Wow. Judging by the work shown in the Student Illustration winners gallery of the Society of Illustrators 2010 Student Scholarship Competition, we are in for a treat as a new wave of talented illustrators readies themselves for professional life.

There is a astonishingly high level of ability on display here, along with imagination and the brash daring of youthful enthusiasm.

The physical show of work chosen from the competition winners will be on display at the Society of Illustrators in New York from May 5 to May 29, 2010.

The Society of Illustrators Competitions site also has galleries of winners from the 2009 and 2008 competitions.

Wonderful stuff.

(Images above: Lisa Ambrose, Alyssa Deville, Shaun Berke, Leon Doucette, Ruth Kim, Samuel Spratt, Toni Foti)

[Via The Art Department]

Scott Hansen, an artist and musician based in San Francisco, has posted an article on his blog iso50 called Overcoming Creative Block, in which he has asked 25 artists, writers, musicians and other creative professionals “What do you do to inspire your creativity when you find yourself in a rut?”.

Along with those responses, there are additional ideas in the post’s comments.

ArtMagick one of those delightful art sites dedicated to a few related genres of painting; in this case some of the more interesting movements in late 19th and early 20th Century art.

According to their own description: “ArtMagick is a virtual gallery dedicated to the continual quest of seeking out obscure 19th century artists and long-forgotten paintings and poems illustrating a ‘magic world of romance and pictured poetry’. The majority of the content in the archive covers the Pre-Raphaelite and Symbolist movements.”

The categories also include selections from the Art Nouveau, Romanticism, Aestheticism and Neo-Classical movements, as well as a selection of “Golden Age” illustration and even a section of “Fairy Painting” (which was a popular genre in Victorian England).

Though far from comprehensive, the site serves as a great place to browse, looking through work by artists you know, as well as perhaps discovering a few you’re not familiar with.

The site also features information about upcoming related exhibitions, museums with relevant collections and related poetry (more closely intertwined with visual arts movements at the time than in most other periods).

You can search or browse by Art Movement, Latest Images or Random Images. In each case, breadcrumb navigation allows you to backtrack to more images by a given artist.

I should give the customary time sink warning. You can get happily lost here for several hours.

(Images above: Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Arnold Böcklin, Gustave Moreau, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, John Martin; links are to the images on ArtMagick. Here are my posts about Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Arnold Böcklin, Gustave Moreau and John Martin.)

Fernando Botero Angulo, often known simply as “Botero” is a Colombian artist known for his exaggeratedly rotund figures and still life subjects.

Botero started his artistic career as an illustrator, before that attending an matador school for two years. He also worked as a set designer.

In 1953 at the age of 21, he moved to Paris. Reportedly, he spent much of his time there in the Louvre, studying in particular the masters of the Baroque period, and becoming fascinated with the work of Rubens. Botero counts Rubens, an artist also known for his filled out figures, as a major influence.

Botero also studied in Madrid and Florence, and spent time in mexico studying the murals of Rivera and Orozco.

Botero’s work has received wide recognition and is popular in many circles.

The distortions evident in his rounded figures are there in his still life paintings as well, which also use exaggerated scale (note the utensils in the still life of the single pear in the image above, middle left).

Botero is also a sculptor (see this gallery on Wikimedia), and his sculptures carry the rounded masses of his figures to monumentality in large scale bronzes.

His subjects can be topical and serious, as in his Abu Ghraib series from 2005; or whimsical and humorous, as in his delightful parodies of works from art history, like his version of Jan Van Eyck’s Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and his Wife (image above, middle right, larger here).

One aspect of Botero’s work not evident in reproduction is the scale of his paintings. Many of them are quite large, and the effect of seeing them in person is much more dramatic than seeing them in reproductions.

The Baroque World of Fernando Botero is a traveling exhibition that I caught last year at the Delaware Art Museum. It is currently on display at the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, Florida until April 4, 2010.

Austrian production and character designer Florian Satzinger has a drawing style with a snap and verve that harken back to the best of classic Disney and mid 20th Century Warner Brothers animation.

The lines with which he delineates his characters zing, bounce and swoop so delightfully that they suggest lively motion even before they’re animated.

Satzinger is the co-founder of Satzinger & Hardenberg Features, and the creator of Star Ducks and Toby Skybuckle.

He studied with Ken Southworth, a well regarded animator and animation director who worked with Disney, Haanna-Barberra, Warner Brothers, MGM Walter Lance and Filmation. Southworth’s credits include Disney’s original Alice in Wonderland and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Hanna Barbara’s The Flintstones and Space Ghost.

Satzinger credits Southworth as his major influence, and his work in the style of great classic hand-drawn animation shows his continuation of that tradition.

There is an interview with Satzinger on the Character Design Blog.

In addition to his character design and production work, Satzinger teaches character design, animation and animation history at the University of the Applied Sciences in Salzburg.

It’s always a pleasure when you get to see artworks in person that you’ve become familiar with over time in reproduction; so I was delighted to have the opportunity to see some of my favorite fantasy illustration from James Gurney, author/artist of the terrific Dinotopia series of illustrated books, in a new exhibition at the Delaware Art Museum.

Dinotopia: The Art of James Gurney opened February 6 and runs to May 16, 2010. The show is an excellent cross section of the work Gurney has done on the series. While thematically unified by the storyline of the books, and the richly imagined world in which they take place, the paintings show a broad range of Gurney’s influences.

Gurney is an artist who is constantly investigating the works of other artists from various points in history, delving into their techniques and approaches, and playfully applying those elements he finds most interesting to his own work.

Gurney chronicles many of these investigations of great artists and their process in his always fascinating blog, Gurney Journey, and has begun to codify much of what he has learned into books like the recently released Imaginative Realism, and the still-in-progress Color and Light.

The result of his experimentation is a fascinating variety within the overall whole of the Dinotopia series, where you can see the neo-classical beauty of Victorian painters like Alma-Tadema and Frederick Leighton, and Orientalists like Jean-Léon Gérôme, along with the robust color and drama of the great adventure illustrators like Howard Pyle and N.C. Wyeth. All of these influences, and of course, Gurney’s own unique style, are set in service of great fantasy scenes in exotic locations; populated by Victorian humans; clever steampunkery, vehicles and gadgets; and those wonderful dinosaurs.

As is often the case when first seeing originals for paintings that are already familiar from reproductions, I found a few surprises in scale; some smaller than I might have thought, some larger; as well as many details and textural aspects in the handling of paint that aren’t evident in print.

In particular, I found myself looking past the subjects of many of the paintings and into the backgrounds, where Gurney’s other passion, plein air landscape painting, is wonderfully evident. In some cases, like the image above, top, the floral and landscape elements could easily be the subject of a painting in themselves. In many others, the confidently simplified landscapes are marvels of suggestion, as in the image above, middle with detail at bottom.

There is even a plein air painting in the show of Niagra Falls and Goat Island, a nod both to the Dinotopia setting of Waterfall City an another great 19th Century artist, Frederic Edwin Church. The large dramatic paintings of Waterfall City are notable for their compositional use of light and shadow as a means of leading the eye through a complex scene. (Waterfall City, by the way, was an uncredited inspiration for the cities of the Planet Naboo in Star Wars Episode I. I’ve heard that production artists who worked on the film have tacitly acknowledged its influence. Gurney really should have gotten credit.)

The Delaware Art Museum, with it’s great collections of Howard Pyle and American Illustration, 19th and 20th Century American art and British Pre-Raphaelite painters is an ideal venue for Gurney’s work.

If you decide to travel to see the show, not only are the museum’s own holdings a nice compliment, but the Brandywine River Museum, with it’s own superb collections of Pyle, N.C. Wyeth and American illustration, is just 20 minutes away.

Edward Matthew Hale is one of those 19th Century artists about whom it’s not easy to find information, but whose few available images hint at a terrific body of work.

Hale studied in Paris with Alexander Cabanel, whose students included Pierre Auguste Cot and Jules Bastien Lepage; and then with Emile Auguste Carolus-Duran, noted as the teacher of John Singer Sargent.

Considered primarily a genre painter, his subjects leaned to mythology and the sea, as well as military subjects from his time as a war correspondent for the Illustrated London News.

The resources I can find are limited, and some (but not all) tend to repeat the same paintings, but if anyone knows of sources for additional images by Hale, let me know and I’ll post them.

Line, color and texture combine and interact in the painting/drawings of Emmanuel Malin, at times interwoven, as other times working in contrast.

Mixtures of detailed linework and decorative pattern are set off against open areas filled with texture, often the rough texture of papers and other surfaces. Color can appear or disappear, at the artist’s whim, leaving some passages to stand as line drawings, others to appear more fully rendered.

Malin lets loose, gestural areas of color define large areas of his compositions, with more detailed areas of line serving as a focus for his subjects.

Malin is an illustrator and gallery artist living in Paris. His illustration clients include Folio, La Recherche, Brandweek, ImagineFX and Gallimard Editions. His work has appeared in several of the Spectrum collections of contemporary fantastic art.

With snow still on the ground throughout most of the Mid-Atlantic United States, and more on the way, I thought it appropriate to look at an American artist renowned for his scenes of snow and winter.

Edward Willis Redfield was one of the major figures among the artists who gathered in an artists colony in and around New Hope, Pennsylvania in the late 19th Century. Generally called the Pennsylvania Impressionists, this group included a number of artists who had absorbed some influence from the French Impressionists, but, like most painters called “American Impressionists”, took that influence and went their own individualistic way. (See my posts on Daniel Garber, Fern Coppedge and Art and the River.)

Redfield is often credited with co-founding the colony along with William Lathrop. Actually Lathrop was the driving force in establishing the colony, but Redfield, who was first to move to the area, was the star and seed around which the colony formed.

Born in Bridgeville, Delaware, Redfield studied with at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts with Thomas Anshutz, James Kelly and Thomas Hovendon. Anshutz and Kelly were carrying on the traditions of their teacher, Thomas Eakins, who had left the school shortly before Redfield arrived.

While at the Academy, Redfield struck up a friendship with Robert Henri that was to continue through the artist’s lifetimes.

After his time at the Academy, Redfield went to Paris with the intention of studying portraiture at the Académe Julian and the École des Beaux-Arts. At the latter, he studied with William Bouguereau and other classically trained painters. On his time off, however, he joined Henri and other young artists who were engaged in the newly popular practice of painting “en plein air“, and was exposed to the work of the young Impressionist painters.

Redfield frequented the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris, fascinated with the work of Monet, Pissarro, and Norwegian painter Frits Thaulow. Redfield became increasingly interested in the effects of light on snow, and had his first snow scene accepted in the Paris Salon of 1891.

On his return to the U.S., Redfield and his French bride settled in Center Bridge, Pennsylvania, on the Delaware River near New Hope.

Redfield took to painting the Pennsylvania landscape with bravura and abandon. His paintings are three dimensional marvels of spattered, heaped and piled on paint; with ridges and gullies in place of more genteel brushstrokes. It’s hard to see how remarkably tactile his canvasses are in reproduction. There is a zoomable image of Overlooking the Valley (image above, middle, with detail, bottom) on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s site that gives you a hint, but only a hint.

By all accounts, Redfield was just as physical in the act of painting, often forgetting to eat his lunch as he blazed through large canvases in one sitting. Redfield painted in all kinds of weather; not only in the cold in search of his famous snow scenes, but in wind, strapping his canvas to a tree where easels would be blown away.

He was a harsh critic of his own work, on more than one occasion burning canvasses he thought were not up to his standards.

Redfield was the most recognized and awarded of the new Hope painters, garnering more awards than any American painter except John Singer Sargent, and his work is in a number of major museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

There is an in-print collection of his work, Just Values and Fine Seeing (Google Books extract here), and you can find many fine examples in Brian Peterson’s excellent book Pennsylvania Impressionism.

Stephen Harby is a working architect and lifelong student of architectural history with a passion for travel and sketching architecture.

Harby took a sabbatical from the architectural office in which he had been working for many years and devoted it to travel and sketching, and in the process moved to watercolor as his preferred medium for observing and drawing architecture.

His site has a section of recent work as well as collections of archived work, both arranged by places, such as France, Persia, Rome, Northern Africa, Spain, Tuscany and Venice.

He moves between color and monochromatic watercolor, using the latter like ink wash for tone drawings.

Unfortunately, some of the posted images are frustratingly small (those from Venice, for example); others, however, are large enough to get a feeling for the work and place (note the “large image” button under the main preview images). Some are sketchlike and briefly notated, others more developed (like those in the Southern California section).

Harby’s knowledge of and affection for the great architecture of the past shines in his depictions of great architectural triumphs like the Pantheon, which has its own section (image above, bottom right, in which he captures sunlight from the oculus against the interior walls).

In his statement about Sketching Architecture, Harby points out one of the best and often overlooked advantages to sketching on location over recording a place with photography:

“When one is obliged to remain in one spot for longer than the snap of a shutter, sketching or painting with patience and concentration, one gains a sense of total immersion, not only visually, but through the sounds, smells, and (most rewardingly) tastes that a prolonged stay in these favorite places makes part of the experience.”

[Via Artist Daily]