In urban scenes of walls, corridors, alleys and car parks — that most of use might pass by unnoticed — Irish artist John O’Reilly finds fascination with geometric shapes, muted color, weathered textures and patterns of light and shade.
O’Reilly’s website has example of his urban landscapes, as well as wall art and murals.
I particularly enjoy the textural patterns in his paintings of slate or shingle roofs.
The Passing of Robin Hood, N.C. Wyeth
On Wikimedia Commons. If I’m reading the Brandywine River Museum’s N.C. Wyeth Catalogue Raisonné correctly, the original is in the New York Public Library.
The illustration is from The Adventures of Robin Hood by Paul Cheswick and N.C. Wyeth. The full edition can be found used; but you can also get the Young Readers version from the Brandywine River Museum Shop, with the illustrations printed larger than in the original.
The entire book is available on Project Gutenberg, albeit with relatively small illustrations. Look for the illustrations on The Golden Age Site.
Wyeth’s masterful control of light is what gives this moment its power.
Henri Biva was a French painter of landscapes and floral subjects active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Biva’s naturalistic but somewhat romanticized landscapes often used a theatrical framing device, inherited from Claude Lorrain: dark foreground elements provide a kind of curtain, past which lighter passages beckon the viewer to enter the picture.
Sometimes Biva’s use of this is a bit overt, to the point of being heavy-handed, but when it works, it works wonderfully. Combined with Biva’s sense of light in woodland interiors, it makes the invitation to step into his paintings irresistible.
Unfortunately, in addition to the usual vagaries to which online art images are prone — shifted color, oversaturation and so on — a number of the available images of Biva’s work are blurred or out of focus. I’ve attempted to color correct a few of the examples here.
There area few examples of his work available in high-resolution zoomable images from auction houses, listed below.
The Breakfast Table, Solomon J. Solomon
On Google Art Project, original is in the Ben Uri Gallery in London, which also counts several other paintings by Solomon in its collection, including the portrait of the artist’s daughter on a pony, which is seen at an angle, hanging on the wall to the right, in this painting of a room in the artist’s own house.
For more, see James Gurney’s article on the use on the use of black in this painting. (Gurney wrote the introduction to a new edition of Solomon’s classic book The practice of Oil Painting and Drawing.)
Pablo Jurado Ruiz is a Spanish artist and creative director who works in the ink drawing technique of stipple, in which hundreds of tiny dots are laid down in carefully controlled ways to create areas of tone.
His website features sections for the individual drawings, with detail crops and often photos of the work in progress, allowing you to see how the patterns of dots are laid down (presumably with a technical pen style marker, like a Pigma Micron or similar).
(For more on the stipple technique, see my recent article in Drawing magazine, and the related post linked below.)
[Via Artist A Day]
Among the most well known painters in the Impresssionist and Post-Impressionist circles, Paul Gauguin has never been a favorite of mine. But, like Renoir, about whom I have similar feelings, I find Gauguin’s earlier, less well known work more interesting than his later signature style.
Like Van Gogh, book authors and museum curators tend to emphasize the most well known work by Gauguin — the richly colored, modern and highly stylized paintings from his later career. His early paintings, in a much different style, and his period of Impressionist-influenced work, often are overlooked.
You can find many of Gauguin’s early paintings on WikiArt and The Athenaeum. In each case, you have the option to choose a sort by chronological order to find his earlier work.
