Since I last wrote about painter Karen Hollingsworth in 2006, she has continued exploring her luminous room interiors, which have evolved into “windowscapes”.

Many painters will work to fill rooms with light, but Hollingsworth’s rooms are volumetrically filled with the palpable presence of light and air. Sea air lifts gossamer curtains, through which sunlight slides, scatters and bounces, playing across polished wooden floors and chairs, cascades of linen bedsheets or tablecloths arrayed with colorful fruit.

Light and air almost seem like competing forces, light filling a space like water in a jar, and air stirring it around, moving your eye through the space across the diagonals of swept up curtains.

In the galleries on her site you can browse through her recent archives of windowscapes, along with “roomscapes” with somewhat weightier contents, as well as portraits, still life and commissioned work.

Karen Hollingsworth is married to painter Neil Hollingsworth, who I profiled here and here.

When I revisited the Cover Browser site in the course of writing my recent post on CBR’s 50 Best Comic Covers of 2009, I discovered that an entirely new sister site had been added, Vintage Ad Browser.

The collection includes ads in a variety of genres, arranged within them by decade. Some categories go back into the 18th Century, but I focused on the turn of the 20th Century, looking for some of the ads done by “Golden Age” illustrators, both well known and obscure, before the emphasis in advertising shifted to photography. Unfortunately, there is no attempt to give artist credits (it would be a daunting task, to say the least), but you can just browse for interesting images.

You can select a category (I had some luck with “Beauty & Hygiene” and “Clothes“) and search back through the years for images of ads from that era. Once inside a particular decade, there are usually several subsequent pages of ads (small “Next” link at bottom).

There are sections on propaganda posters (see my post on Propaganda Posters, and here), movies, toys, food, cars, military topics, sports, tobacco and all manner of stuff that has been advertised over the years. It’s a amazing conglomeration of advertising styles, approaches, topics and, best of all, illustration styles.

Some of the initial images are a bit rough, but many of them are linked to higher resolution versions that look much better.

They’re not all gems, of course, far from it in some cases; but the gems are there if you’re willing to do some clicking and searching.

I’ve mentioned before (also here) that the attribution of works to artists from the past is often an inexact science, perhaps more of an art in itself.

Attributions change, and works once identified with one artist are subsequently assigned to another, or often, to pupils of the artist. Sometimes the reverse happens, and works once assigned to another hand are recognized as coming from that of the master.

The Getty Museum is currently exploring this concept with an exhibit titled Drawings by Rembrandt & His Pupils: Telling the Difference.

In the web site material for the exhibit is an interactive that compares drawings by Rembrandt side by side with similar drawings by his students and contemporaries; many of the latter drawings having once been attributed to Rembrandt.

The Wall Street Journal has an article about the exhibit that also has an interactive. In this case they present the compared sets of drawings without initially identifying the artist, letting you play detective in determining which is by Rembrandt. (It’s hard to predict if this article may disappear behind a pay-wall at some point.)

The interactive on the Getty’s site allows you to zoom in on the images, affording a detailed view of the drawings.

Drawings by Rembrandt & His Pupils: Telling the Difference runs to February 28th at the Getty Center. There is a concurrent exhibit, Drawing Life: The Dutch Visual Tradition, that should provide a rich context for the Rembrandt show.

There is also a virtual exhibit called Rembrandt in Southern California, that features images of 14 Rembrandts on view in five Southern California Museums.

For more background, and lots more Rembrandt drawings, see Rembrandt’s Drawings on Jonathan Janson’s Rembrandt van Rijn: Life and Work, and my posts on that site (formerly called Rembrandt: life, paintings, etchings, drawings and self portraits), and Jonathan Janson.

There is a book published to accompany the exhibit: Drawings by Rembrandt and His Pupils: Telling the Difference; and there is also a nice book of Rembrandt drawings that came out in 2007: Rembrandt Drawings: 116 Masterpieces in Original Color.

As I pointed out in my 2007 article on Cover Browser, comic book covers have a singular focus: to make you notice the cover, pick up the printed pamphlet or booklet to which it is affixed, slap down your hard earned dollars, and run home clutching it to your chest, cackling maniacally with glee at the prospect of the brain tantalizing wonders that lie within.

OK, well maybe you just put it in a bag, but the main part of that is the slapping down hard earned cash part; and covers have long been considered a crucial element in selling comics (as with any printed material), to the point where specialized artists are often called in to do the cover instead of the art team who created the actual story, and art directors often sweat and fuss over them and ask the artists for repeated revisions.

Comic book covers inherited their traditions in attention getting, sometimes lurid, imagery from the pulp magazines of the early 20th Century; but the art of making arresting comic book covers has become more subtle, and modern “grabbers” often utilize themes and styles that would have been unrecognizable to the sensibilities of the pulp artists and many of the comic cover artists of the late 20th Century.

Here is a list from Kevin Melrose, of the ROBOT 6 blog on Comic Book Resources, of his picks for The 50 best covers of 2009. As always with “best of” lists, it’s a jumping off point for discussion and conjecture, but serves as an interesting cross section of modern comic covers. The covers shown in the article can be clicked on for larger versions.

You also view his list of The 25 best comic covers of 2008.

For a dive into history, check out Cover Browser (see my article on Cover Browser).

(See the article for cover credits on the images above.)

One of the things that appealed to me right away when I browsed through the (still in progress) portfolio site for concept artist and designer Billy George was the nicely otherworldly color schemes he worked with in his environment paintings for Spacetime’s Blackstar game project (image above, top).

He used palettes of seemingly not-of-this-Earth colors, but made them nicely consistent within themselves.

I was then impressed with his subtle and restrained concept art for Disney’s Treasure Planet feature animation (above, middle), and, in particular, his beautiful workbook sketches for Brother bear (above, bottom).

You can find a number of these and more in the galleries on his site (note the sub-navigation at top to other sections, like Layouts, Characters, etc.).

You will find more work on his blog, including comics work, in particular an in progress graphic novel, Ruined Earth, storyboards and other goodies, like experimental vector drawings intended for Flash animation.

George was hired by Disney as a trainee when he graduated from Art Center College of Design. He worked with them for ten years and worked on seven feature animations. He left to pursue work in the gaming industry, but has recently returned to the Disney fold as Lead Concept Artist for the Disney owned Junction Point interactive studio in Austin Texas.

American artist Fred Tomaselli creates intricately detailed and highly colorful works that are both representational and decorative.

Tomaselli utilizes both painting and and collage techniques; the latter including unorthodox (and sometimes even illegal) materials like flowers, herbs, prescription pills and hallucinogenic plants. He will also use photographic elements and direct painting in gouache; and adheres the collage components to the panel with resin.

His subjects are often birds, plants and other natural themes, as well as less directly representational images. He states that his intention is to be hallucinatory and transportive.

Sometimes his themes carry over into the collage elements, as in an image of a woodpecker whose bill is composed of photographic collage of hundreds of other birds beaks.

His use of illegal substances, even though locked in resin, has caused exhibits to be confiscated and locked up at customs, leaving gallery walls for a scheduled exhibit in Paris blank.

John Berkey, who died in 2008, was one of the premiere space artists. His distinctive style graced the covers and interiors of a wide variety of publications with visionary images of the future.

Berkey had a wider range of style and subject matter than is widely known. Since my article about John Berkey in 2006, a number of additional places to view his images have cropped up on the web.

The online gallery at ArtOrg.info is still the best, but there have been interesting additions, like the posts on Pinkowski.com that show both familiar space art and rare or simply unfamiliar work by Berkey, like his cover for a 1989 Eddie Bauer Catalog, (image above, bottom).

I’ve listed some other resources below.

In what is becoming something of a tradition, I’ll wrap up the year with four more Saturday Evening Post covers from the early 20th Century featuring New Year’s babies from J.C. Leyendecker, the illustrator who started the practice of representing the new year as a baby.

For more on the history of Leyendecker’s New Year’s babies, see my post Happy Leyendecker Baby New Year from 2006. I’ve also listed below some of my previous posts about this amazing illustrator, one of the all time greats, who should be much better known than he is today.

The good news is that after many years without an in-print book of Leyendecker’s work, J.C. Leyendecker by Laurence S. Cutler and Judy Goffman Cutler was published last year and is still available.

I hope you all have a new year filled with great art, old and new!

-Charley

David Levine was one of the great caricaturists of the 20th Century. He is best known for his drawings of notable figures published in The New York Review of Books over the course of more than 40 years.

The NYRB web site has a gallery of over 2,500 of his drawings that can be browsed by year or category.

Unlike caricaturists whose subjects are largely drawn from one or two sections of public life, Levine’s position called on him to portray a wide variety of figures from history as well as the present.

I’ve always been particularly fond of his caricatures of artistic figures, both historic and contemporary. The images above show Levine’s interpretation of Rembrandt, Rubens, Valázquez, Titian, Andrew Wyeth and John Singer Sargent (links to Lines and Colors articles on those artists).

Levine took the “large head small body” style of caricature and made it his own, giving emphasis to the faces. His pen and ink approach could be intricately detailed, wonderfully loose, or both simultaneously.

He studied painting at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and at Tyler School of Art here in Philadelphia. His work as a painter is less well known than his illustrations, but you can find galleries of his paintings on his web site and a few examples elsewhere on the web.

His caricatures were often searingly on target, focusing on the foibles and flaws of politicians and other public figures; sometimes definitively so, as in the case of his famous portrayal of Lyndon Johnson lifting his shirt to show his Vietnam-shaped operation scar.

There have been several collections of his work published, like his collection of American Presidents.

David Levine died today at the age of 83.

[Via Art Knowledge News]

I’ve written before about Karin Jurick, both about her own wonderful paintings and her ongoing group painting blog, Different Strokes From Different Folks in which numerous artists paint their own interpretation of the same photographic resource in periodic challenges.

I also wrote last year about the Different Strokes From Different Folks Portrait Swap, in which participating artists supplied photographs of themselves and were in turn supplied with the photograph of another participating artist; each artist painting the portrait of another.

Jurick has decided to repeat the challenge again this year, (in what may become a tradition), with a Different Strokes From Different Folks Year End Portrait Swap.

This time there are 180 participating artists. The photographs have all been assigned, but the artists still have until December 31st to submit their finished portrait.

A good number of them are already posted on the Different Strokes blog, however, and it’s a fascinating mix of painting styles and approaches. The images usually have a somewhat larger version linked to them, as well as a link on the artist’s name to their own site of blog.

The participants include Adebanji Alade, who I recently profiled and Karen Hollingsworth, who I profiled in 2006.

Jurick has also posted a pair of videos on YouTube, here and here, in which some of the portrait paintings are shown with the source photograph.

(Images above, artist credit, row 1: Sharon Margolies, Paula Cravens, John Wolff, row 2: Akiko Watanabe, Dana Copper, Steve Prenner, row 3: Karin Jurick, Karen Hollingsworth, Amanda Carder)