I will admit that I’ve gotten a bit spoiled by the general tendency of the web to increasingly provide wonderful art images. If there is an artist whose work was not very accessible five or six years ago, chances are good that more resources are available now, or will be as time goes on. (Hopefully […]
Sometimes who we encounter as a teacher can have a dramatic effect on our development as an artist, and even who we are as a person. Elizabeth Shippen Green encountered Howard Pyle. Green began her study of art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, drawing from plaster casts of classical sculpture for a […]
William Heath Robinson, who signed his pictures “W. Heath Robinson”, was an English illustrator, cartoonist, author and watercolorist known in particular for his wry cartoons and his series of drawings depicting unlikely and complicated contraptions for accomplishing mundane tasks. Here in the U.S. we associate the latter with American cartoonist Rube Goldberg, but Robinson was […]
Discovering art that you love by artists whose work is new to you can be a little like meeting a person to whom you’re romantically attracted — there’s an initial rush of infatuation that is so pleasurable the feeling can be addictive. Growing up in northern Delaware (in a house a few hundred yards from […]
British illustrator Inga Moore moved with her family to Australia when she was eight, but a fondness for the English countryside never left her, as she grew up reading books with British illustrators. When she returned to England as an adult, and after a time working in various positions in London, she moved out to […]
Jessie Willcox Smith was a prominent American illustrator from Philadelphia who studied at the School of Design for Women (now Moore College of Art) and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where her instructors included Thomas Eakins. She began her career working in the production department of the Ladies’ Home Journal, but didn’t realize […]
The great American illustrator Howard Pyle was influential both in his own work and as a teacher whose ranks of students contained a generation of America’s finest illustrators. Artists like N.C. Wyeth, Frank Schoonover, William James Aylward, Elizabeth Shippen Green, Jessie Wilcox Smith, Violet Oakley, Maxfield Parrish, Ellen Thompson Pyle, Olive Rush, Phillip Goodwin, Stanley […]
We are jaded by an abundance of color images. Dazzled, distracted and spoiled by color’s overt and often brash appeal, we can easily lose sight of the sublime pleasures to be had in the appreciation of black and white artwork. There is a visual charm and magic to black and white images that is difficult […]
William Heath Robinson wanted to be a landscape painter. Even after his study at the Islington Art School and later at the Royal Academy, he came to the realization that he could support himself better by following his brothers Charles and Thomas into the burgeoning field of illustration. (See my post on Charles Robinson.) The […]
Most illustrators are called upon to interpret and represent the essence of a story. Occasionally, illustrators will venture into writing and, even less frequently, writers will have the skill to add illustrations to their own work. Outside of comics, a medium that seems to lend itself better to the role of author/illustrator, it’s rare to […]
Frank Brangwyn was a unique and individualistic painter, water colorist, illustrator, muralist and graphic artist who is hard to categorize. Critics had difficulty classifying him while he was active and writers still have difficulty today. Unfortunately, he often unjustly winds up in the “forgotten Victorian painters” bin. From the grays of his early marine paintings, […]
If we look at art over the course of time, we see an intricate web of the influences of one artist on another; influences that, in their crossings and re-crossings, eventually weave the tapestry of styles that we call art history. Howard Pyle, who is often rightly called “The Father of American Illustration”, is one […]