The children’s book is The Duchess of Whimsey, written by his wife, Randall de Séve, the blog is called A Sketchy Past, the Art of Peter de Séve, and the monograph is titled the same, A Sketchy Past, the Art of Peter de Séve (look for the link to download a beautiful PDF preview of the book under the images in the right hand column; Amazon link here).

More Hoorays: there is an audio interview with De Séve on Sidebar (look for “Click Here” link at bottom of post), a video interview (conducted by Bobby Chiu) on Imaginism Studios; and word has it that there is a tutorial DVD in the works at Massive Black (no direct info yet).

There is also a nice selection of original art for sale on the Arludik Gallery. The site is unfortunately in frames so I can give you a direct link. Click on his image at top left an follow through the work, drawings first, then color works.

De Séve has a sharp, lively style, springy with confident draftsmanship and sparkling with whimsey. He wields it with aplomb across the range of his endeavors. He deftly captures light, movement, expression and energy in his pen and watercolor pieces, and somehow makes it look easy. His solid background in traditional drawing technique serves him well in his imaginative expressions of wild characters and delightfully loopy animals.

The new book, which I haven’t had the chance to pick up yet, has over 200 pages of full color art, and promises to be a first class treat.

Hooray!

He indicates that he drew extensively as a child, but lost interest in drawing for a time and only returned to the practice a few years ago. He began to carry a pen and sketchbook and draw his surroundings, and has since added watercolor to his sketching materials.

Belair says he considers drawing his form of meditation, an escape from the stresses of working, and devotes time to it whenever he can.

His watercolor sketches of city scenes, particularly those of row homes or industrial and commercial structures, are wonderful in their contrasts of texture light and shadow.

He takes on complex scenes as a challenge, working immediately in ink and watercolor, without preliminary pencil sketches, on subjects like metal bridgework and elevated train structures.

He now frequently works in 5×8 watercolor sketchbooks and has posted a Flicker stream of his sketches.

Belair also contributes to Urban Sketchers, which is where I encountered his work.

Personally, I remember being struck by his cover illustrations for the Avon editions of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy.

Punchatz had a versatile range, a solid command of painting technique, and a wild imagination. He particularly excelled at conceptual metaphor, carrying complex ideas through in images that had more than one layer of meaning.

Ray Bradbury said of him: “His ability to touch men with acrylic and melt them into beasts, or touch beasts with oil and ink – and: voila! they are senators or brokers – is endlessly stunning. Metaphor, after all, is the universal language. He could teach at Berlitz!”

In addition to his work as an illustrator, Punchatz was influential on other illustrators in a more direct way. He was one of the few to move away from the New York publishing center, and established a studio in Texas that became the model for several others.

Due to the detailed nature of his style, and the difficulty of creating images on deadline, he hired several assistants, and, according to illustrator and comics artist Gary Panter, who was one of them, ran his studio like a Renaissance workshop. As was also the case with Renaissance workshops, many of his assistants went on to become accomplished artists in their own right.

Punchatz taught illustration and graphic design at Texas Christian University and was a guest instructor at Syracuse University. He was also recognized outside of the illustration field, and his work in in the collections of the Dallas Art Museum and the Smithsonian Portrait Gallery.

Don Ivan Punchatz died of cardiac arrest on October 22nd. Unfortunately, I can’t find a major collection of his work online, but I’ve gathered a few sites below that either have bios or examples of his work.

Many are familiar with Punchatz primarily for his famous cover for the hugely popular game Doom, for which he unfortunately turned down royalties, opting instead for a flat fee. Like many freelance artists, Punchatz was not as strong at business as he might have been.

Also like many freelance illustrators and artists, Punchatz was without medical insurance, and his widow is now facing a mountain of medical bills from his hospitalization. Donations can be made to Sandra Punchatz, c/o Lewis Glaser, TCU School of Art, TCU, Box 298000, Fort Worth TX 76129.

[Suggestion and donation address courtesy of Larry Roibal]

(Any of you Republicans out there want to tell me again why you’re conducting this embarrassingly shameful fight to prevent health care reform in the U.S.?)

Addendum: Despite my comment above, I have suspended comments on this post. I simply don’t have time to admin a continuing political debate, as valuable as lively discussion may be. The original post is about Don Ivan Punchatz, and I have let his son Greg close out the discussion in the comments section. -Charley

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.

It is simultaneously wonderful and frustrating. It’s wonderful, of course, because it features even more of Foster’s elegant, painterly, and superbly accomplished illustrations, old and new; and now includes a terrific section of sketches.

It’s frustrating because it simply doesn’t do justice to how good his paintings are. Size and resolution, as they often are in web galleries, are the limitation here. You can certainly get a taste by browsing through the site, but I have to emphasize that it’s worth seeking out his work in print, as I pointed out before.

Unfortunately, both collections of his work are out of print and commanding high prices used, but if you have copies of the Spectrum collections of fantastic art, you may find some Foster treasures in them (I don’t have a list of the particular volumes).

There is a gallery on the Tor.com site that is much more limited than Foster’s site, but has slightly larger images. There is an audio interview with Foster on Sidebar, part 1 and part 2.

[Via The Art Department]

In a fashion Chris Ware fans have come to expect, the hilarious but subtle cover leads seamlessly into the story, a poignant look at generational and family relations, told in his sublime graphic style.

Ware constructs comics in the way a fine woodworker might construct an inlaid box, crafting each element with refined precision, interlocking elements that might seem unrelated to form a unified whole. Notice the parallels between panels in the second two-page spread, the interweaving of the panel designs with the exterior and interior of the masks and the repeated theme of the phone, carried forward form the cover. Also take note of Ware’s superb control of color and his interesting abandonment of perspective for isometric projection in many panels.

Also note that Ware manages to tell a complete short story in four pages, something many contemporary comics writers can’t seem to do in 6 or more 24-page issues.

Beautiful work.

[Via Daring Fireball]

Inexplicably, it requires that you drill down into Paintings, and then choose a sub-section (summer, spring, etc.) before seeing a color image.

Cornell’s paintings, when you do get to them, are rewardingly fresh and lively, with accomplished but abbreviated notation of the subjects, nicely embodying the strengths of the plein air approach.

Subjects include rocky bluffs, wooded hillsides, muddy fields, formal gardens and placid streams, mostly of places in Wisconsin, Colorado and Missouri, arranged on the site by season.

Cornell’s palette is controlled and understated, to the extent that the bright colors of autumn can be represented in muted tones, lending the images a feeling of quiet refinement. Most are fairly large by contemporary plein air standards, and it’s a little disappointing that there are no larger or detail images provided on the site.

Cornell is also a potter, and apparently represents himself and sells his work through art events rather than gallery representation. He also conducts workshops, sometimes in the company of his father, David M.Cornell, who is also a plein air painter.

Like the more well known and widely distributed Our Friend the Atom, a longer, part live action, part animated, 1957 film from Disney, this was basically an indoctrination for school children as to why atomic power was a Good Idea. As part of an overall campaign to promote acceptance of that idea, they were quite successful.

Both films, Disney’s explicitly, this film implicitly, treat atomic power as an obedient genie, ready to grant our wishes for nuclear powered cruise ships and airplanes, saving lives with isotope based medicine, and, of course, providing the clean, efficient and oh-so-advanced Energy of the Future to power our cities.

In the course of their ad for atomic power, the two films actually manage to teach some basic principles of atomic physics.

A is for Atom in particular is charming and efficient in this. I especially like portrayal of “Element Town” (about 5 minutes in) and the wonderful building representing “Science”.

Though A is for Atom opens with a (somewhat mild) representation of a mushroom cloud; as you might expect, it conveniently dismisses with a few nods to “shadow of the atom bomb” and “men of good will” the fact that hundreds of thousands had died in the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki only 7 years earlier. (For a sobering counterpoint, see my post on Barefoot Gen.)

This was the dawn of the “Atomic Age”, a time of postwar prosperity with the promise of atomic power balanced against the cold war insanity in which school children were drilled to cower under their desks or line up in the halls with their hands over their heads, and enterprising, forward-thinking families were building backyard bomb shelters. (Ah! The shining promise of the future!)

Films like A is for Atom illustrate again the power that cartoons and animation have to explain and educate (and influence), with the strong appeal of moving drawings.

I’m convinced there was more before the beginning scene, which seems abrupt and more like the end of a sentence than an opening statement, but I haven’t found anything to indicate that is the case.

[Link via BoingBoing]

Fouquet was the court painter to Louis XI, and is usually regarded as the most important French painter of his period. He traveled to Italy, where he caused a stir by painting a portrait of Pope Eugenius IV on canvas rather than wood; and brought the influence of Italian art into his own style, combining it with the influences from Jan and Hubert van Eyck, whose styles dominated northern European painting at the time (see my post on Jan van Eyck).

Fouquet painted at least one free-standing portrait, a self portrait on a copper medallion, now in the Louvre, that is the earliest known portrait miniature; and is in contention for the earliest formal self-portrait in Western art, depending on whether Jan van Eyck’s Portrait of a Man is actually a self-portrait (which it likely is).

It is as a miniaturist that I find Fouquet at his most interesting. He produced astonishing “illuminations”, miniature paintings on pages of manuscript, that have an uncanny monumentality and presence, and a surprising feeling of painting styles more common many years after his time. He was particularly known for his miniatures form the Book of Hours by Étienne Chevalier.

The image at top, above (larger version here, click for enlargement and click “100%’ if image doesn’t show), is a manuscript illumination from a history of Julius Ceasar, and portrays his crossing of the Rubicon. The naturalistic feeling and attention lavished on the background convinces me that, were he born a few centuries later, Fouquet might have dedicated himself to landscape. (It’s interesting, though, as accomplished as he is, to see Fouquet apparently struggle a bit with perspective, particularly if you assume the trees to be the same height. Perhaps the confines of the illuminated manuscript made laying out geometric perspective difficult.)

The other image, Virgin and Child Surrounded by Angels, is the right half of a now separated diptych. It caused a stir in later years (and perhaps at the time) for its sensual overtones, and portrayal of the Madonna in fancy and stylish fashions of the time. (Hey Renaissance fair re-enactors, are the noblewomen among you shaving your forehead and temples as part of your period dress?) It has also been suggested that the model for Mary was Agnés Sorel, a famously beautiful woman of the time, further cause for moral outrage. The Madonna is accompanied by some bizarre cherubs, starkly blue and red, except for their glassy eyes, arranged in a pattern reminiscent of one of M.C. Escher’s surface tessellations.

The Bibliothéque nationale de France (the National Library of France, roughly analogous to the Library of Congress for the U.S.) has mounted a virtual exhibition of Fouquet’s work, particularly his manuscript illumination miniatures, titled Fouquet, painter and illuminator of the XVth century, that gives a good introduction, though the images are somewhat small. You can supplement it with some of the other resources I’ve listed below, particularly the Web Gallery of Art.

[Virtual exhibition listing via "Thomas J. Wise" on MetaFilter]

Williamson occupies a unique place in the history of comics, acting as a kind of bridge between the dazzling full page newspaper adventure comics of the early 20th Century (and the traditions of the great 19th Century pen and ink illustrators that they embodied) and the modern comics upheaval and revolutions of the late 20th Century.

At the early stages of his career, Williamson fell smack in the middle, going to work for the notorious EC comics in 1952, where he was the youngster amid legendary comics greats like Frank Frazetta, Roy Krenkel, Wally Wood and others. His striking science fiction work graced the pages and covers of EC titles like Weird Science and Weird Fantasy, and influenced the generations of comic artists who were growing up at the time, goggle-eyed with flashlights under the covers, reading his lavishly illustrated tales of outer space adventures and outlandish monsters.

Prior to his work with EC, Williamson studied with Burne Hogarth, and assisted him on pages for his Tarzan Sunday newspaper strip. Newspaper adventure comics were dying at the time, however, under pressure from other forms of entertainment and economic squeezing from newspaper editors, and what would have seemed Williamson’s natural place became something of a dead end.

Though he worked within the increasingly restrictive format of small daily adventure news paper strips off and on for years, he also moved into comic books, where adventure comics went and morphed into something different in the middle of the century, and he followed them into the latter half of the century, working for the Warren comics magazines (image above, 2nd from top) and Marvel Comics in its heyday, where he was known in particular for his work on a series of Star Wars comics.

All the while he carried forward his love for the great adventure comics, and especially his admiration for the work of Alex Raymond, creator of Flash Gordon, and one of the all time greats of comics art (more on Alex Raymond in a future post).

Williamson had a chance to step into Raymond’s considerably large shoes on several occasions, taking over his spy adventure newspaper strip Secret Agent X-9, which became Secret Agent Corrigan and moved from film-noir to James Bond style adventures (image above, bottom and detail), ably scripted by Archie Goodwin. He also assisted John Prentice, who took the reins of Raymond’s Rip Kirby strip.

Williamson worked on several versions of Raymond’s star character Flash Gordon (image above, top), the strip that had obviously been such and influence on him, from the amazing King Comics version in the 1960’s to the Marvel Comics version in the ’90s (more on Williamson’s Flash Gordon work in a subsequent post).

Unfortunately, though there are scattered resources, I can’t find a major repository of Williamson’s work in the web, so it’s hard to convey the grace os his figures, the elegance of his pen lines, the chiaroscuro drama of his spotted blacks, the dynamics of his compositions or the ground breaking inventiveness of his storytelling and panel layouts. I also can’t lead you directly to great examples of his astonishingly rendered details, applied with a delicate finesse that never leaves the impression of gratuitous unnecessary fiddling, unlike so many lesser artists whose grasp of the use of pen and ink textures will never approach Williamson’s.

The only thing I can supply, apart from those resources I can list, is a hearty recommendation that those of you with any appreciation for great adventure comics art, or graphic stories told with superb draftsmanship and a subtle command of the visual language of the great pen and ink illustrators, who are not yet familiar with Williamson, treat yourself to one of the many printed collections available that feature his work.

There is a recent book collecting some of his short story work, titled Al Williamson Adventures, from Insight Studios (more here). The limited edition hardcover has apparently come and gone, and I’m unsure of the status of the softcover edition (if it’s out, Insight needs to promote it better, I couldn’t even find mention of it on their web site.)

Fortunately, there is a great new collection from Flesk Publications, Al Williamson’s Flash Gordon: A Lifelong Vision of the Heroic. This book is so terrific I’m going to make it the topic of a separate post.