Ruth Sanderson is an illustrator with a long career of creating illustrations for children’s books, fairy tales and fantasy. Her book illustrations have garnered multiple awards, including her own original fairy tale, The Enchanted Wood.

She cites as her influences American illustrators like Howard Pyle, N.C. Wyeth and Norman Rockwell, along with the English Pre-Raphaelite painters and the landscape artists of the Hudson River School.

Landscape plays an important role in her storybook themed paintings, with lavishly forested settings filled with detailed flora as a backdrop for fairies, knights, princesses and Mother Goose characters.

In addition to galleries of illustrations in various categories, her web site has a cover gallery of books she has illustrated, arranged by years, and a page of step-by-step process for several of her paintings.

Working under assumed names for obvious reasons, writer “Amir” and artist “Khalil” chronicle events in Iran in the wake of the disputed elections of 2009 in an ongoing story called Zahra’s Paradise.

Zahra’s Paradise is a graphic story that is being published as a webcomic in installments every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. It just started on February 19, and will continue to include current events as they happen in the context of a fictional story. It follows a young Iranian blogger’s search for his brother, who has disappeared following his participation in the post-election protests.

The author is an Iranian-American human rights activist and the artist is a sculptor, ceramics artist and cartoonist who is taking on his first graphic novel.

The webcomic is being published simultaneously in English, Farsi, Arabic, French, Spanish, Italian and Dutch. First Second Books will publish the story in book form in 2011.

The site conveniently opens on the first page of the story (unlike the majority of webcomics, who open their site with the most recent page on the mistaken assumption that convenience for current readers is more important than orienting new ones.)

The art is clear and straightforward, with enough touches of style to add visual charm without distracting from the storytelling. Simple tones and hatching, along with well spotted blacks, provide depth and visual balance.

The characters are immediately accessible, even to Westerners who might assume they have little connection to people and events in Iran. As we follow along with the search for Mehdi, we may find out more about how similar, and different, our lives are.

[Via BoingBoing]

Edward Sorel’s wonderfully loose and gestural cartoon illustrations have been featured on the covers and interiors of magazines like The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harpers, Forbes, The Nation, Esquire and The New York Times Magazine for a number of years.

His pen and ink and watercolor images capture personalities, places and situations with wry humor and an uncanny sense of place.

Sorel studied at Cooper Union and was one of the con-founders of the legendary Push Pin Studios. He has had a number of one-man shows, including a 1998 multi-room show at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC (see my post on The National Portrait Gallery).

A collection was published in conjunction with the show, Unauthorized Portraits from 1997. He has also illustrated a number of books and created numerous posters.

There is an interview here, conducted by artist Zina Saunders, along with Saunders’ portrait of Sorel. (Here’s my post on Zina Saunders.)

Sorel’s work has been compared to other modern masters of caricature like David Levine, and even to historic figures like Daumier and Hogarth.

In an essay for the Laguna Art Museum, Michael McManus referred to the wave of American painters who brought the influence of the French Impressionists to California in the early 20th Century as “Impressionism’s Indian Summer”.

Impressionism flowered late in California because it was largely a remote area before the turn of the century. The artists who came there early found a largely unspoiled and non-industrialized landscape, ideal for their endeavors. (For more on the timeline of California Impressionism, see my post on Guy Rose.)

Along with his friend George Gardner Symons, William Wendt was one of the Chicago area artists who came to California on the rail line that was completed in the late 1800’s.

Unlike Guy Rose, who was actually a student of Monet, Wendt only indulged in the all-out Impressionist dissolution of form in a flurry of paint strokes for a brief time. For most of his career, he painted in a more restrained palette, heavy in greens and browns, with broader strokes; to my eye more in keeping with some of the other American Impressionists like William Merrit Chase.

Though his colors were not as dazzling as those of some of his contemporaries, they were perfectly suited for his subjects. Wendt’s paintings carry a fresh, open feeling of the California countryside, rendered in the immediate style of paintings started, if not always finished, on location.

Jordu Schell makes monsters; icky, scary, grotesque and hairy, monsters, aliens, creatures and beasties of all manner and configuration.

Schell is a sculptor and concept artist working in the film industry. His credits include Avatar, Leigon, War of the Worlds, Hellboy, Galaxy Quest and many other feature films.

Schell is primarily a sculptor, working in clay and other physical materials, not 3-D CGI sculpture. His studio creates masks, maquettes, busts, full size sculpture and other three dimensional visualizations of imaginary monsters, creatures and alien life forms for film concept design.

Like many sculptors, Schell also works in two dimensions, drawing sketches both as preliminaries for sculptures and as an end in themselves. His Monster of the Day seems to be primarily for his own amusement.

Schell’s site has galleries of his studio’s work in many areas. Be aware that most sections have multiple pages, accessed by a row of small numbers to the lower right. The Illustration and Monster of the Day sections in particular go on for many pages.

The sculpture sections often feature many images of the piece both preliminary and finished, in multiple positions. Some of his preliminary pieces have a nice “sketch like” quality, if you can apply that term to clay.

There is also a blog, on which he posts the Monster of the Day sketch as well as posting about more finished works.

Unfortunately, I just missed telling you about Schell while there was a show of his work at Gallery Nucleus, in California. The gallery still has pieces for sale, however.

If you like fun scary monsters, beautifully done with great attention to surface texture and color, as well as nicely imaginative sketches of wildly bizarre monster concepts, Schell’s work should keep you happily knee deep in monsters for hours.

Addendum: There is an article on Schell in issue #2 of Dan Zimmer’s HorrorShow Magazine.

Jos van Riswick is a contemporary Dutch still life painter, living in Nijmegen, Holland, and working in the general tradition of the Dutch still life painters of the past.

Van Riswick is a self-taught painter, originally having studied and then taught physics. He started painting in an Impressionist style; but then, after becoming familiar with some contemporary Dutch realists, started to reach back and study the masters, and moved to a more finished realist style.

His subjects are often fruit, vegetables, china and glassware; items that have been the staples of still life painting tradition, as well as tin boxes, tools, and other household items.

Van Riswick employs a controlled, subdued palette, with careful attention to lighting and shadow in his compositions. Though his handling is fairly finished, he leaves enough painterly surface to convey the appeal of visible, tactile paint. Texture is also an important element in his portrayal of physical objects; he captures the surfaces of wood, metal, glass and, of course, the various food items, with subtle visual clues and brief notation of variations in color and value.

His web site features his studio work. He also has a blog, Postcard from Holland, that features his more immediate small paintings, supplemented with a secondary web site that archives those smaller works.

There is an article on his site about technique, and he also posts videos to YouTube that are in instructional time-lapse records of the process of painting some of his small daily paintings (image above, bottom left, with finished piece, bottom right). These are very direct and simply done, and as such, are some of the more useful still life painting instruction videos on YouTube.

If you look at enough concept art, particularly within the gaming industry, much of it can come to feel repetitive and even formulaic; which why I was so pleased to discover the concept art of Thom Tenery, which is delightfully imaginative, unique and wonderfully realized.

Tenery studied Architecture at the University of Texas, Austin, and worked designing architecture and interiors for a number of years.

He studied illustration and concept design at the Art Center College of Design, and moved into that field. His work is included in the book, In the Future…: Entertainment Design at Art Center College of Design.

Tenery has done work for companies like Sony Entertainment, Propaganda Games and Spacetime Studios; and is currently Senior Concept Artist at ID Software.

His web site has a long, single page gallery of concept art from various projects; which are not identified. His sketchblog, lab luna, has additional concept images, plus sketches, speedpaintings and plein air paintings in gouache.

There is also a gallery on the Tor.com site, and an interview with Tenery conducted by Irene Gallo.

Tenery is featured prominently and is co-author of the new book Alien Race: Visual Development of an Intergalactic Adventure.

[Via SiDEBAR]

Dan Hillier is a UK artist working in the tradition of Max Ernst’s Surrealist collage (see my post on A Week of Kindness, also here).

Using similar source material from reproductions of Victorian engravings, Hillier combines various images, and unlike Earnst, adds some pen and ink modifications of his own, to create disconcerting, horror-tinged images.

There is a gallery of his “altered engravings” on his site, along with pen and ink drawings and other works. Hiller also has a blog in which he posts about his most recent work, including the piece above, bottom, which is a still from an upcoming animation in collaboration with Tom Werber for an indie single by Losers.

An interesting aspect of Hillier’s work is showcased in a blog post about a number of people who have chosen Hillier’s images as subjects for tattoos.

[Via BoingBoing]

The Dog Who Was a Cat Inside and Going West are two more short animated films picked out by Irene Gallo for her continuing weekly list of “Saturday Morning Cartoons” on the Tor Books site.

The Dog Who Was a Cat Inside (image above, top) is wonderfully stylized in an almost cubist design, artfully realized and emotionally resonant. There are wonderful touches in the handling of the background, lighting and scene compositions.

Going West (above, bottom) is an evocative homage to the transportive magic of reading, told with terrific paper cut-out animation.

While you’re on Gallo’s Saturday Morning Cartoon Index, take a look through the rest of her list (time-sink warning). Here are my previous posts about The Saturday Morning Cartoon Index, the Tor Books site and Gallo’s blog, The Art Depatment.

Is it love or is it art?

Only François Boucher, that master of Rococo excess and dazzle, knew what his allegory of painting actually implied. It was meant to be matched with a companion painting, Cupids. Allegory of Poetry, for which I haven’t found a web based image.

Cupids came to have meaning in allegorical painting beyond the stories in Greek mythology from which we inherit our concept of Cupid as the arrow wielding son of Venus and messenger of love.

Here we see two cupids, one engaged in drawing, that most basic of the painter’s skills, apparently being advised, instructed or even criticized by the other. (Whatever you may say about Boucher, who many loathe, but I personally delight in; he was a masterful draftsman. More on Boucher in a future post.)

We also get a clear picture of an artist’s palette, presumably a representation of Boucher’s own, with its orderly arrangement of colors.

This painting is in the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, Russia. There is a link for a larger image to the right of that page, and a much larger version on the unofficial ArtHermitage.org site (full size image here).