Seth Engstrom has worked as an art director, concept artist, layout artist and production designer for animated features like Avatar, Bee Movie, Shark Tale, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimmeron, Sinbad and El Dorado.

His blog contains an interesting range of images, from color and black and white concept art from the above mentioned films to oil paintings of highway overpasses, to figure sketches in oil and location sketches in gouache.

The most recent entries are a series of monochromatic watercolor or ink wash studies of freeway ramps and overpasses, in which he seems fascinated with the geometric arrangement of the structures and the negative shapes that they carve out of the space they surround. The series includes some finished oil paintings of highway structures and airport terminals with a brusque finish to the paint surface.

Farther back in the blog posts we come across some of his film concept work, also often monochromatic, usually in wash or graphite. These are frequently highly detailed, with a great feeling of texture and dramatic lighting. Some of my favorites are his moody and atmospheric drawings of Mayan temples for El Dorado (image above, top).

As you continue down the page, you’ll encounter work from other films and then some of his oil figure studies. Don’t miss the fresh little gouache sketches toward the bottom of the page (above, bottom).

[Link via John Nevarez (see my previous post on John Nevarez)]

Though he apparently paints in oil as well, I have been unable to find anything but images of watercolors while searching for pantings by Timothy J. Clark.

The watercolors are certainly enough, though. Crisp, clear, confidently rendered and deftly executed, Clark’s landsacpes, architectural views and room interiors are revealed in often theatrical compositions with dramatic casts of dark and light. At other times, his value contrasts are more muted, giving way to subtle variations in color that carry a softer emotional tone.

Clark’s website has a nice but limited selection of his paintings, but you may be able to see a mid-career retrospective of his work that has just opened at the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio, and will travel to the Whistler House Muesum of Art in Lowell, MA in the fall.

There is a new book accompanying the exhibit, Timothy J. Clark by Jean Stern and Lisa Farrington. Though currently out of stock at the Amazon link I’ve given, you can order it directly from the artist’s web site.

Clark is also an art historian and the author of several books on art history, including The Painting of Modern Life, a fascinating look at the changing role of painting during one of the most interesting places and periods, Paris in the 1860’s and 1870’s, when the nature of painting, its sturcture, technique and subject matter, were undergoing dramatic changes.

Clark’s knowledge of the history of late 19th Century painting carries over into his choice of inspiration, notably the American Impressionists in general and John Singer Sargent in particular.

You can readily see the influence of Sargent’s beautiful watercolors of Venice in Clark’s modern visions of the same entrancing subject in images accompanying an article on TFAOI about a previous show of Clark’s work.

[Link via Art Knowledge News]

Wow, that guy could paint!

This was essentially my response when I first encountered the work of John Singer Sargent back in my art school days.

I was disappointed, though, to find that the art history books treated him with less regard than I expected. “Facile”, “highly skilled” and “renowned portrait painter”, seemed to be the best they could say of him. I would read the discussions of the great painters and constantly be frustrated to find him not on the list. “Oh yeah”, seemed to be the consensus, “one of those late 19th Century painters who was all technique and no substance — not important in the grand scheme of things”.

I eventually figured out that the late 20th Century art establishment had a bug up its collective ass about 19th Century Academic art in particular, and that in a world where “flatness” was a pinnacle of achievement, and white on white conceptual abstracts painted on 12 foot canvasses with paint rollers were trading for millions of dollars, “facile” was a bad word; and that “substance” and “important in the grand scheme of things” meant “leading up to modernism”.

As I gained the knowledge and confidence to form my own opinions, and understand that the “experts” were often idiots, I realized that my initial impression of Sargent was a true one.

Of all of the great painters I have come to admire over the years, two are at the top of my list of personal favorites, Vermeer and Sargent.

The more I learn about painting itself, the higher my regard for Sargent becomes, and I consider him one of greatest painters in the history of Western art.

The art snob intellectuals will still turn up their nose at this, of course, but as the froth of modernism has receded in recent years, and some semblance of balance has returned to the art establishment, Sargent’s star has risen again.

He also gets knocked because he was a society portrait painter, which of course is a crime similar to engaging in “commercial art” or (horrors!), illustration. Sargent himself eventually got tired of his parade of rich sitters and the limitations of pleasing the upper class with pictures of themselves, but in the course of painting portraits, he was painting the visual world.

I have to admit that his paintings on the surface are not infused with great emotion or drama, he seems as unconnected to his sitters as those he painted in groups seem to each other. By accounts Sargent apparently did not have strong ties outside his family, but it is not in the emotional character of his faces and figures that I find the passion in Sargent’s work, it is in the painting itself.

If you approach Sargent’s portraits as “living still lifes” or “interior landscapes”, you may begin to see what I mean. Look at the folds in a dress, the way soft interior light bounces off valleys of satin, glowing with subtle but intense colors, like a misty Impressionist garden in the rain. Look at the textures of cloth, hair and skin; the rose colors where blood vessels are close to the surface in noses and cheeks; the sweep of light through dark interiors and the interplay of varied-colored brushstrokes, swaying back and forth with the rhythm of some distant symphony…

Here is Sargent’s passion, not found in his bored dilettante subjects, but in spite of them, in the act of painting itself. Yes, there is romance and drama in Sargent’s work, but it is less in his images than in his brushstrokes. If you go to look at Sargent’s oil paintings, get up close.

The painting above, Nonchaloir (”nonchalance”, sometimes titled as “Repose” - larger reproduction here), is a non-commissioined portrait of Sargent’s niece, now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.. Even as family, her individuality is lost in his exploration of splashing light, rich, subtle color and the dance of his brush.

Sargent was considered an American painter, though he was born in Florence to American parents and spent most of his working life in Paris and London. He studied in the Paris atelier of the well known portrait painter Emile Auguste Carolus-Duran, and took drawing classes at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. (If you haven’t seen any of Sargent’s charcoal drawings, look them up. There is a nice inexpensive book of them from Dover Books, Sargent Portrait Drawings.)

Sargent took inspiration from Valázquez, the painter’s painter, and some of the wonderfully facile Baroque portrait painters like Anthony van Dyck and Thomas Gainsborough; looking back to the inspiration of the past when the art world was beginning it’s mad, blind dash for the future. Even critics of the time began dismissing him as irrelevant.

He became tremendously successful as a portrait painter, though he scandalized the conservative art establishment with his notorious portrait of “Madame X“, (Madame Gautreau), a famous painting that he gave to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Sargent, like many of the so-called “American Impressionists” whose work I particularly enjoy, took influence form the French Impressionists. Sargent visited Monet at Giverny and associatied with others in the circle; but like the other “American Impressionists”, didn’t share the need the rebellious French painters felt to reject the traditional underpinnings of academic drawing and representational solidity, resulting in a wonderfully free blend of draftsmanship, color, and loose, painterly brushwork.

Sargent eventually abandoned his society portraits and devoted his later career to traveling and painting, largely in watercolor, a medium in which he was as stunningly accomplished and “facile’ as in oil. (See my previous post on Sargent in Venice.)

Happily, Sargent is in vogue these days and there are lots of great resources, both online and in print.

One of the best online resources for Sargent is the John Singer Sargent Virtual Gallery. Though the organization is not as convenient as you might like, there is a great deal of information and lots of wonderful art to be found here.

Sargent’s resurgence of popularity has resulted in a number of fine books over the past several years. Here are some of the ones on my shelves:

John Singer Sargent by Kate F. Jennings is a good place to start, it’s absurdly inexpensive ($10) and this slim but oversize book is filled with large scale reproductions.

John Singer Sargent by Carter Ratcliff is large and informative (you may be able to find it less expensively used), and has some nice details, though some of them are in black and white (which can be instructive in itself).

John Singer Sargent by Trevor Fairbrother has a nice cross section of oils, watercolors and drawings, and the text is a good overview of the painter and his work.

John Singer Sargent: The Sensualist, also by Trevor Fairbrother, is one of my favorites, and speaks, I think, to some of what I see in his passion for the visual world.

The Watercolors of John Singer Sargent by Carl Little is beautiful. No painter of representational watercolors should be unaware of it.

The best resource, though, if possible, is to see if there are works by Sargent in a museum near you, and put your nose up to one.

Whatever else you may say about John Singer Sargent, one thing is undeniable:

Wow, that guy could paint!

As an antidote to yesterday’s scary monsters, I take you this morning to the tranquil beauty of a water garden, alight with the brilliance of water lilly blossoms, in botanical watercolor paintings by Alexis America.

America has a series of paintings of water lillies, lotus and related water plants, their bright blooms, colorful stalks and delicate floating pads rendered in fresh, crisp watercolor (image above, top). These are presented in a web site gallery called Alexis America botanical paintings.

The site provides little background information, but with a little digging I was able to find that America, originally from Connecticut and now living in Hawaii, also has a series of Water Paintings created as aqueous monoprints (image above, bottom).

Aqueous monoprinting is a process closely related to traditional Italian book marbling, in which oil based paints are floated on water, taking advantage of the old adage that oil and water don’t mix, and the colors are stirred or moved around with delicate wands or by blowing air through a tube to create intricate marbled patterns. A sheet of paper is then gingerly laid atop the paint, and carefully lifted off, preserving the pattern in a single unique impression.

I had a chance to see traditional marbling done when some Florentine artisans participated in a cultural exchange here in Philadelphia a few years ago, as part of the little known “Sister Cities” relationship between Philadelphia and Florence. If you ever get a chance to see the process demonstrated, it’s fascinating and quite demanding. In America’s monoprints, she has used the process in a more representational way that I have seen before, in images suggestive of rolling and breaking waves.

Both her botanical and water paintings sites offer limited edition prints, though there is no indication of whether the originals are for sale or have gallery representation (or the size at which they’re done). Oddly, neither site mentions or is linked to the other; leading me to wonder if she has other sites of themed paintings, though these are the only two I turned up with a quick search. I also found a mention of her on the Tiki Art Gallery, that includes a small bio and offers prints some of her older figurative work.

[Link and suggestion courtesy of Ocean Quigley]

Richard Parkes Bonington was one of the great English landscape painters at the height of the grand era of landscape painting in the 1800’s, and a notable figure in the English watercolor movement.

He is credited with carrying the influence of both of those artistic waves to Continental Europe and inspiring many European painters to take up the practice of painting with watercolor, including Delacroix.

In his tragically short life of twenty six years, and a career as a painter that lasted only ten, he produced a notable body of work; with fresh, atmospheric paintings that bent the rules of what was acceptable in painting at the time, and helped lay the groundwork on which later sharp breaks with tradition (i.e. Impressionism) would be based.

He preferred to work outdoors, and took his compositions from modern life rather than composing “history paintings” in which the landscape was subservient to some concept of classical antiquity or religious significance.

His paintings are notable for their sweeping skies, atmospheric haze and quick suggestions of texture in place of labored rendering.

There has been some debate among artists and illustrators (some of it on the comments pages of certain posts here on lines and colors) about the wisdom of placing relatively large, non-watermarked images on the web, where they can ostensibly be “stolen” and used for some nefarious purpose.

Those who have read my posts on how to display your art on the web, and my rant on how not to display your art on the web, will know that I come down firmly on the side that holds that displaying your work to best advantage far outweighs the disadvantages of potentially having it “borrowed” (the aversion to which I think is often more a case of indignant territorial response than a practical concern).

As a case in point, if I hadn’t seen Boris Kulikov’s wonderful children’s book illustrations either in print or in relatively large digital versions, I wouldn’t have become an instant fan. As intriguing as his conceptually clever and wonderfully drawn illustrations may be at a smaller size, it’s the texture and detail revealed by higher-resolution images that really grabbed my attention.

Kulikov describes his work as “mixed media” which appears to be mainly pencil, pen, watercolor and gouache. The children’s book illustrations are mainly watercolor, but Kulikov works on a textured watercolor paper rather than smooth illustration board, and the reproductions show that texture in a way that makes his washes and blocks of color display a wonderful textural quality, and carries some of the feeling of “this image is made of paint” that is present in “painterly” oils.

Kulikov combines this with an imaginative and colorful approach to his subjects, sometimes dreamlike scenes, nicely stylized characters and a terrific knack for slightly offbeat compositions, to create a style that captures your eye.

He also does beautiful pen and ink illustrations, notably for the Giants of Science series by Kathleen Krull.

His site is a bit awkward to navigate, but the children’s book illustrations are divided into color and black and white, as are the “other” (editorial) illustrations. Though the latter are also imaginative, conceptually clever and nicely realized, they are drawn and painted with a different feeling and approach and don’t wow me like his children’s book work.

In either case, when looking through his online galleries, be sure to click on the individual images for the higher res versions, and you’ll see why I think it was very wise of him to make those images available. In the meanwhile, I’ve made a note to look for some of the books he’s illustrated the next time I’m at the bookstore.

La Domenica del Corriere (”Sunday Courier”) was Sunday insert for Corriere della Sera, an Italian newspaper that ran for 90 years, from 1899 to 1989. For most of that time the section featured a full-page illustration on its cover each week.

These were often dramatic gouache or watercolor illustrations, almost in a pulp-illustration vein, but they presumably illustrated actual news stories (think of all of the notable and dramatic events that occurred during that period of time).

There is a site devoted to them at www.illustrated-history.org/, containing an archive of the illustrations and a bit of the history. The site is in Italian, and I’m afraid my Italian is even weaker then my French, so I relied on Google Translate to find my way around.

There is a search function on the home page that allows you to search by region (Per luoghi), by artist (Per autore) or event (Ricerca avanzata), with attendant drop-down menus.

It appears that there is a concentration on two artists in particular, Walter Molino (above left) and Achillies Beltrame (above right), whose work is sought after by collectors. Searching for these two may be a good place to start. Once you are on a page with a featured illustration, clicking on that image provides a pop-up with a wonderfully large reproduction of the painting. (I’ve included a full-size crop from a small section of each illustration above.) You can also informally browse from an illustration page to other pages by incrementing or decrementing the database number at the end of the URL in your browser’s address field.

Some of the illustrations are less interesting than others and there is some repetition of subject as they looked for sensational topics to illustrate (lots of train wrecks and other disasters), but some of these images are just wonderful and make the trouble of searching and browsing worth your while.

This is intended to be more of an illustrated history than an appreciation of the artists, but it serves as both. You can take a fascinating stroll through the early to mid 20th Century and view some wonderful pulp-style illustrations in the process.

I also found a blog on a site devoted to the paper, Blog del Club Domenica del Corriere, also in Italian, that features the illustrations, but doesn’t dwell on them exclusively.

[Link and suggestion courtesy of Jared Shear - see my post on Jared Shear]

For some reason I haven’t been able to fathom, a lot of artists who work digitally in fantasy art or concept art seem to feel the need to go by pseudonyms, sometimes multiple ones.

Lorland Chen is alternately known as lorlandchain, Lorland Chain, Wei Chain and Wei Chen. I think one of the last two is actually his real name. Take your pick.

Chen is an illustrator from Chengdu China. He is also an instructor at the ChengDu Fine Art Academy.

Chen exhibits a fascinating range of influences. His sometimes intricate and elaborate compositions of fantasy themed works draw on Chinese mythology and history for their subject matter, but are painted in the traditions of Western art. Chen works in both traditional media like watercolor and in digital painting applications like Painter and Photoshop, and sometimes combinations of digital and traditional media.

His figures in flowing robes walk through fantasy palaces or enchanted forests amid great trees that sometimes show the influence classic American illustrators like Maxfield Parrish. There are nods to classical European painting and contemporary fantasy art alike.

His digital paintings are sometimes extensively detailed, giving the impression that Chen was just having so much fun rendering out the intricate bits that he didn’t want to stop.

Chen’s own site, though it has an English version and information about the artist, is difficult to recommend for viewing his work because the images are marred with watermarking. The site also has some technical problems (won’t stop trying to load in Safari) and plays unrequested music (and long time readers know how much I love that). Still, if you like Chen’s work, it’s worth checking out the info about his work and his self-published how-to book.

Fortunately, you can see a number of his images without the annoyance of watermarking on his gallery spaces on deviantArt and CGSociety, which are often accompanied by his comments on the works and his digital painting process.

[Link via startdrawing.org]

It’s nice to start the new year by looking forward, but it can be just as instructive to look back; and there are some great resources that make looking back easier and more fruitful than ever.

Project Gutenberg is a great idea. Not just in the sense of “great” as “terrific”, but in the sense of “great” as “milestone” or “extraordinary”.

If you’re not familiar with it, Project Gutenberg is an attempt to digitize and archive as many public domain cultural works as possible (as opposed to archiving technical information). Started in 1971 by Michael S. Hart, and maintained and contributed to by thousands of volunteers, the archive already contains the full text of more then 20,000 books that are old enough to have moved into the public domain.

These are archived as free eBooks in several formats, Plucker a format that can be read on a Palm device or smartphone with the open source Plucker Viewer; HTML, which can be read online or downloaded as a Zip file; and plain text in ascii and utf-8 encodings. There are also audio books, sheet music and pictures.

Even though the length of time it takes for a book to become public domain was extended by the Copyright Term Extension Act, as the result of intensive lobbying by Disney and other corporate entertainment barons (hence its nickname as The Mickey Mouse Protection Act because the change happened as MM was about to slip into public domain), there are still a number of books in the archive printed after color printing became economical enough to include good reproductions of illustrations and other paintings, in addition to the older pen and ink illustrations.

Unfortunately, the weak link in the Project Gutenberg chain seems to be that the scanning and preparation of many illustrated books for the archive has apparently been done by individuals with no knowledge of graphic arts basics, and/or by brain damaged rhesus monkeys, resulting in the frustrating presence of a number archived illustrated books in which the illustrations are dark, blurry, over-compressed smears, or ratty, scratchy GIF files. (The latter is sadly the state of their archive of the wonderful John Tenniel illustrations for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. For better resources, see my post on Sir John Tenniel).

Thankfully, this is not always the fate of illustrated books in the collection, possibly because some graphics knowledgeable people have volunteered to help. A case in point is Masters of Water-Colour Painting by H.N. Cundall (HTML version here), a book published in the 1920’s with color plates of great watercolors, like the plate above, “Palazzo Contarini Fasan on the Grand Canal, Venice” by Samuel Prout.

There are some other gems in the collection but you have to look for them, a process that’s not always as easy as is should be. The project has a decent search feature, if you know what you’re looking for, but is weak on browsing. Repeated searching can bare fruit, the terms “painting” and “painters” will return different results. Try the Advanced Search or Catalog Overview page, from which you can use the Anacleo, Yahoo and Google search features.

Also, once you find a title you like, look in the “Bibliographic Record” section toward the top of that entry’s main page for the “LoC Class” link, in the case of the above title, the class is “ND: Fine Arts; Painting“, and returns some good results.

Digging will be rewarded.

Obviously, a project like this depends on contributions of money and time (they are always asking for help in the form of distributed proofreaders); and, though I can’t speak for the program, it looks to me like it might benefit in particular from they help of individuals with some knowledge of digital media and graphic arts.

[Masters of Water-Colour Painting link via Acuarela]

Chris Ware, who I wrote about here and here, has just released The Acme Novelty Date Book, Volume Two: 1995-2000.

For those of you who are only familiar with Ware’s precise, carefully controlled marvels of precision comic art, these two volumes are something else altogether.

Basically they’re sketchbooks, not that different in essence from sketchbooks released by a number of comic artists and illustrators, with a mixture of sketches from life and fanciful doodling, often accented with handwritten notes.

You may notice a similarity in particular to the sketchbooks of Robert Crumb. Though not the marvellously expressive cartoonist that Crumb is, I think Ware is actually a better draftsman, despite his occasional notes of complaint about his own drawing ability.

What sets Ware apart from most, and invites comparison with Crumb, is the exceptional mind and original talent behind the sketches.

The drawings themselves are in turn loose, careful, freewheelingly imaginative, and when drawn from life, wonderfully observant, both of people and of everyday scenes.

Even those not familiar with Ware’s work, particularly if they enjoy sketchbooks, will find much to like in this volume. The sketches for the most part have a personal quality, the kind of honest, often casual, observations of what is a hand when one picks up a sketchbook. A far cry from the careful, self-conscious presentation drawings that many comic artists like to publish as “sketchbooks”.

Artists who frequently fill their own sketchbooks with observations from what’s around them whenever they get the chance will find common ground and inspiration here, quick sketches of people, sketched from angles the indicate the subject was often unaware of being drawn, and numerous room interiors and street scenes, drawn in simple line or detailed crosshatch pen and ink, and often colored with modest but very effective watercolor washes. There are travel sketches from Europe and “around the corner” scenes from Ware’s native Chigago. One is a very detailed watercolor and ink drawing of an airplane cabin, obviously filling as much time as possible on a trans-Atlantic flight.

There are lots of drawings of simple household objects, kitchen counters, tables, chairs and odds and ends like toy robots. There is also plenty of cartoon sketching, including sketches of classic early 20th Century comic characters, like those from Gasoline Alley, as well as sketches and doodles of his own characters, designs for his wonderful fake ads and other germinating ideas. There are lots of handwritten notes about where things were sketched, along with longer passages of various ideas, notions, ramblings, rants and diatribes, giving an unusual glimpse into his thought process.

There are also some comics stories, comics that are printed small enough to have you squinting, nose to the page, but comics nonetheless, and drawn much more freely than you will ever see in his finished comics.

I don’t know what size the original sketchbooks are, but most of the sketches have a feeling of being printed at the size they might have been done, so perhaps the comics were drawn that small.

Interestingly, the paper is off-white and flecked with spots and ink smudges, giving the book feeling of sketchbook pages that have been collected into a classic old library binding, another of Ware’s wonderfully imaginative an detailed book designs.

The image above is not an actual spread, but two separate pages I’ve put together to try to give an idea of the variety in the book.

All in all, this is a treat for fans of Chris Ware, and fans of sketching and sketchbooks in general. This is the second of two volumes, covering the years stated in the title. The first one was composed of sketchbook material from 1986-1995.

There are a few mentions of the first one on the web that include some images from that volume, and a scattering of mentions are begining to appear for Volume Two.

Here are two Acme Novelty Datebook Volume One posts on Book By Its Cover and Read About Comics; and and article from The Comics Reporter on Volume Two.