Mike Lester is a Georgia based illustrator and cartoonist who just received the National Cartoonist Society’s Ruben Award for Book Illustration, for his illustrations for Cool Daddy Rat, a read-aloud children’s book written by Kristyn Crow.

In addition to his numerous illustrations for children’s books, Lester is an editorial cartoonist for the Rome News-Tribune, and also does a range of other commercial and editorial illustration.

Lester is also the creator of the Mike du Jour semi-animated cartoon for DowJones.com and Work.com

His web site includes a range of his cartooning, comic strips, characters and illustration, though it’s a bit disappointing that there isn’t more of his children’s book illustration featured on the site. It’s in his loopy, sprightly children’s book characters that I find the most delight in his work.

For reasons that are beyond me, the image most popularly associated with Whistler is not, as it is with most artists, one of his artistic pinnacles; but, at least in my opinion, one of his least successful and least interesting works, Arrangement in Grey and Black: The Artist’s Mother, known commonly at “Whistler’s Mother”.

How this particular painting became an icon of American art is a mystery I find too uninteresting to pursue. Whistler’s overall body of work, however, his muted tonalist masterpieces, evocative portraits and stunningly beautiful etchings, make him one of the most under-appreciated “famous” artists that I can bring to mind.

While many of his Victorian contemporaries spoke boldly in voices of Academic clarity or Pre-Raphaelite finesse, and the more adventurous shouted with Impressionistic abandon, Whistler… whispered.

Influenced both by the free brushwork of Impressionism and the solid foundation of Academic training (like many of the so-called “American Impressionists”), Whistler, even more than the others, took great inspiration from the spare, open and visually poetic compositions of Japanese prints, which were a popular import into England and Europe at the time.

Though he is considered an American painter, Whistler, like Sargent, spent the better part of his life in Europe (England, actually) and was European in his sensibilities.

The son of an engineer, Whistler went to the West Point Military Academy, where he did poorly but came away with enough acumen from drawing class to be employed mapping the entire U.S. coast for the Military, a job he hated almost as much as school, though the etching skills he acquired would serve him well later.

Whistler despised the way Americans held art and artists in low esteem in comparison to Europeans (a situation that continues to this day, as far as I can tell); and on leaving to seek artistic training in Europe, never returned to the U.S. He subsequently spent much effort, in the course of his continual re-invention of his persona, denying his birthplace in Lowell, Massachusetts — alternately claiming to be a disenfranchised Southern aristocrat or born in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Whistler’s antics, his often arrogant and abrasive personality, dandified appearance and relentless self-promotion can be as misleading as his iconic portrait of his mother in discerning the real painter. For that, seek out his other portraits, like Purple and Rose: The Large Leizen of the Six Marks (one of my favorites in the Philadelphia Museum of Art) or Symphony in White, No 2: The Little White Girl (image above, top); or his beautiful, poetic “nocturnes”, soft harmonies of mist and atmosphere, like Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Chelsea (above, bottom).

In these works, and his masterful etchings (Whistler is my second favorite etcher next to Rembrandt), you can see Whistler as the major figure in art that his rather drab portrait of his mother and overly colorful personal behavior might otherwise obscure.

Fortunately, there are many resources on Whistler, numerous books, including a very nice and inexpensive Dover book of his etchings, and lots of web resources, some of which I’ve gathered for you below.

If you live in or near New York, now is a good time to re-discover Whistler, as the Frick Collection is presenting a beautiful little show culled from their own impressive holdings: Portraits, Pastels, Prints: Whistler in The Frick Collection from now until August 23, 2009.

If you’re not familiar with the “real” Whistler, don’t let him hide behind his mother’s skirts, seek out his quiet brilliance in the paintings and etchings where he composes his visual “symphonies”.

I occasionally make the assertion, in my posts about artists like Jan van Eyck, Antonello da Messina, Albrecht Altdorfer and Matthias Grünewald, that prior to the modern era of motion pictures, artists at various times were the special effects wizards of their day — dazzling those who viewed their works with displays of technical virtuosity, monumental scale and dramatic scenes of exotic landscapes, catastrophic events, and vivid imaginings.

A stellar case in point is John Martin, a romantic painter active in the first half of the 19th Century, who was unabashed in his efforts to wow audiences with his large scale paintings of Biblical and literary events.

His paintings were in a way more artistic versions of “dioramas” or “panoramas”, staged at the time as popular entertainments, that utilized images painted on large cloths, theatrical lighting and sometimes props like potted plants, to amuse the public in a way that presaged movies. The diorama makers, in turn, copied Martin’s work, knowing a good thing to steal when they saw it.

Martin’s paintings are said to have been a significant influence on pioneering movie director D. W. Griffith, who sought to impress audiences with his moving scenes of great drama and catastrophe.

In the latter years of his career, Martin was working on a large scale triptych of Biblical scenes, The Last Judgement, The Great Day of His Wrath (image above, with details, large version here) and The Plains of Heaven.

As someone who spent many happy hours as a child watching huge electromagnets unload metal from railroad cars into the steel mill that was about a block from my house in northern Delaware, I find a particular resonance in the urban landscapes of Minnesota artist Michael Kareken.

In them Kareken finds rich subject matter in the jumbled piles of twisted metal in a scrap yard in Minneapolis and the textured heaps of scrap paper in a recycling plant near his studio in St. Paul.

He explores the shifting piles of metal, made rich in texture and color by varying degrees of chrome and rust, realistically rendering geometries that would have satisfied the most enthusiastic cubist; and sifts through the landslides of scrap paper to find shimmering patterns of light and dark, intersecting in waves of shadows.

When looking through his gallery of recent paintings, it’s worth clicking on the “Download” link at the top of the bar of thumbnails to get a larger resolution version of the works.

You can see something of the scale of Kareken’s paintings in the photos of his studio.

There is also a section of his drawings, that finds him investigating many of the same themes, but with the emphasis on value over color.

In addition his site contains an archive of older work that explores other themes, including figurative work and interiors.

Kareken is participating in a Father/Son Art Show at Schuerman Fine Art, in which he and his six year old son Owen display their art along with three other sets of father & son artists. The show runs from June 18 to July 31, 2009.

[Via Painting Perceptions]

Drawing Day is an event initiated last year by Mick Gow, creator of the Rate My Drawings site, with the simple intention of drawing attention (if you’ll excuse the expression) to art by encouraging artists worldwide to create 1 million drawings on a single day, and coordinate, cooperate and share the experience through a variety of social networking sites.

Participants can upload and share their drawings, or even draw directly online, through sites like deviantART, YouTube, Red Bubble, Drawspace, Rate My Drawings, Flickr and a number of others. (It’s worth investigating the list of participating sites just to see if some of them are new and of interest to you.)

The ambitious goal of 1 million drawings may or may not be reached, but the event is a fun way to capture a little attention for the act of drawing, and perhaps kindle some contact and community among participants.

The Drawing Day web site gives an overview of the turnout from the first event, and points to some galleries of uploaded drawings from the day, as well as videos of users drawing on YouTube and even virtural drawing in SecondLife.

There is also a blog associated with the event, which covers news about participating sites and, of course, is counting down time to the event.

Drawing Day is the first Saturday of June each year, and this year it’s this Saturday, June 6, 2009.

(Image above, a detail from Rembrandt’s etching Landscape with a Man Sketching a Scene, in which the artist caught a fellow artist sketching the same cottage that was his subject.)

I first wrote about conceptual illustrator James Clyne back in 2005, and then again in 2006 when he formed a collaborative studio with concept designer Feng Zhu as Gamma Ray Studios, which is no longer in operation.

Since then, Clyne has extended his resume and added to his online project gallery with concept art for feature films like The Poseidon Adventure, X-Men 3: The Last Stand, Star Trek (image above, top, with detail, middle) and an underrated and undercirculated science fiction film called The Fountain (above, bottom).

Clyne’s atmospheric, detailed and and imaginative concept images start with traditional media, markers and pens, rendered on vellum, and then move into digital applications like Photoshop for final renderings as digital paintings.

There are 5 instructional DVD’s on the Gnomon Workshop in which Clyne details his techniques. As I also mentioned in a previous post, Clyne was an instructor for the Gnomon Workshop: Live! 2008 event. I think he is scheduled to be part of this year’s Gnomon Workshop Live!: 2009 event, which takes place in Hollywood on June 27 and 28, 2009, but I haven’t been able to confirm that yet.

The io9 site has recently featured some additional galleries of Clyne’s work, with his designs for Star Trek, and several more general articles, including a collection of his Sweeping Vistas .

Even though it can take a long (long) time for me to get to them, I do enjoy receiving recommendations about artists I might like from others. I particularly enjoy it when a painter whose work I admire takes the time to write me with a recommendation for a painter that he admires.

Such was the case when Julian Merrow-Smith, whose work I have written about here and here, was kind enough to write and suggest the work of Marc Dalessio, who he had the chance to meet last year in Florence.

Dalessio is a Los Angeles born artist, who lived in Fiji as a child, and for the last 17 years has been living and working in Florence, Italy (or more properly, Firenze – how the English made “Florence” out of “Firenze” I don’t know, but, I digress…).

In addition to pursuing his own painting, Dalessio teaches small workshops in the summer and a course in plein air landscape at the Florence Academy of Art in the Spring. In the winters he takes group painting excursions to places like Kenya, Greece, India, Morocco, and recently, Myanmar.

Dalessio excels at both figurative work and landscapes. As much as I like his strong, classically adept portraits, which simultaneously have both a modern feel and a late 19th Century sensibility, it is his landscapes that capture my attention.

As in his portraits, Dalessio brings both a contemporary sensibility and a strong undercurrent of admiration for classical painters to his landscapes. He seems largely free, however, of accepting the conventions of particular strains of art, rather taking on only their spirit. Subjects that one would expect to find dealt with in a bright palette, a garden in Sicily, St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice, are instead approached in muted muted colors on an overcast day.

His viewpoint shifts and searches, restlessly looking for a particular composition, which is seldom the one other artists might choose. There is a unique rhythm to his placement of light and dark areas, curves and geometries that defy the compositional choices one might expect from the subject.

His use of color is understated, carefully controlled and always powerful. Dalessio discusses his supplies and his palette in posts on his web site, part of which serves as a blog, and part of which is a gallery of his work.

There is an interview with Dalessio on Painting Perceptions.

There is currently a show of Dalessio’s work at the Grenning Gallery through June 21, 2009. The gallery also represents him on an ongoing basis.

The Grenning Gallery’s website, much to my mystification, does not seem to list the gallery’s location or give contact information. According to Google, they are apparently at 90 Main St, in Sag harbor, NY. Here is Dalessio’s post on the exhibit, which includes a link to a downloadable PDF catalog of the show.

Jorge Colombo is a Portuguese artist living in the U.S. who has been getting much attention lately for this week’s cover of The New Yorker, which he “fingerpainted” on his iPhone using a painting application called “Brushes“.

The app lets you record the painting process and play it back, and the New Yorker article linked above includes a time laps video of his process.

I say “fingerpainted” because unlike other small mobile computing platforms, the iPhone and iPod touch is a touch-screen interface, meant to be used without a stylus, so your finger becomes the “brush”. This seems a little ungainly compared to stylus based small screen painting applicaitons, but the results indicate that you can do some interesting work with it.

Colombo did his sketch in about an hour while standing outside Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in Times Square.

On Colombo’s web site you will find some of his iPhone sketches, along with other done in pencil and colored digitally. He is also offering prints of some of the iPhone work.

In addition, there is a section of video and press coverage of his New Yorker iPhone sketch cover.

[Suggestion courtesy of Jack Harris]

Inspired in part by Ed Ruscha’s photogrphic series of “Every Building on the Susnset Strip” and Matteo Pericoli’s panoramic drawings in his book Manhattan Unfurled, artist Paul Heaston decided to draw every building on Main Street in the historic district of his hometown of Bozeman Montana.

Some of us who have never been to Bozeman think of it as a literary location, having been the setting for part of Robert Pirsig’s remarkable Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and a surprising number of other cultural references, including being the nominal location of the Star Trek: First Contact movie (co-written by Bozeman native Brannon Braga). It is also the site of Montana State University and is apparently rich with other colorful points of history.

Heaston focused his interest in the historic architecture of Bozeman, the town’s Main Street, from Grand to Rouse Avenues, and as a challenge to himself, drew every building on every block in that area, on both sides of the street, from direct observation in his Moleskein sketchbook (which he apparently filled exactly, without intending to). The project started in October of 2008 and just wrapped up on May 10 of this year.

It’s interesting to note that the seasons changed over the course of his project, giving it in interesting dimension of time as well as space.

Heaston’s approach, is an immediate and direct drawing in pen (that I assume is a fine point marker like a Pigma Micorn or Staedtler, though I didn’t find a mention of drawing instrument), with a casual feeling, even while enjoying the portrayal of surface textures. He even seems to have a cavalier disregard for making his architectural lines straight.

In some drawings, he winds up with what looks like curved perspective – like a photograph through a wide angle lens (which some have suggested is truer to the way we actually see than traditional “straight line” perspective).

The casual feeling of his drawings brings to mind the sketchbooks of Robert Crumb and Chris Ware.

I came across Heaston’s Bozeman Main Street Project on Urban Sketchers, where he is a correspondent. There is an article about the project, as well as one about its completion. The entire project is posted as a Flicker set.

Heaston has a web site with galleries that include other drawings and graphics, as well as his oil paintings. The latter are largely a series of gestural, painterly standing portraits, that are informal both in composition and the sitter’s (stander’s?) attire.

Heaston also maintains a blog, three letter word for art, on which you will find many other sketches and the stories behind them.

Walter Crane was one of the premiere English illustrators. He was active during the “Golden Age” of illustration, from the late 1800’s to the early 1900’s.

Crane’s elegantly designed, deliberately retro illustrations for children’s books were influenced by his admiration for the work of Edward Byrne-Jones, and undoubtedly by the other Pre-Raphaelite painters, as well as by the Japanese prints that were favored in English and European society at the time.

Crane in return was also influential, both on his fellow illustrators, and on the wider Arts & Crafts Movement, with which he was integrally involved, having founded the Arts & Crafts Exhibition Society in 1888.

Crane was also a designer for textiles and wallpapers, and created gallery art, much in watercolor, and was an associate in the Water Colour Society.

His book illustrations range from graphically designed book pages, somewhat in the vein of Howard Pyle’s self-authored tales, to a more fully rendered style akin to his compatriot Arthur Rackham; though the artist who most often springs to mind for me in comparison is Edmund Dulac.

One of the best resources for Crane is the ArtMagick site, which has a bio and several pages of images. Wikimedia has quite a few book pages. You can read his entire illustrated Baby’s Own Aesop on MythFoklore.net, and a much shorter Beauty and the Beast on Bedtime Stories. Fontcraft has a font called Walter Crane, developed from examples of his hand lettering.

There are a number of books available with his illustrations and ornamentation.