Month: August 2016

Sainer

Posted on

CategoriesGallery and Museum Art, Illustration

Sainer, murals and canvasses
Sainer is a Polish painter and muralist, currently based in Gdynia, Poland. He is also one half of the artistic collaborative duo ETAM, along with Bezt.

I’m a little uncertain whether some of the murals shown above are collaborative.

They have a jaunty, sometimes cartoony style, but with definite attitude. Their large scale and presence on the sides of buildings give them a different character than they might have as stand-alone images.

In Sainer’s canvasses (images above, bottom four), he often takes a more refined and subtle approach (though not always).

 
FacebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinFacebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedin
Link: www.sainer.org
Behance portfolio
Instagram
ETAM CRU

Eye Candy for Today: Holman Hunt’s Dovecot

Posted on2 Comments

CategoriesEye Candy for Today, Gallery and Museum Art

The Festival of St Swithin (The Dovecot), William Holman Hunt
The Festival of St Swithin (The Dovecot), William Holman Hunt

Link is to a larger version on The Athenaeum, original is in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

The version on the Ashmolean site is likely more accurate, I’ve lightened the slightly larger version from the Athenaeum to match it in value.

I usually like to have higher resolution images for these Eye Candy posts, but this is the largest I could find for this work, and I find the painting particularly engaging.

The alternate title of “The Dovecot” (or Dovecote) refers to a small house for domestic pigeons; the reference to the holiday is likely just to place the time of year the painting was to represent.

The Ashmolean site indicates that Holman Hunt — one of the premiere painters of the Victorian artist group, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood — designed the composition for his sister Emily to paint. She started but then abandoned the project. Holman Hunt finished it himself a year later, calling it the most highly finished painting he had done (which is saying something).

 
FacebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinFacebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedin
Link: The Festival of St Swithin, Athenaeum

G Liulian

Posted on

CategoriesConcept & Visual Dev.

G Liulian, concept art
G Liulian is a concept artist based in Shanghai, China. Aside from that I have found little biographical information.

He focuses on environments and architectural designs, from individual structures to grand vistas of cities and mountains.

His Artstation portfolio has examples of his work in styles that are sometimes straightforward, sometimes stylized — their sense of vertical distance exaggerated with curved three-point perspective.

Some of his pieces are of fanciful alien landscapes with colorful plant formations. I like the way he plays with punctuations of light in almost all of his compositions.

You will find some process step-throughs in the portfolio, and additional work on his deviantART gallery.

 
FacebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinFacebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedin
Link: www.artstation.com/artist/gliulian
deviantART gallery
Tumblr

Stan Miller

Posted on2 Comments

CategoriesGallery and Museum Art, Watercolor and Gouache

Stan Miller, watercolor and tempera
Spokane Washington based painter Stan Miller works in both watercolor and egg tempera, taking as his subjects portraits, landscapes, and in particular, scenes of Venice.

The play of light across textural surfaces plays a key role in all of his compositions, whether revealing the turn of form in a face and head, illuminating the textures of weathered clapboard or dancing off the water in a stone-lined canal.

Within these contexts, Miller explores subtle transitions of color, sophisticated variation in edges and a range of dramatic and muted value relationships.

Miller teaches workshops in Washington State, as well as in other parts of the country. He also has a series of short instructional videos on YouTube (there is an alternate listing of them on Parka Blogs, arranging them by subject).

 
FacebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinFacebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedin
Link: http://stanmiller.net
Workshops
YouTube
http://stanmillerartist.blogspot.com

Eye Candy for Today: Ingres pencil portrait of Adolphe-Marcellin Defresne

Posted on4 Comments

CategoriesDrawing, Eye Candy for Today, Gallery and Museum Art

Portrait of Adolphe-Marcellin Defresne, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, graphite pencil
Portrait of Adolphe-Marcellin Defresne, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

Graphite pencil on paper, roughly 17×12 inches (43×29 cm). Original is in the Morgan Library and Museum.

Here is another of Ingres’s wonderful pencil portraits, with his trademark combination of exacting portraiture, and loose, almost casual rendering of the figure.

The Morgan Library’s page offers both a zoomable and downloadable version of the image, though the zoomable is a bit larger. Note the “full screen” icon at the right of the controls under the zoomable image.

See my previous Eye Candy post on Ingres’ pencil portrait of the subject’s wife: Mme Adolphe-Marcellin Defresne, née Sophie Leroy.

 
FacebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinFacebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedin
Link: Portrait of Adolphe-Marcellin Defresne, Morgan Library

Leszek Kostuj

Posted on

CategoriesGallery and Museum Art

Leszek Kostuj, surreal paintings
Polish artist Leszek Kostuj works in traditional media like acrylic and oil, as well as in drawing and digital art.

His flights of imagination are often intricately detailed, layered with overlays of faces and eyes, and arranged in waves of cool colors laced with warmer accents.

Kostuj’s subjects, which often include stylized birds, fish and other natural forms, can vary from whimsical and somewhat representational to more pattern-like divisions of space, dimensionally rendered as fantastical reliefs.

I enjoy the way he plays with the relative size of his elements, giving suggestions of distance with scale and pulling your eye deeper into his images. He combines this with compositional arrangements of curvilinear or wavy forms that suggest movement and energy.

There is a playful, dreamlike quality to his paintings, suggesting a stream-of-consciousness approach to their creation.

His website is in Polish, but with translation flags for other languages at upper right>. The galleries in the translated versions are more limited, though, and the full ones are easily navigated in the Polish version. (I also found that once you click on the English translation flag, some of the navigation for the Polish language site does not work properly, particularly the gallery links.)

I found the gallery of new work particularly interesting. You can also find his work on deviantART and other sites linked below.

 
FacebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinFacebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedin
Link: www.kostuj.com,
Gallery of new work
deviantART gallery
Museum Syndicate
Artmajeur