John Watkiss has created visual development art for films like Disney’s Tarzan, Treasure Planet, Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Fantasia 2000, Skycaptain and the World of Tomorrow and the proposed Sandman. In his movie related career he has done work for Twentieth Century Fox, Dreamworks, Francis Ford Coppola and Ridley Scott Associates.

Watkiss has also had a career as a comic book artist, doing covers and interiors for D.C., Marvel and UK publishers on titles like Batman, Conan, Deadman and Sandman.

If that isn’t enough, Watkiss also is a gallery artist. His subjects are frequently images of women painted in a modern style but in costume and compositions influenced by Victorian painting.

You can see a mixture of his film development and gallery work on his blog, though not much of the work for comics. There are unofficial galleries of his comics work on ComicArtFans and Comic Art Community.

On his blog, there are some visual development paintings for a prospective Sandman movie on this page. Despite the huge red “SOLD” across some of them, clicking on them still takes you to viewable images (image above, bottom).

Watkiss has taught anatomy and other art subjects at Royal College of Art in London, as well as other schools. He is the author of several books on anatomy. These don’t seem to be available through the usual online bookstores, but can be ordered directly from the sidebar of Watkiss’ blog. Watkiss has a drawing approach that combines fluid linework with strong underlying geometry, reminiscent of George Bridgeman or Andrew Loomis. Students of figure construction may see a similarity to Burne Hogarth as well.

The books had a dedicated site at one time, and there was also a site devoted to his gallery art, but he seems to have dropped those in favor of the bog.

There is still a site dedicated to his gallery art, a different one, The Works of John Watkiss at seventhsealproductions.com, I don’t know if it is directly connected to Watkiss or not. Here you will find his Pre-Raphaelite influenced paintings of women in (and out of) classical gowns and idyllic settings. These are my favorites of his, in which subjects and styles we are used to seeing rendered with a high degree of finish are given a lighter, more gestural approach.

There is a YouTube video of a “Levi’s spec ad featuring John Watkiss” that Marcel Duchamp fans in particular may find amusing.

A new solo exhibition of Watkiss’ work from all three aspects of his career opens on August 2nd and runs to August 10, 2008 at Gallery Nucleus in Alhambra, California.

The Blanton Museum of Art, part of the University of Texas at Austin, is currently showing Exquisite Visions of Japan, which is an exhibition of Japanese woodblock prints from the James A. Michener Collection of the Honolulu Academy of Arts.

Though the online image gallery on the museum’s site is minimal, it provides a nice jumping off point for revisiting some of the extraordinary Japanese woodblock print artists I’ve written about before, including Hiroshi Yoshida, Kawase Hasui, Katsushika Hokusai and Ito Shinsui; as well as looking for links for some artists I have not yet written about, like Utagawa Hiroshige, Hiratsuka Unichi, Okumura Masanobu, Katsukawa Shunsho and Kitagawa Utamaro.

Many of these artists are associated with the genre known as Ukiyo-e, or pictures of the “floating world”. (As I mentioned in my post on a recent exhibit of work from the Utagawa School at the Brooklyn Museum, the “floating world” is not what you might think on first hearing the term.) Others are associated with the “shin hanga” or “new print” movement.

These artists were tremendously influential on European artists in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, particularly the Impressionists and others like Whistler.

Unfortunately, my knowledge of the history and relationship of these artists and their times is frustratingly minimal. You will also have to forgive me if I am inconsistent in the order in which I use the artist’s family and given names, as this varies in listings and the naming conventions are unfamiliar enough that I’m never quite clear about which is which.

I do know that some of these works are among the most beautiful prints I’ve ever encountered. Particular favorites of mine are those of Hiroshi Yoshida and Kawase Hasui.

(Image above: Okumura Masanobu, Utagawa Hiroshige, Hiroshi Yoshida)

[Link via Art Knowledge News]

Shino Arihara’s often deceptively simple illustrations are usually in service of a concept, illustrating not only a particular article or story, but the underlying idea.

However, as is often the case for me when viewing the work of illustrators, I find some of her most interesting work is among her personal pieces, unrestrained by the demands of publishing.

Arihara’s illustrations appear to be painted in gouache. Her brief bio page doesn’t mention anything about technique or medium. It does tell us, however, that her clients include L.A. Weekly, The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal and Time Magazine, among others.

Her work has been included in American Illustration, Spectrum and illustration annuals for Communications Arts, which also featured an interview with her in the October, 2007 issue. She is also the recipient of a Bronze Medal from the Society of Illustrators.

In addition to her editorial work, Arihara has illustrated books like Ceci Ann’s Day of Why by Christopher Phillips, and A Song for Cambodia by Michelle Lord.

One of the characteristics of her work that I find most appealing is her use of the texture of the paint as a pictorial element, particularly in backgrounds or large areas of color in which the paint not only keeps, but emphatically declares, its identity as paint, without losing its role in conveying the image.

Arihara often keeps her palette restrained, choosing muted, neutralized colors accented by stronger hued passages and enlivened with those wonderful paint textures.

For those who would like a little exposure for their comics in the Philadelphia area, Philadelphia City Paper has posted an open invitation for cartoonists and illustrators to submit their comics for the weekly paper’s Second Annual Comics Issue.

All submissions will be posted on the paper’s web site, and editors picks will be published in the August 14th issue.

As their little bit of self-deprecating humor points out, they get free comics and you get “exposure”. Take it as you will.

Artists can submit Quarter Pages (4.875 x 4.875) or Half Pages (9.875 x 4.875) to:
comicsissue@citypaper.net
OR
Patrick Rapa
123 Chestnut Street, 3rd Floor
Philadelphia, PA 19106

The deadline is August 6th.

Minnesota artist Jeffrey Larson studied at the Atelier Lack, now simply called The Atelier, an academic studio program founded by Richard F. Lack (who will be the subject of a future post if I can ever find enough examples of his work online). Lack was a student of R.H. Ives Gammell and one of the pioneers of returning the now-thriving European atelier style system of art instruction to viability here in the U.S.

Larson’s atelier training is most evident in his still life paintings, which have the refined clarity and precision of academic realism, but keep a painterly edge.

His figures, in contrast, are much looser, usually painted out of doors, and often posed in water or amid washlines full of sunlit sheets, bringing to mind the posed in water figures of Anders Zorn and the sun-drenced paintings of beach-goers by Joaquin Sorolla.

My favorites of Larson’s paintings, though, are his landscapes (bearing in mind that most of his figurative paintings are also landscapes in effect). These force me to resort to those overused terms “fresh” and “immediate” because nothing else sums them up quite as succinctly.

His landscapes evoke the dappled sunlight on an intimate creek or the cool haze of a winter sky with beautifully efficient brush strokes and a subtle handling of color variation. He’s chosen a position on the spectrum of tight to loose rendering that I find particularly appealing.

Something I found of special interest in Larson’s work is they way he constructs the image with the direction and shape of his brushstrokes. He isn’t just dabbing color in, filling in shapes with slapdash blots of paint, he’s drawing with his brushstrokes, defining the shapes of objects in same way lines and textures applied in a drawing can follow and define the form. (This is a characteristic I particularly associate with painters like Sargent or Cecilia Beaux.)

I’m also fascinated by the apparent difference in approach between Larson’s loose landscape and figurative work and his more tightly rendered still life paintings. There is no indication of dates for the work on his site, so perhaps the still life paintings are earlier; or perhaps Larson just enjoys applying the range of his considerable abilities in a different manner for those subjects.

Larson was featured in articles in Classical Realism Journal in 2001 and American Artist in 2004 (the latter as a cover story).

Addendum: Reader A.W.C. (see this post’s comments) was kind enough to write and let us know that there is currently a solo exhibition of Jeffrey Larson’s work at Tree’s Place Gallery in Orleans, Massashusetts. In addition to an online catalog, which features several images of his work, there is a multi-page gallery of images that can be enlarged by clicking on the thumbnails.

This it the original post on Jeffrey T. Larson, in which I made a typo in his name in the title the post.

I’m leaving it in place because changing the title changes the link to the post, and this post has been linked to from BoingBoing (thanks, Mark!).

The full post is now here.

I’m certain I will have a typo on my gravestone, probably a reference to the one that puts me under it.

Tor Books is a publishing house that specializes in science fiction and fantasy titles. I should probably say outstanding science fiction and fantasy titles; Tor has won the Locus Magazine poll for best science fiction publisher every year for the last 20 years.

Tor also publishes some of the very best science fiction and fantasy illustration, which is to say some of the best contemporary illustration, period. I’ve noticed in recent years, more and more mainstream illustrators moving into the this field, and more of them turning up each year in the Spectrum collections of contemporary fantastic art.

The superb choices of illustrators, and the art direction that aligns them in in fine tuned harmony with the stories they are illustrating, is the work of Tor’s insightful art director, Irene Gallo (see my previous post on Irene Gallo and her blog The Art Department). Gallo has been the art director at Tor since 1992.

Tor books has just launched a new web site at tor.com, and it has immediately become one of the best destination sites for science fiction and fantasy on the web.

In addition to the fascinating blog, and the stories you can read online (soon to include a graphic story, The Leviathan by Wesley Allsbrook), the new Tor web site includes a feature of particular interest to Lines and Colors readers, a gallery of some of their terrific illustrators.

There is a Featured Artist, currently Craig Phillips, and a roster of some of the field’s best illustrators, each with a gallery of representative work.

The list includes many illustrators I’ve featured here on Lines and Colors, including Craig Phillips, Scott Altmann, Christian Alzmann, Patrick Arrasmith, Daren Bader, Volkan Baga, David Bowers, Aleksi Briclot, Brom, Kinuko Y. Craft, Brian Despain, Bob Eggleton, Craig Elliot and Jon Foster, as well as many others that I haven’t covered who are sure to be the subject of future posts.

It’s an impressive showing and, as of this writing, they are apparently only up to the “F’s” in filling out the gallery.

Despite a few little post-launch glitches (missing thumbnails in some of the galleries) this is a fantastic collection of fantastic art, and even in its initial stages, already one of the best on the web.

The only downside I can possibly see is that that the Tor blog may distract Irene Gallo from her regular posting on The Art Department. While her posts on the Tor blog would be as interesting and informative, it’s nice to have them in one place, undiluted by other topics.

Though there may be larger repositories of science fiction and fantasy art on the web, you would be hard pressed to find a more concentrated sampling of the best the field has to offer (up to the “F’s”, that is).

(Image above, left to right: Patrick Arrasmith, Jon Foster, Christian Alzmann, Daren Bader, Brom, Brian Despain, Bob Eggleton, Aleksi Briclot, David Bowers)

Correction: Don Dos Santos was kind enough to write an let me know that there are, in fact, links to the other alphabetically arranged sections of the gallery. I specifically looked for links to additional pages at the top and bottom of the column of thumbnails, but they are off to the left in the heading area, which graphically seems to be a separate element from the thumbnail column.

Of course, that also extends the list of artists in the Tor galleries that I have previously written posts about on Lines and Colors (and I actually surprised myself on this one): Marc Gabbana, Donato Giancola, James Gurney, Stephen Hickman, James Jean, Tom Kidd, Todd Lockwood, Gregory Manchess, Daryl Mandryk, Stephen Martiniere, David Mattingly, Chris Moore, Lawrence Northey, John Jude Palencar, John Picacio, Alan Pollack, Omar Ryyan, Adam Rex, Robh Ruppel, Don Dos Santos, Sparth, Raymond Swanland, Greg Swearingen, Shaun Tan, Keith Thompson, Francis Tsai, Dice Tsutsumi, Christophe Vacher and Sam Weber.

PJ Lynch is an Irish illustrator currently living in Dublin. His award winning illustrations have appeared in numerous books, illustrating both modern stories and new versions of classics.

Lynch has also been commissioned to design posters for Opera Ireland and the Abbey Theatre, created murals for the Cavan County Library based on Gulliver’s Travels and designed stamps for the Irish postal service.

You can see some of the latter in a recent post on his blog, on which he also links to his 6 step by step painting videos on YouTube. You will also find some of his gallery paintings.

There is also a step by step article on the creation of his cover for The Gift of the Magi on Scamp, the Irish illustration blog.

For his illustrations, Lynch works primarily in watercolor. At times his illustrations can be evocative of classic illustrators like Arthur Rackham or Edmund Dulac, at other times they have a modern feeling; Lynch adopts his stylistic approach to the service of best illustrating the story.

Throughout, there is careful attention to the role of light, particularly the muted light of overcast days or candlelit interiors, and a masterful handling of textures and suggestions of the tactile surfaces of things.

Lynch has that quality evident in the best illustrators of understanding the theatrical application of his compositional elements; his lighting, color and textures are not just creating an image, they are also telling a story.

His gallery of book illustrations will take you through a series of covers, from which you can click to see images from the individual title. There are several pages of thumbnails, and a number of books. (Don’t miss his wonderful interpretation of Dicken’s A Christmas Carol toward the back.)

Lynch’s six (to date) step by step painting videos are short, nicely done and fascinating. They are simple, but gracefully timed and well photographed. They take you through his process from initial sketch to finished painting with just enough steps to get a good feeling for his watercolor or oil technique.

I was particularly fascinated by his video showing him painting the portrait of a young boy in a baseball cap, based on a photograph and inspired by his study of Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring (which he titles The Boy with the Blue Baseball Cap: I am not Vermeer!).

[Suggestion and links courtesy of James Gurney]

You will often hear the phrase “big shoes to fill” applied to the task of filling a role formerly held by someone whose accomplishments were significant and difficult to achieve.

Illustrator and comics artist Gary Gianni put on some big shoes when he stepped into the role of illustrator for Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant newspaper comic strip.

Hal Foster (who will certainly be the subject of a future lines and colors post) was one of the three or four greatest newspaper comics artists in the history of the medium; and, to my mind, should be on the list of all time best pen and ink artists.

Gianni took over the illustration chores on the strip from John Cullen Murphy, who was Foster’s assistant, and had taken the reins on the strip when Foster retired in 1970.

Gianni’s previous work included illustrations for versions of classics like Moby Dick and Kidnapped, and he created graphic novel versions of Tales of O. Henry and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. He also worked for mainstream American comic book companies on titles like Indiana Jones and The Shrine Of The Sea Devil, Batman: Black and White (for which his story won an Eisner Award in 1997) and The Monstermen Mysteries, which ran as a backup feature for Mike Mignola’s Hellboy.

The Prince Valiant Page is a new book from Flesk Publications (see my previous posts on Flesk Publications) that showcases Gianni’s work on the strip, and also offers a glimpse into his background.

The book is written by Gianni, and offers an insightful look into his working process, and his collaboration with Mark Schultz, a terrific artist himself, who handles the writing on the current strip.

Gianni talks about his admiration for Foster, as well as other great pen and ink artists like Joseph Clement Coll and Franklin Booth, an admiration that is evident in his refined ink drawing style.

In the process of describing how a modern Prince Valiant page is created, including the use of models and reference, we get to see a number of pages of Gianni’s pencil drawings before they were inked. These, though not meant as finished art, have a wonderful tonal quality that is very different from the final ink drawings.

I have to admit that I didn’t have a proper appreciation for Gianni’s work prior to seeing this volume; partly because I had not seen much of his other illustration and comics work except in scattered examples, and partly because of the terrible job that modern newspapers do of presenting their comics.

One of the things that newspapers do to render their comic strips ineffectual, particularly those few remaining adventure strips, is to print them too small to allow for any real visual excitement. The original Prince Valiant pages, like those of Little Nemo in Slumberland and many other comic strips in the early 20th Century, were sized to full newspaper pages. (See my post on Winsor McCay.)

As time went on, and the role of newspaper comics as one of the major forms of home entertainment was superseded by movies and then television, newspaper editors (or more likely, owners and accountants) continually reduced the size of newspaper comics. In an age where home video screens and computer monitors keep getting bigger and bigger, this is a trend that, if continued, will eventually result in microscopic panels; which will undoubtedly help in the efforts of newspapers to remove all entertaining content as their circulation drops.

Prince Valiant is now down to 1/5th of a page at most in the newspapers, but several of the Gianni & Schultz strips are printed in the book as fold-out pages, doubling the book’s 9×12″ (23×30cm) size; nice and big, though still far short of a full newspaper page. It’s enough to let Gianni’s work shine, and make you wish for a volume of the strips at this size.

There is a collection of the Gianni & Schultz strips, Prince Valiant: Far From Camelot due in the (presumably near) future, but the Amazon pre-publication listing doesn’t include that book’s dimensions.

You can see a recent Prince Valiant strip on the King Features site, but you apparently can’t see the current one, or search the archives, without getting a membership of some kind, in an effort to… well, I don’t know why; I guess as part of the continuing effort on the part of newspapers and syndicates to discourage reader interest.

In the meanwhile, we have this beautiful volume to appreciate Gianni’s work. The Prince Valiant Page can be ordered directly from Flesk Publications in either hardback or limited edition signed, slipcase hardback. The book includes a foreword by Hellboy’s Mike Mignola and an introduction by Robert Wagner, who played the character in the 1954 Cinemascope movie.

Flesk has done their usual superb job of showcasing the art, jamming the book cover-to-cover with wonderful examples and using the highest production values. It certainly makes you wish newspapers would treat their comics with half as much respect.

Gianni and Schultz continue their work on the Prince Valiant weekly strip, trying to give us a taste of the former glory of newspaper adventure strips within the restricted confines of their 1/5th of a page.

It’s a valiant effort.

Sir Alfred James Munnings is best known as an equestrian artist. His beautifully rendered images of race horses bring high prices at auction and are the subject of popular posters and reproductions.

In his early career, however, he was a plein air painter, whose subjects were as varied as the English countryside, and whose artistic sensibilities were informed by Constable, John Sell Cotman, and in particular the animal paintings of George Stubbs. He was also, evidentially, influenced by Impressionism, as his paintings are remarkably loose, filled with free brushstrokes, and a marvelous mixture of refined passages and great chunks and blobs of paint.

In 1892, at the age of 14 he apprenticed with a lithography firm, and at night attended the Norwich School of Art (you can see his painting of a class here). At the end of his apprenticeship he was offered a job with the firm, but turned it down to seek his career as a painter.

Tragically, he lost sight in his right eye as the result of an accident shortly after, but was undeterred in his pursuit of painting. The story goes that he had to stab at the canvas for a while, judging the distance to the surface by feel until he got the range.

Had I only see Munnings’ work in reproduction, I doubt that I would have paid him much attention, as images of fox hunting and horse racing are not high on my list of favorite subjects for paintings (Degas notwithstanding); but I had the opportunity today to see an exhibit of his work at the Brandywine River Museum, and came away very much impressed with Munnings as a painter.

Though he was a vocal opponent of Modernism, claiming that Piccasso, Matisse, Cezanne and their associates had ruined art; he was evidently favorably impressed by the freedom of the Impressionist painters and perhaps their American counterparts, as his own work was delightfully “modern” in that respect. Like the American Impressionists, however, he kept the firm underpinnings of academic art beneath his free brushwork.

Munnings was, in fact, a member of the Royal Academy, and for a time late in his career, served as its president.

Hi was probably one of the finest painters of horses and other animals.

In small reproductions, you would get the impression that he was painting tightly, with lots of blending, and occasionally his horses or figures are more smoothly rendered than the backgrounds he sets them in; but those backgrounds, and his landscape paintings, are full of exuberant paint handling and wonderful textures.

There are a number of books on Munnings, including an autobiography.

I’ve assembled some links below, though most reproductions are too small to really get a feel for the close-up quality of his paintings.

The exhibit at the Brandywine River Museum, which is in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, not far from Philadelphia and even closer to Wilmington, Delaware (see my post on Andrew Wyeth), has been assembled from local collections in the area. The Brandywine Valley has history of equestrian events and organizations, one of which, the Radnor Hunt Races, has been associated with the museum for 30 years.

Many of the paintings are on loan from private collections, and not normally on view to the public. The show is strong with his early paintings, landscapes and figurative work.

Alfred J. Munnings from Regional Collections is on view at the Brandywine River Museum until September 1, 2008.

I plan to see it again.

Addendum Katherine Tyrrell was kind enough to let us know that those in the UK can visit the Sir Alfred Munnings Museum in Dedham Vale in the heart of Constable country on the borders of Essex and Suffolk; and that there is a web site for the museum.

She also points out that Munnings was for a short while a member of the Newlyn School in Cornwall (see my post on Stanhope Forbes) and also had a studio at Lamorna.