The Artist’s Magazine and many others.

In addition to the cartoonlike visual approach, his illustrations often have a cartoonlike twist, or humorous variation on a common scene. This is often applied to his “Rollover” illustrations, web-specific illustrations in which mousing over the image reveals an alternate version of the scene (sometimes shown as an animated sequence).

Many of the latter have been done for Tor.com where he is a regular contributor (never too early to stock up on your Cthulhu Christmas Cards!). The Tor site also has a gallery of his work.

Brundage began his career while still a student at the University of the Arts here in Philadelphia, with the winning design for a children’s helmet contest, which was put into production by Bell Helmets. He is originally from Connecticut and now lives in New York City.

In addition to his web site, Brundage keeps a blog where you can see work in progress and other pieces not yet included in the galleries, like the image above, for a Tor.com Valentine’s Day Rollover, in which he has playfully recast a scene styled after Fragonard’s Rococo garden dalliances into a chase from The Wizard of Oz.

Wisconsin artist Chris Beck went from the fine art program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to a career as a graphic designer and then found her way back to painting.

Her bright, high-chroma watercolors have been featured in magazines like Watercolor Artist and The Artist’s Magazine and she has been the recipient of a number of awards from juried shows and exhibitions.

In addition to still life subjects and florals, both in still life and in gardens, Beck finds inspiration in the colorful painted metal surfaces of tin toys, which she also calls “Vintage Critters“.

Her painting “Snail Mail” (image above, bottom) has been chosen to share the cover of the upcoming book from Kennedy Publishing, Best of America, Watermedia II (more info here).

Beck maintains two blogs, a personal one called I’m painting as fast as I can… and a more general blog, aimed at the appreciation and spotlighting of various watercolor artists, titled Brush – Paper – Water.

Gouache is a medium that doesn’t get its due. Often looked on as a “less than” subset of transparent watercolor, or a “wannabe” substitute for oil, gouache has some of the characteristics of each.

Gouache is a form of watercolor, pigment suspended in gum arabic, and does give the ability to work in light over dark like oil and unlike transparent watercolor. Most importantly, though, gouache has its own character, allowing the artist to produce smooth, even tones, distinctive color and impart a graphic character to brushstrokes that can give gouache a unique visual appeal.

Larry Seiler worked for 17 years in acrylic and another 15 in oil, and though he apparently still works in both, he now prefers gouache for his small immediate paintings of the Wisconsin landscape.

Seiler’s colorful landscapes are often painted on black board or black prepared surfaces, and he frequently paints in an inset area, leaving part of the surface around the edges.

His gouache paintings are rendered in bright dabs of color with little blending, giving them a simultaneously painted and graphic feel. His compositions often include small streams of lakes and bright foliage, subjects that lend themselves well to the application of broken color.

Seiler has a web site on which you can find examples of both his small paintings and larger studio work, but it is on his blog that you will find the small gouache paintings.

His web site also includes step-by-step demos, an instructional DVD and CD Rom book, and information on workshops.

Larry Seiler’s son, Jason Seiler, is also an artist, known for his caricatures, character design, portraits and humorous illustration.

Stephen Scott Young is a renowned contemporary watercolorist and etcher whose works are in major collections and museums.

Young was born in Hawaii, moved to Florida with his family at the age of 14, and studied printmaking at the Ringling School of Art in Sarasota. His watercolor technique, which frequently makes use of drybrush, is self-taught, and based on his admiration for artists like Winslow Homer, Andrew Wyeth and Thomas Eakins.

Young lives part time in Florida and part time in the Bahama Islands, where he finds subjects for many of his well known paintings of children. This was also a place where Homer came to paint, and Young has even done compositions that are essentially recreations of Homer paintings.

Whether at play, moody and contemplative, or even formally posed, his images of children seem to see past the surface into a moment in their lives.

The refined technique and precise draftsmanship applied to his subjects are often set off against loosely suggested backgrounds, rendered together in a muted palette with accents of brighter color.

Young also works in etching, drypoint and silverpoint drawing.

[Via Artist Daily]