Alois Kalvoda was a Czech painter who was active primarily in the early 20th century.
Though he traveled and studied in Paris and Munich, most of his work focused on landscapes of his native country. These were painted in a naturalistic style early in his career, and in an increasingly impressionist approach as his career progressed.
Particularly striking are his numerous paintings of birches and birch groves.
Young Girl Carrying a Pumpkin, Fausto Zonaro
Link is to zoomable file on Google Art Project; there is also a downloadable version of that file on Wikimedia Commons.
The original is in the Sakıp Sabancı Museum in Istanbul, Turkey. The museum also has a zoomable version of the file, but it looks over-saturated to me. The real appearance of the painting could be somewhere between the two, but given the choice between them, I feel the Google file is likely to be more accurate.
Fausto Zonaro was an Italian painter who spent a good part of his career in Istanbul. In this simple subject, he has contrasted the orange of the pumpkin against the background greens and muted color of the girl’s dress, but kept the contrast in check by adding the green area of the pumpkin and having the girl’s hand and forearm cover a good bit of the surface.
I love Zonaro’s painterly approach to suggesting the texture of the ground and the strewn bits of other plants.
Tom Gauld is a Scottish cartoonist and illustrator whose deceptively simple style is simply delightful and simply perfect accompaniment to his wry sense of humor.
Gauld is a regular contributor to the (most excellent) British newspaper The Guardian, where his “cultural cartoons” are often literary in subject matter, and New Scientist, where they are obviously science themes, as well as The New York Times.
Gauld’s quirky turns on subjects both historic and contemporary (often mixed) can give you a delightful simultaneous brain tweak and laugh.
His website portfolio is not extensive, you can find more on the Guardian site or on his Instagram, Tumblr or Twitter feeds.
The image above, bottom, is part of this amusement on The Laurence Sterne Trust, in which you can assemble sections of it multiple ways.
Gauld is the author/illustrator of a number of books, including: You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack (cartoons), Goliath (graphic novel) and Mooncop (graphic novel).
His latest book of cartoons is Baking With Kafka.
Those in LA, can see Tom Gauld interviewed by Mark Frauenfelder tonight, November 6, 2017 at Skylight Books in Silver Lake at 7:30 pm.
Dedham Vale With The River Stour In Flood From The Grounds Of Old Hall, East Bergholt, John Constable
We’re fortunate that so much of the world’s great art is currently in museums and public collections. Works in private collections can often go unseen by the public for decades, or even hundreds of years.
From time to time, works that have gone unseen for extended periods become available and enter the art market.
This is the case with a newly “rediscovered” painting by John Constable, and boy is it a beauty!
Of those Constable paintings that I have not seen in person, it is already one of my favorites.
The painting is currently set to be part of the December 2017 Old Masters Evening Sale at Sotheby’s, one of the premiere auction houses through which high valued art reaches the market (see my 2009 post on Sotheby’s). If you have an extra $3 or $4 million lying around, maybe you can pick it up for over your couch.
There is a reasonably large zoomable photo on the Sotheby’s auction listing, but a much higher resolution image accompanying this article on Art Market Monitor (even larger than my detail crops would indicate).
There is also an article on the Sotheby’s site that describes the find: “Important Constable Rediscovered After 50 Years“.
Still Life: Basket of Apples, Pear, Walnuts and Knife; Léon Bonvin
Original is in the Waters Art Museum, which has both a zoomable and downloadable file. There is also a zoomable image on Google Art Project and a downloadable file on Wikimedia Commons, though the one on the Walters’ site is larger.
Another beautiful and sensitively realized watercolor still life by 19th century French artist Léon Bonvin, who had to paint in whatever spare time he could find while managing a family restaurant.
Mark Reep is an artist based near Pittsburgh who I first profiled back in 2006. His dreamlike, enigmatic imaginary landscapes are rendered monochromatically in graphite, charcoal and ink.
His monochromatic approach seems to heighten the sense of mystery, as textural rock faces, towers and islands emerge from mist and fog, their exact boundaries obscured.
His isolated towers of rock, jutting up from valleys lost in mist, predate similar imagery from the movie Avatar by many years.
I particularly admire the geometric strength of his compositions, in which negative space often plays a prominent role.
There is an interview with Reep in the Strathmore Artist Papers site from February.
Reep’s blog, which he titles dreams in black and white, sometimes has larger reproductions of his drawings than his website.
Thare are prints and other items featuring Reep’s drawings and photographs on Fine Art America and RedBubble, and originals on West End Gallery.
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