Garlands of fruits, rendered with softly psychedelic colors; twisted networks of wiry limbs and roots, framed by lush tropical plants, luminous in distant mist; topographical cornucopias of formal gardens, resplendent on the surface of a globe, itself set in a magical walled garden; fruit laced bowers sheltering asexual twins; glowing indoor showers of jeweled raindrops; flaming chandeliers hanging from trompe l’oeil ceilings in baroque drawing rooms, an adolescent boy lifting a folded carpet of landscape amid a netting of captured momentos; and a rope mesh dress with flowing skirts made of small game animals and fruits; these are some of the lushly painted items, signs and symbols that make up Julie Heffernan’s “Self Portraits”.

The Illinois born, Brooklyn based artist names many of her works as such, “Self Portrait as Big World”, “Self Portrait as Broken Home”, “Self Portrait as Animal Bed” and “Self Portrait as Fabulous Droppings”; others are part of a sequence with more direct names, “Tender Trapper”, “Boy in Flight” and “Budding Boy”; but the sense of enigma, hidden meaning waiting to be sought out, and the elaborate Baroque meets Magic Realism detail of her compositions is common to all.

Heffernan’s paintings carry echoes of the Early Renaissance, Botecelli, Bruegel and Bosch, along with the more overt stylings of 17th Century Baroque painting and the profusion of shapes, colors and patterns with which the Baroque style gave meaning to our contemporary use of the word.

These are mixed with the dream state juxtapositions of the Surrealists, by which I don’t so much mean Dali and Magriette, as Ernst, Tanning and Tanguy; and the intensely chromatic rendering of contemporary Magic Realism. All of these affections and influences are assembled and woven into a dense and intricate tapestry of styles that becomes uniquely her expression, and by extension, her self portrait within her self portraits.

Heffernan studied at the University of California, Santa Cruz and received her MFA in painting and printmaking at the Yale School of Art and Architecture. She is an Associate Professor of Fine Arts at Montclair State University in Upper Montclair, New Jersey. She delivered this year’s commencement address at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Though the artist doesn’t appear to have a dedicated web presence, you can find her work well represented by several galleries, particularly the P-P-O-W Gallery in New York (also here). There is a post on Escape Into Life that features several works large enough to get a quick overview (more here). There is a brief interview with Heffernan on ArtSlant.

Quoted in an article on Montclair State University Insight Online, Heffernan says she seeks out her imagery in the semi-waking state on the edge of sleep in a process she calls “image streaming”. In this she shares some of the true intentions of the Surrealists, who were most interested in inspiration from dreams and the unconscious mind.

(Painting titles above: “Budding Boy”, “Self Portrait as Big World”, “Boy in Flight”, “Self Portrait as Booty”)

Trompe l’oeil, French for “trick the eye” is an illusionary art technique with a long history in Western art. The intention is to create an optical illusion, in that the viewer is given the impression that there is a three dimensional object or scene before them, not just a realistic image (see some of my posts relevant to trompe l’oeil, in particular my post on Eric Grohe).

California born artist John Pugh paints large scale trompe l’oeil images, usually on the sides of buildings, that reveal impossible, and often amusing, dimensions to an otherwise flat wall.

In his Mana Nalu (power of the wave) Mural Project (image above, top, large version here) in Hawaii, the flat side of a building appears to be deeply concave, and filed with an enormous cresting wave, in which we see a personification of Queen Lili’uokalani. Riding the wave is pioneering surfer Duke Kahanamoku, and standing at the foot of the wave, looking for all the world like real children walking on a ledge in front of the oncoming wall of water, are three painted children.

Pugh likes to give our sensibilities an extra tease at times by including a painted observer in his illusionary scene.

In his Siete Punto Uno in Los Gatos, California (image above, bottom, large version here), a red jacketed woman peers into an apparently earthquake caused break in the wall of a cafe, that reveals a hidden temple of the Mayan Jaguar God (the bringer of earthquakes in their mythology).

Pugh’s web site showcases his mural work, public and residential and corporate. It also includes a page of “mural mishap” accounts, in which the illusion of the murals has prompted amusing responses from people, such as patrons in a bar who break glasses trying to set them on trompe l’oeil “shelf”, or people who walk into walls trying to walk “into” his paintings, a la Road Runner cartoons.

In addition to his site, Pugh maintains a site for prints and mural posters that also has galleries of images.

[Via Daily Mail Online]

This depiction of the Nativity by Petrus Christus (large version here) strikes me as one of the more interesting and unusual interpretations of the event.

We view the scene through a framing trompe l’oeil arch, likely inspired by the influence of Rogier van der Wyden’s similar compositions, such as his Miraflores Altarpiece (and interesting to compare to this “framed” walk-through composition by Antonello da Messina). The arch portrays a series of Biblical events, including stories from Genesis, and places the current event in the context of fall and redemption.

The figures, including four seemingly disinterested onlookers behind the ruined stable wall, are dressed in contemporary Flemish costume, and are viewed against a Flemish town, albeit with domed structures from Bethlehem and set amid rolling hills that might be neither location.

The event is attended by four angels, presented about one third human size, with strikingly bird-like wings, and dressed as sub-ministers of a 15th Century Northern European Mass.

The baby Jesus lies doll-like on the ground in the folds of Mary’s garments, central to everyone’s gaze, but otherwise not emphasized by the composition.

It’s interesting to compare the painting with Christus’ earlier versions of the Nativity and Annunciation here, here and here.

Petrus Christus was associated with early oil painting master Jan van Eyck, and may have succeeded him as master of his studio when he died in 1441. There is discussion, however, about whether he was actually Van Eyck’s student, as he shows as much influence from painters like Robert Campin and Rogier van der Weyden.

This painting of the Nativity is in the collection of the National Gallery in Washington.

Andrea Mantegna was an influential Itallian Renaissance painter and engraver who was noted for his monumental, almost sculptural, figures, his command of perspective and his unusual, often visceral, portrayals of Biblical events.

Mantegna was apprenticed at the age of 10 to Francesco Squarcione, who also legally adopted him. At the age of 17, he had advanced far enough to establish his own studio and declare his independence from Squarcione, who he accused of exploiting his abilities.

Roman sculpture was being collected in Padua during Mantegna’s time there, and the influence of those sculptors, as well as contemporary sculptors like Donatello, is evident in the sculptural (some would say stiff) qualities of his figures.

Mantegna married Nicolosia Bellini, daughter of Jacopo Bellini, one of the key figures in early Renaissance art, and brother of painters Gentile and Giovanni Bellini. Mantegna had a working relationship with Giovanni, and you can see the influence of his masterful command of landsacpe in the rocky intricate detail of the landscapes in Mantegna’s Biblical scenes (see my post on Giovanni Bellini).

Mantegna worked on monumental sized works as well as smaller, more intimate works, and was fascinated with experimental perspective and elements of architecture.

One of his most renowned pieces is La Camera degli Sposi (The Wedding Chamber) of the Mantua Palazzo; a “camera picta” (painted room), covered with illusionistic frescoes. This included his famous example of “di sotto in sú”, or illusionistic ceiling painting, depicting a false oculus in the ceiling, through which cherubs, servants and a peacock lean over a balustrade, peering down at the viewer; rendered in trompe l’oeil realism and dramatically foreshortened perspective (image above, top); the first example of this kind of ceiling effect. I love the underside of the seemingly precariously placed urn and the cherubs poking their heads through the balustrade. The perspective rendering of the geometric elements of the balustrade is astonishing.

One of his other works that incorporated illusionistic perspective and his fascination with architectural elements is his striking grand altar-piece for the Basillica di San Zeno in Verona (supposedly the setting for the marriage of Romeo and Juliet in Shakespeare’s play). Mantegna’s work for this featured a polyptych (multiple paneled painting) depicting Mary and Child in the central panel, flanked by scenes of disciples and saints, with scenes below of the prayer at the Mount of Olives, the Crucifixion and the Resurrection (image above, middle and bottom).

The upper panels, in particular, break the paradigm of such altarpieces in that the top three scenes, though depicting separate events, are joined into one by a common background. The architectural elements are rendered in dramatic perspective and with great attention to realistic texture, an effect heightened by trompe l’oeil garlands of fruit seeming to hang between the actual carved pillars on the face of the altarpiece.

Mantegna has pulled out the stops here, and used the almost magical ability of the newly popular medium of oil paint to render his subjects with extraordinary detail.

He continued to render his paintings in this kind of canvas-wide pinpoint focus, even as Leonardo and Giovanni Bellini began to move Renaissance painting toward more atmospheric effects of tonal color and sfumato.

The Louvre in Paris, which has the largest collection of Mantegna’s works outside of Italy, has mounted a major retrospective of his work. Simply titled Mantegna (1431-1506), the show contains over 190 works and and runs until January 5, 2009.

[Exhibition link via Art Knowledge News]

I’ve written before about the illusionistic 3-D sidewalk “paintings” in chalk by artists like Kurt Wenner and Julian Beever, as well as the large scale illusionistic murals by Eric Grohe.

Web Urbanist has posted a nice overview, Amazing 3D Art from the Best Street Artists, with a selection of work by Wenner (image above), Beever, and others; including Edgar Muller and Manfred Stader, Tracy Lee Stum, Eduardo Relero, Rod Tryon and Anthony Cappetto, giving you a quick look at some highlights of this apparently growing phenomenon. It also features muralists like Grohe and Greg Brown, and even a 3-D graffiti artist known as Diam.

Some of the pavement chalk art takes the form of large scale reproductions of famous works by artists like Da Vinci, Vermeer, Rembrandt and others.

Much of the work that has made this a phenomenon is based on anamorphoses, images that are distorted in such a way that they only look “right” form a certain vantage point. The limitation is a trade off for the illusionistic power the images can have to appear three dimensional when seen from that viewpoint. You can see an example of how this works here.

Anamorphosis has been used in art for centuries; you can see a particularly striking example of it in Hans Holbien the Younger’s famous double portrait The Ambassadors, which contains the anamorphic apparition of a skull.

The new urban sidewalk artists have used this approach to create images of objects and environments that, when viewed from the correct vantage point, appear to extend above or below the pavement on which they are painted.

Wenner has gotten new, upscale website since I wrote about him, casting himself as available for corporate commissions and highlighting his architectural designs. Beever is still coasting along like a street artist, with a homemade looking, 90’s style site, but he has added additional images.

Wenner’s site includes some videos of him working, and there are some others on YouTube of a short documentary, Masterpieces in Chalk.

If you look around, you’ll find a few not covered in the Urbanist article, like Cuong Nguyen.

Muralists like Grohe or Brown are in the long artistic tradition of “trompe l’oeil” (French for “trick the eye”), in which artists have created images that appear to have dimensionality beyond the surface on which they are painted, relying less on anamorphosis and more on realism. This tradition includes some of the fantastic dome paintings in which the vault of heaven, filled with angels and religious figures floating in apparent disregard for gravity, is projected on the interior of a dome.

Of course, if you step back and think about it, the modernists were right; all representational art is an illusion.

It’s interesting that in the great body of art throughout history that has been inspired by Christianity, or commissioned directly by the various expressions of the Christian church, the resurrection of Christ, the event that is the basis of the important observance of Easter, doesn’t seem to be one of the more common subjects for paintings.

While it understandably doesn’t embody the drama or emotional impact of the crucifixion, it seems less frequently depicted than many less important or dramatic events from the Bible that are often the subject of paintings, statuary or altarpieces.

I’m not certain why; there are some depictions of the resurrection that have plenty of visual impact, like Albrecht Altdorfer’s stormy scene and Matthias Grünewald’s stunningly intense vision in his Isenheim Alterpiece.

Perhaps it’s just my perception. I haven’t attempted an actual count, and there is a pretty long list of resurrection artwork on this site. It may just be that those paintings are not the ones most noticed or remembered.

Here is one to add to the list, though, a fascinating painting by an early master of technique of oil painting, Rogier van der Weyden. It is the right panel of his Miraflores Altarpiece (image above with detail, right and bottom).

This is an extraordinarily elaborate and detailed work, in which Van der Weyden is taking advantage of the ability of oil painting to execute intricate details and carry color in layers of translucent glazes.

This is actually a double scene, depicting two separate events in one image. Our eye moves from the decorative elements on the trompe l’oeil arches into the interior scene, painstakingly constructed in linear perspective, with Christ having arisen and gone immediately to his mother.

From there we move into the background of the painting, and also travel into the immediate past, to the scene of the resurrection, rendered with carefully painted atmospheric perspective. (It’s interesting to note that in work by the early masters of oil painting, there is an understanding of the color shifts and value changes in atmospheric perspective, but distant background elements are often rendered with the same fanatical detail as foreground elements.) The two scenes, and two events in time, are connected by a winding path in the middle ground.

Like Antonello da Messina’s remarkable St. Jerome in his Study, we are invited to journey into and through the painting, and in this case, through time as well.

OK all you conspiracy buffs and fans of The Da Vinci Code, here’s your chance to get all up close and personal with the master’s famous fresco from the comfort of your computer chair.

The folks at Haltadefinizione, who previously posted zoomable ultra-high resolution images of Gaudenzio Ferrari’s wonderfully intricate Vita di Cristo, and Andrea Pozzo’s amazing trompe l’oeil vault, Gloria di Sant’Ignazio, at 8.6 and 9.8 gigapixels respectively, have posted a new 16 (count ‘em!) gigapixel image of Da Vinci’s The Last Supper.

To give you some idea, that’s 1,600 times higher resolution than a typical 10 megapixel digital camera. You can get down to the level of examining individual chips of plaster if you want, but you’ll probably want to stay out at about 6-10% of the potential magnification just to be able to see recognizable parts of the image.

Actually, I find the hi-res version of Pozzo’s ceiling more rewarding to explore this way, flying in and out through his imaginary sky. The controls allow you to immediately turn off the inexplicable music, zoom and scroll, and even tuck the smaller preview window out of the way.

The da Vinci image is unfortunately watermarked, but it’s still fascinating to be able to see it up close. The curator points out: “You can see how Leonardo made the cups transparent, something you can’t ordinarily see.”

Intended to make examination of the painting possible for numerous scholars, particularly amid some controversy about Milan’s ability to protect the work, which has deteriorated seriously, from the city’s severe pollution problem, the image has been made available to the public, and you can zoom, scroll and examine to your heart’s content.

Leonardo reportedly used some experimental techniques in the painting, diverging from the traditional methods of fresco that have made it one of the most durable painting methods known to mankind, with unfortunate results.

For those interested in the pop-culture phenomenon of the Dan Brown’s book and the atrendant movie, you can zoom in on the figure to Christ’s right and see that it is pretty easy to interpret it as feminine. Also, if you print the image out on a vinyl disc and play it backwards on a phonograph, it says “I buried Paul…”.

[Link courtesy of Karl Kofoed]

Active in the mid-15th Century, Cosmé Tura (AKA Cosimo Tura, AKA Cosimo di Domenico di Bonaventura) was an Italian painter of the early Renaissance.

Tura was born in Ferrara, in north-central Italy, on the road between Venice and Florence. Though not as commonly mentioned as the other major centers of the Renaissance, Ferrara was home at one time or another to such notable artists as Andrea Mantegna, Giovanni Bellini, Pisanello and Titian.

Of them, Tura was certainly possessed of one of the most unique visions and styles of painting. His figures are cut with precise edges into high relief, glowing with with bold, high-chroma colors, intensified by the use of adjacent compliments (e.g. greens and reds), and are frequently set within wildly stylized architectural elements and deep, sometimes forced, perspective.

Plus the guy was just downright weird at times. I mean check out those copper “dolphins” adorning he throne of our muse above; where did those come from?

The painting above (large version here), was painted around 1460 and has been alternately called “Spring”, “The Muse”, “Erato”, and “Calliope”. (Often the original titles of old master paintings, if indeed they had titles, are lost to us; and scholars and collectors provide their own names over the years.)

The original is currently in the National Gallery in London, which has an image (unfortunately watermarked) with a zoom feature.

This piece was probably part of a richly decorated room, no longer in existence, created for the d’Este family; which is assumed to have had several paintings of these “muses”. Tura also did murals and other works with mythological and secular themes, as well as religious works including a painting of the Annunciation, complete with nesting doves and an attendant squirrel, on the organ doors for the Duomo.

There are some books available about Tura and his milieu, like Cosme Tura: The Life and Art of a Painter in Estense Ferrara by Joseph Manca and Cosme Tura of Ferrara: Style, Politics, and the Renaissance City, 1450-1495 by Stephen Campbell, though they are on the expensive side and I haven’t personally seen them.

Like many artists of his time, Tura painted in both egg tempera and the exciting new medium of oil paint, which had been introduced to Italy by northern painters like Rogier van der Weyden. In this case Tura has painted this work in oil over top of a previous, somewhat different image in tempera on the same wooden panel.

Some of his religious works are just as striking as this one. Look at his painting of the Madonna Enthroned, with it’s trompe l’oeil arch, wild architectural constructions, punched up colors and oddly languorous figures (larger but color shifted version here). Take a look at the intricately carved figures and weird details on the alcove/pedestal/throne or whatever it is behind the Madonna, including hanging grapes, winged lions, urns with faces and that bird-thing at the top with a human-looking head. Say what?

In the image at top, the plants, low retaining walls, benches and sidewalk are real. Everything else, the stone structures with their carvings and decorative elements, the ironwork bridge and the entire city street and sky behind them, are an image painted on a flat wall.

The decoration of walls with murals, both exterior and interior, is well thought of when considering the great muralists of the past, but often not appreciated in artistic circles when performed by contemporary artists.

Many cities have public mural programs, both to discourage grafitti and to beautify otherwise drab buildings and blank walls. (There is a prominent mural program here in Philadelphia.) Usually, however, these are conducted by teams of neighborhood volunteers under the guidance of artists who are often professionals, but seldom professional muralists.

Eric Grohe is a dedicated muralist, and paints murals of a different scope and intensity. In the course of a career as an illustrator and graphic designer, Grohe was asked to design graphics for Expo ‘74 in Spokane, Washington. This and subsequent commissions led him to devote himself to the creation of large scale trompe l’oeil (”fool the eye”) murals on public buildings, corporate architecture and occasionally private residences.

His commissioned murals are often in, and simultaneously of, public spaces. Great American Crossroad (image above, top), depicts a historic view of the town and helped transform an empty parking lot and blank wall into a vital civic space in Bucyrus, Ohio. You can see the wall’s former state just below and to the right.

Under that is the wall of a shopping mall in Niagra, New York, transformed into a dramatic series of arches framing a trompe l’oeil view of the famous falls and river.

Grohe’s murals often include painted people within the architectural spaces he creates, and in photographs it’s sometimes difficult to tell them from real observers, like the two standing in front of the view of the Niagra river in the detail above, middle left. They are the ones casting shadows on the sidewalk. The kid sneaking a peak around the trompe l’oeil column, and the other “tourists” are painted. All of the figures in the long view at bottom are painted.

Somehow, when looking at these illusionary spaces painted at street level, I can’t help but think of those hilarious Chuck Jones Warner Brothers’ cartoons, in which the Road Runner would paint an image of a road or tunnel on a rock face and run into it, leaving the hapless Coyote with a hard lesson in trompe l’oeil painting and Newtonian physics.

Grohe has a firm now, specializing in the creation of large scale murals, and utilizes special type of paint developed in the 19th Century called Keim Mineral Paint (more info here), that changes its chemical structure in such a way that it will not fade or peel like ordinary paints.

There is a gallery of work on his site. Most of the projects feature several views so you can see the “before” state of the surface and also get a feeling for the scope and ingenious false perspective of the finished work.

There is also a post here with some of the views posted on a single page from which you can get a quick overview.

Link via Digg

Among his other talents, Kurt Wenner is a “street painter”, an artist who does highly rendered “paintings” in colored chalk on public sidewalks, usually with a fairly high degree of draughtsmanship and most often in European cities. (American cities are usually too up-tight to allow “art” on the sidewalk, even temporarily; advertising maybe, but not art.)

For more on this fascinating practice, see my post from last fall on its other notable proponent, Julian Beever.

As with Beever, Wenner’s street paintings sometimes take the form of straightforward classical or original images rendered on the pavement. The most intriguing sidewalk images, however, are anamorphic; distorted in a way that, when viewed from a certain angle, produces a dramatic illusion of 3-dimensionality.

Wenner’s site doesn’t demonstrate it, but you can see an excellent example of how this works on these two pages from Beever’s site: the illusionistic view, and the anamorphic image from another angle.

With Beever, (who plays the pop art counterpart to Wenner’s classical approach), it is often the illusion of a 3-dimensional object on or above the plane of the pavement. Occasionally he projects depth below.

Wenner, however, prefers the illusion of depth below the pavement and creates spectacular images of ornately decorated structures that appear to be sunken into the sidewalk. Many of his painting sessions also take on the flavor of public events.

Wenner is certainly the more classically proficient draughtsman of the two and his images often carry the feeling of the classical trompe l’oeil techniques, used to add the illusion of ornate decoration to plain architectural elements, that were popular in the Baroque period. In fact, Wenner himself does this for clients and you can see a rather striking example of it here.

Wenner also does traditional painting, sculpture and decorative relief, as well as designing fanciful architecture. He used to be a scientific space illustrator for NASA(!). There is also a gallery of his street painting at Snopes.com.

Link via John Nack on Adobe.