Here in Philadelphia, which has, I believe, more anti-graffiti murals than any other city in North America, I’ve seen my share of large scale and nicely done murals on the sides of buildings.

However, in Montreal, members of A’Shop, an artists collective that draws from the graffiti and street art culture, has created a mural that is inspired by Art Nouveau designs (primarily Mucha’s background designs), an approach I have not seen before.

Ironically, the mural is done using graffiti techniques and tools – spray paint. There is an article on My Modern Met that goes into the process of painting the mural, and another on the A’Shop site.

Though we have hundreds of his drawings, we have precious few of Leonardo da Vinci’s paintings. Depending on questions of attribution, perhaps 15 survive, of only 20 or so known works painted in his lifetime (see the list of extant works on Wikipedia).

Of Leonardo’s existing paintings, more than half of them, 9 works, will be on display together in an extraordinary exhibition that opens next week at the National Gallery in London.

Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan is the first major exhibition to focus on Leonardo’s paintings, rather than his drawings.

Though the enigmatic Lady Lisa will not be making the journey across the channel, another stunning work from the Louvre will. Leonardo painted two versions of The Virgin of the Rocks and the one from the Louvre will be seen together for the first time with the National Gallery’s own version (images above, 3rd, 4th & 5th down, zoomable version here). I just love the face of Leonardo’s angel in that painting.

In addition to the other works, and the supplementary paintings by other artists that will provide context, there is a stunning jewel that promises to be the centerpiece of the exhibition.

Though its attribution has at times been in question Lady with an Ermine (aka Portrait of Cecilia Gallerani, images above, top two — larger image here) will be on loan from the Czartoryski Museum in Krakòw.

Wow. Makes me wish I could jet over for the show. (If Lady with and Ermine is not by Leonardo, it’s by somebody just as good!)

There is an article on The Guardian about how this remarkable show was assembled, another about Leonardo’s portraits of women, and a third urging readers who attend the exhibition to savor the rest of the National Gallery’s superb collection.

Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan will be on view until 5 February 2012.

The museum’s pages for the exhibition unfortunately don’t include many images; you can supplement the descriptions with images from the WGA.

California based painter John Budicin often works with a muted palette and seeks out subjects with subtle value contrasts, though he also works with higher contrast subjects in a brighter range of color.

I particularly enjoy those compositions in which he places the foreground and subject in shadow, with more brightly lit objects in the backgrounds. You will also find small touches of brighter light and color punctuating his more atmospheric works.

Budicin, originally from Italy and now living and working in San Bernadino, prefers to work in plein air whenever possible, but also develops larger paintings in the studio from his field sketches.

Budicin occasionally teaches workshops in various areas.

The navigation on his website isn’t as well organized as it might be; you’ll find paintings in the sections for “New Artwork”, Painting Showcase”, Painting Archives” and “Field Studies”. There are also examples of his work in the websites of the galleries I’ve listed below in which he is represented.

I first encountered French illustrator Gérald Guerlais through the Sketchtravel charity project, of which he is a co-founder along with Daisuke Tsutsumi (see my recent article on Sketchtravel).

Guerlais has a wonderfully springy and energetic style, with some of the feeling of good hand-drawn animation art.

His website opens to the portfolio, which is unfortunately a bit vertiginous in that every selection is zoomed when clicked. You can also find many examples of his work on his blog.

Both are in French, with occasional English translations on the blog, but the images, of course, require no translation.

In addition, there is a gallery of his art on the site of his artist’s representative, Shannon Associates, and a selection of his work available from Gallery Nucleus in California.

Guerlais has a new book, Les 3 microbes, that from the preview on Amazon.fr, looks to be an absolute treat (images above, bottom three).

Unfortunately there does not appear to be an English language version yet, but I hope there will be one. (You will find more illustrations from the new book on the Shannon Associates sites than on his own site.)

In the meanwhile you can see his other titles listed here, some of which are available in English language versions.

Since I last wrote about his work back in 2006, California painter William Wray has moved even further toward abstraction. By “abstraction” I don’t mean non-representational art, but the original sense of the word, now somewhat lost, meaning to distill the essence of something.

He has also moved from a more muted palette to a vibrantly bright one, sometimes intensely so, placed on the canvas with energetic and highly textural brush marks.

Wray paints bold compositions that revel in the geometry of the industrial landscape and everyday mechanical objects. From those subjects he pulls an abstract of planes and divisions of space, and displays them in arrangements in which the negative space plays just as strong a role as the subjects themselves.

In addition to his website, Wray maintains a frequently updated blog on which you can sometimes find his work displayed larger than on the website (click on the images in the articles for the larger versions), allowing a better appreciation of the textural surface of his paintings.

On the website, note the fascinating page showing examples from some of his influences.

I was delighted to learn from the blog that Wray is now represented by a new gallery that is local to me, Parke Schaffer Fine Art in Wayne, PA, and I’m looking forward to the chance to see his work in person.

For those in the Los Angeles area, Wray’s paintings are featured in a show titled “City to a Fault” that opened today at José Fine art & Antiques and runs until November 29, 2011. The opening reception is November 12.

Bulgarian watercolorist Atanas Matsoureff has a deft command of the medium that allows him to be simultaneously exacting and free, textural and spare.

In his still life subjects, Matsoureff’s paintings have a feeling of quiet contemplation, in his landscapes, a sense of quietly observing and listening to nature, and in his figures and portraits, a striking feeling of texture and physical presence.

Matsoureff’s website is divided into sections for those subjects as well as sections for drawings and a separate gallery for book illustration.

[Via Jeffrey Hayes]

For reasons that are lost on me, concept and visual development artists for the film and gaming industries often go by “handles” (nicknames) when publishing their work online.

“Goodbrush”, AKA Craig Mulllins, is by either name one of the most recognized and respected artists in the field. He is also one of the first to move into digital painting, and remains at the forefront of the medium.

Since I last wrote about him, Mullins has launched a redesigned website that showcases the broad range of his subject matter and approach.

The “Quick Tour” section will give you an overview, highlighting selections from the other categories, and the other sections go into some depth, with numerous selections of his concept art, matte paintings, promotional work and various kinds of painted sketches and drawings.

In addition there are sections of his work in traditional painting media, oil and watercolor.

One of the things that always impresses me about Mullins’ work is his ability to leave out the inessential and suggest more than is there. Even in pieces that look very realistic, the actual rendering and detail are minimal; Mullins uses his superb control of color and just enough detail and textural elements to allow your eye to fill in the rest.

I also always enjoy his wonderfully playful explorations of light and shadow, contrast and highlights, with which he enlivens and energizes his images and commands the path of your eye through the composition.

Those of you who admire the work of great illustrators like Howard Pyle and N.C. Wyeth will easily find their influence in Mullins’ historical pieces.

Speaking of influences, don’t miss the downloadable PDF of John Singer Sargent’s notes on painting that Mullins has been kind enough to make available from this page.

For more, see my previous post on Craig Mullins (and here); I’ve listed additional resources below.

[Update suggestion courtesy of Will Kelly]

A few years ago, well known science writer Carl Zimmer was at a pool party with a scientist friend who studies genetics, and noticed a tattoo of DNA on his shoulder.

It prompted him to wonder if other scientists had similarly chosen to have tattoos related to their scientific pursuits. He put the call out on his popular blog, The Loom, and the responses became the basis of a feature he called the Science Tattoo Emporium (see my post from 2008).

Zimmer has now collected a number of the images into a book titled Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed.

You can see a few pages from the book on the Amazon preview, but you can view many more of the tattoos by browsing back through the posts in the Science Tattoo Emporium.

Instead of monsters and flaming skulls, we have tattoos of real animals, both prehistoric and extinct, and scientifically accurate skulls of various species.

In place of iconic hearts, we have biologically accurate illustrations of the human organ.

Throw in molecular structures of various compounds (in the example above, the molecule for LSD), planetary bodies, illustrations of the golden section laid out against a chambered nautilus shell, various scientific formulas and, of course, other interpretations of DNA strands — and you have a range of unusual and fascinating tattoo images.

Unfortunately, the tattoo artists, and/or the artists who created illustrations they may have worked from, aren’t credited.