Joseph Zbukvic is a Croation born artist living and working in Melbourne, Australia.

Zbukvic’s atmospheric, emotionally resonant watercolors have a wonderful characteristic of being simultaneously loose and crisp — loose in that he suggests rather than elaborating, and crisp because of his masterful command of edges. He has a highly refined sense of when to define a sharp edge, and when to let an edge disappear into mists of hazy textured color.

His landscapes and cityscapes, often of locations in Europe, are highly evocative of the place, without being rigid in their portrayal of details and specifics. He portrays the kind of visual image we might call up as a memory of a fondly remembered place, both hazy and sharp.

Many of Zbukvic’s paintings are done on location. His palette is often muted and understated, though sometimes punctuated with higher chroma passages. Zbukvick enjoys dwelling on misty atmosphere, rain and overcast shadow, as well as the haze of bright sunlight.

Zbukvick gives highly regarded workshops. This year’s schedule includes dates in France, Spain and Canada as well as Australia. His DVD, Watercolor Impressions, includes scenes from previous workshops; you can see a short excerpt by clicking on the second image on the workshop page.

I also came across this video clip from Inside Joseph Zbukvic’s Sketchbook, related I think to a June, 2008 cover story on him in Watercolor Artist magazine.

In addition to his workshops, Zbukvick also teaches at Charles Sturt University and the Mitchell School of Arts.

Some of the galleries that represent his work have additional galleries in which you will find images not on his site (and/or larger reproductions, particularly the first two listed).

[Suggestion courtesy of Jeroen Coert]

Addendum: Adebanji Alade wrote to let us know about Zbukvic’s book Mastering Atmosphere & Mood in Watercolor: The Critical Ingredients That Turn Paintings into Art. Unfortunately, it is out of print and resellers seem to be asking high prices for it at the moment. Perhaps something to keep an eye out for.

Mattias Adolfsson is a 3D artist living outside of Stockholm, Sweeden and currently working for gaming developer Simbin Development Studios.

Having apparently put aside traditional drawing for a while, Adolfsson returned to regular drawing when he started his sketchblog Mattias Inks, in 2006. Since then he has populated it with a wonderful and fast growing assortment of whimsical drawings on a variety of subjects and themes.

Usually drawing with a Namiki Falcon fountain pen and Noodler’s American Eel ink, and often in the pages of Moleskine sketchbooks, Adolfsson draws charmingly offbeat characters, animals, robots and architectural fantasies, as well as more straightforward sketches of his surroundings.

He often fills out his drawings with watercolor to varying degrees, usually with light touches that leave the feeling of the ink drawing intact.

For someone who has only been drawing recently for a couple of years, Adolfsson has been prolific; his Flickr galleries go on for dozens of pages.

He also has a web site with galleries of his drawings, doodles and sketch books; as well as an Etsy shop in which he sells original art.

One of his excursions into fanciful imaginings is his interpretation of “Star Wars, the baroque version” (expanded page version here), with a curly-wig helmeted Darth Vader, blunderbuss and balloon-pak equipped Bobba Fett, and Han Solo being harassed by the puritan police at the base of his eminently baroque Millennium Falcon (top, left).

I particularly enjoy Adolfsson’s architectural imaginings, like his houseflowers (top, right) and ornate, leaning, single-room-stacked “skyscraper prototypes” (left).

Mattias Adolfsson is giving a workshop in drawing this July 29-31 (more information here, in Swedish); and is currently working on a children’s book titled Till mitt barnbarn.

[Via 'skine art]

I came across the work of Mark Taro Holmes when I was struck by these two watercolor sketches on the Urban Sketchers blog. They were from his participation in the recent Sketchcrawl in San Francisco (see my posts on a previous Sketchcrawl, and here).

I then looked him up and found his sketch blog, SKETCHtaro, which has a wonderful array of his sketches, largely in watercolor or pen and ink, of both landscapes and figures.

His figure drawings have an engaging looseness, within the framework of accomplished draftsmanship. He has an unusual approach, sometimes drawing the figure in line, but multi-colored watercolor line, applied in brushstrokes that vary in weight and translucency as well as color .

His black ink drawings are frequently concerned with shadow and the play of light across architectural details.

Holmes is professionally a gaming concept artist and art director. According to his short bio on ConceptArt.org, he is currently the Studio Art Director at Ensemble Studios, and and has worked on gaming titles like Neverwinter Nights and The Lord of the Rings Online. MobyGames lists some of his other credits here. [Correction: Holmes has moved on from Ensemble and is now doing concept art for the film industry. See this post's comments.]

Urban Sketchers is a group blog that I first wrote about last November.

Since then, hundreds of additional sketches have been added; and the blog’s layout has been updated, with a wider format and better organizatation (though I still wish they would somehow limit the Flickr slideshow widget at page bottom to a single page and make the “Older Posts” link bigger).

Urban Sketchers has kept the tagline of “See the world one drawing at a time”, and continues to a be a source of constant delight, filled with location sketches in a variety of media, size, approach and degree of finish.

There is an increasing list of contributors, as well as an impressively extended list of represented cities and countries from around the world; though much of the content is still provided by a core of frequent contributors, including founder Gabi Campanario. (Sadly, Gabi’s recent sketches have been chronicling the impending demise of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, a terrific newspaper; image above, top right)

Many of the images are linked to larger versions, and most of the contributors have their own blogs and web sites to which you can go for even more sketches and finished work. Some of them are profiled on the Meet the Correspondents page, but others are worth tracking down through links at the bottom of their posts, or looking up via Google.

Updates are frequent and you can check in with Urban Sketchers any day and find fresh new sketches to enjoy and take inspiration from. In fact, it’s sometimes hard to check in frequently enough to keep up with the new posts.

(Images above, left to right: Pete Scully, Gabi Campanario, Tommy Kane, Tis Boon Sim, Roger O’Reilly, Gerard Michel, Stephen Gardner, Maarten Ruijters)

With lots of attention being paid to the inauguration of the new American President today, here’s a set of portrait drawings of the 43 former U.S. presidents by Rick Tuma, a staff artist for the Chicago Tribune. The series is posted as a special feature called Presidential Portraits on the Tribune’s web site.

Tuma painted his series of presidential portraits in ivory black watercolor on bristol board. If you go to his web site and choose “Other Things” at the bottom of the portfolio pages (easy to miss if you don’t know to look for it) you can flip through the thumbnails to the page about the series.

Tuma also does a variety of illustration for the Tribune, from info-graphics to cartooning, and also does freelance work in addition. His online portfolio is divided between watercolor, pencil and digital. (He also apparently collects toys, you can see a QTVR view of his toy-filled work station at the tribune here.)

It’s interesting to see the range of presidents’ faces as portrayed by a single artist. Some of them are of course more interesting as subjects for drawings than others. I’ve selected a couple of the images above for that reason and a couple for relevance to current events.

I just discovered the Urban Sketchers blog a couple of weeks ago, and it immediately became one of my favorites.

I enjoy location sketches done in an urban environment, particularly travel sketches, and the blog has much of that feeling, even though the contributors are often sketching in their home city.

I came across Urban Sketchers by way of Katherine Tyrrell, who is one of the correspondents, and contributes from London (see my post on Katherine Tyrrell).

In addition to Tyrell, contributing artists that I have featured previously on Lines and Colors include Lok Jansen and Laura Frankstone.

Other contributors are from various cities in France, Spain, Italy, Denmark, Norway, Germany, Russia and other locations in Europe; a number of cities in the US, including New York, San Francisco, and Seattle, as well as cities in Canada and other parts of the globe, like Tokyo, Bangkok, Tal-Aviv and Sao Paulo. You can see the contributors listed by location in the side bar.

There is also a Meet the Correspondents page, on which some of the contributors give short profiles of themselves, their subject cities and their sketching practices.

There is a variety of approaches in medium, drawing style and subject matter, though some common themes, like the frequent use of the ubiquitous and oh-so-convenient Moleskine sketchbooks, and a consistently high level of quality.

The blog is an extension of the Urban Sketchers Flickr group started in 2007 by Seattle illustrator/journalist Gabi Campanario.

The subtitle of the blog is “See the world one drawing at a time”, and though the blog has only been up since October, with an “official” launch on November 1st, there is already a world of images posted from the multiple contributors.

Next to traveling and sketching yourself, what better way to see the world than through the eyes and pens of artists?

(Images above, left to right, top to bottom: Alessandro Andreuccetti, Rob Carey, Gabi Campanario, Lok Janssen, Laura Genz, Matthew Cenich)

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!

Addendum: Katherine Tyrell has assembled an amazing Squidoo lens of John Singer Sargent Resources.

It’s brimming with links to articles, bios, online galleries, Flickr photo sets, YouTube videos, Amazon book listings and descriptions, art galleries and museums, exhibition listings, portrait resources, geographical places associated with the artist, drawings and sketches, Del.icio.us bookmarks, and blog posts; including several on her own excellent art blog, Making a Mark, on which she initiated a John Singer Sargent Project to call on her extensive circle of internet contacts to help assemble the material in the course of a month long study of the artist.

Along with the John Singer Sargent Virtual Gallery, the most comprehensive resource on Sargent I’ve seen.

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]