Ambera Wellman started experimenting with oil painting in 2004 at the age of 22. She has just moved from being a self taught artist to being a student at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design last year. She already seems to be finding a mature voice, at least in one series of paintings.

If you browse back through her blog you will find paintings, and a few drawings, of a variety of subjects, but it is her series of paintings of skies and clouds that immediately grabbed my attention.

Great sheets of cloud masses, in turn glowing with brilliant color or dark with more subtle tones, roil and billow across her canvasses. Some of her skies are luminescent with reflected light, almost as if the clouds were generating their own light. In the darker canvasses, they have the opposite feeling. as though the cloud forms were devouring the light.

In her older works, the landscape above which the clouds do their stuff is more varied and often busier with foreground objects; in her more recent work, she keeps the foreground in check and lets the clouds and skies dominate.

Wellman also has a dedicated web site, in which, in addition to her land/cloudscapes, you will find her photorealistic portraits as well as an interesting selection of reproductions, in which she has replicated well-known paintings.

Unlike the more common factory-like process of churning out reproductions of the same painting over an over (see my post on Dafen, China), Wellman has made the copying of these paintings part of her learning process. I don’t know if she chose the paintings to reproduce, or if they were commissioned on request, but they vary from Ingres to Modigliani to Vermeer to Chagall to Delacroix, and she apparently picked a few things about skies from her study of Monet and N.C. Wyeth.

In preparing for a new exhibit of her cloud-themed landscapes at the Black Duck Gallery, in Lunenburg, NS, she recently asked her blog readers to give her feedback on which of five paintings to choose for the advertisements to accompany the show; perhaps indicating that though she is mature enough as a painter to have a clear voice, she is young and open minded enough to step back and look at the response her images elicit from others in judging her path.

Athur Mathews was a California painter active in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.

Mathews is sometimes thought of as an Art Nouveau artist. He and his wife Lucia Mathews, also an artist and one of his former students at the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art in San Francisco, brought together influences from the European Art Nouveau artists, the burgeoning American Arts and Crafts movement (of which they were an influential part) and the ideals of classical art, and created a style that came to be called the California Decorative Style.

Arthur Mathews was trained as both an artist and an architect. He studied painting at the San Francisco School of Design and later at the Academie Julian in Paris. There, like many American painters of the time, he was exposed to the creative explosion of avant-garde European art. Unlike most of his compatriots, he did not become enamored of the techniques of the French Impressionists, but took his inspiration from the graceful elegance of Art Nouveau (see my post on Alphonse Mucha) and the sublime tonalism of Whistler. (It’s sometimes hard to remember that Art Nouveau and Impressionism were essentially contemporary, Mucha and Gauguin shared a studio for a time.)

Mathews returned to California and became director of the San Francisco School of Design; and brought his various influences to bear on the creation of brilliantly colored and elegantly naturalistic California landscapes. He became an influential teacher and, though he was not a proponent of Impressionist ideals, counted among his students major figures of California Impressionism and plein air painting like Granville Redmond.

Arthur and Lucia produced a range of artistic and decorative works — stained glass, carved frames, furniture, graphic design and illustration. After the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, they joined with like minded artists and artisans and tried to make their part in rebuilding San Fancisco a guiding and enlightening role, with the dream of making the city a cultural utopia.

Unfortunately, there aren’t lot of high-resolution images of their work on the web just yet. As their influence and importance is rediscovered, that should change.

Those in the Ohio area can see an exhibit currently at the Akron Art Museum (originally organized by the Oakland Museum of California) called California as Muse: The Art of Arthur and Lucia Mathews that runs until September 7, 2008.

For the rest of us, there is a new book created to accompany the exhibit, The Art of Arthur & Lucia Mathews by Harvey L. Jones.

There is a nice post about Arthur Mathews, with several images, on the 2blowhards blog, and I’ve listed what other resources I could find for you below.

[Exhibit link via Art Knowledge News]