Today is the birthday of Maxfield Parrish, one of the great illustrators form the “Golden Age” of American illustratraton. For more, see my previous post on Maxfield Parrish, which includes a list of links to galleries of his work and other resources. I’ve included a few additional resources below that I’ve come across since then, […]
In many ways Maxfield Parrish was the antithesis of the popular image of bohemian artists, struggling for recognition and starving in noble sacrifice for their art. He was precise, orderly and methodical and was successful throughout his career. Born into a family that unflaggingly encouraged his interest in art, he was taught initially by his […]
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 […]
California artist Ken Auster started his artistic career with poster and t-shirt graphics in the milieu of 1960s surfing culture. He went on from there to plain air painting, and established his signature subject choices of streetcars, contemporary surfing scenes, California landscapes and restaurant interiors. All were approached with bold brush work, vibrant color and […]
Garden Landscape, Louis Comfort Tiffany & Studio Favrille-glass mosaic, 103×114 in (263×290 cm); in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Tiffany may have made this in preparation for work on the even larger Dream Garden mosaic, here in Philadelphia, on which he collaborated with Maxfield Parrish. I love the subtle, painterly representation of […]
Michael Parkes is an American painter, printmaker and sculptor now based in Spain. Parkes takes inspiration in his affection for a variety of artistic sensibilities, from Renaissance portraits to 19th century academic and Orientalist painters, Symbolists like Gustav Klimt, Art Nouveau posters, Golden Age children’s book illustrators — particularly Maxfield Parrish — and classic pin-up […]
Along with Alan lee, John Howe and the Hildebrant brothers, Canadian illustrator Ted Nasmith is one of the artists most associated with bringing to visual form the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. It’s difficult now to see past the look established by the extremely popular movies, but that look was largely developed from existing sources in […]
Back in May of this year, I wrote about the effort to publish The Vadeboncoeur Collection of ImageS #13. Long time publisher and classic illustration enthusiast Jim Vadeboncoeur was looking to KickStarter to raise the funds to publish the the ultimate issue of his 13 year labor of love, with a fantastic selection of classic […]
A few winter images to mark the winter solstice today. If you want more, revisit Irene Gallo’s “Picturing Winter: A Solstice Celebration” from 2011. Images above: John Henry Twachtman, Gustave Courbet, Caspar David Friedrich, Antoine Blanchard, Albert Bierstadt, Ivan Bilibin, Neil Welliver, Alphonse Mucha, Ivan Shishkin, Maxfield Parrish, Andrew Wyeth, N.C. Wyeth, Toshi Yoshida)
Longtime readers of Lines and Colors may be surprised to find me writing about Thomas Kinkade, as I normally only write about artists whose work I personally find appealing, and I wouldn’t be quick to put Kinkade on that list. I do find him interesting as a phenomenon, however, and his untimely death yesterday at […]
Scott Gustafson’s richly textured and intricately detailed illustrations are steeped in his admiration for great illustrators of the Golden Age like N.C. Wyeth, Normal Rockwell, Maxfield Parrish and Arthur Rackham. Though he has had numerous commercial clients in his 25 year career, his fondness for those great classic illustrations, and the classic stories they often […]
MagazineArt.org is a trove of magazine covers and advertising illustration from the decades around the turn of the 20th Century. Though a number of names of illustrators from that era have become familiar, many many more are still obscure, rarely featured or highlighted. The illustrations in the MagazineArt.org archives are heavy on the latter, light […]
Heritage Auctions is an auction house that, like Sotheby’s, puts images of their items to be auctioned, notably including artworks, online in relatively high resolution. Unlike Sotheby’s (and Christie’s), Heritage doesn’t constrain its hi-res images to a zooming box; instead giving you a high res image that you can view as a whole. The tradeoff, […]
Part of a site called Picturing Books, the Picture Book Timeline is a brief overview of illustrated children’s books as they have changed over time. Not actually presented as a timeline (despite the appearance of my images above), but as a slide show, it steps through some significant titles and artists in the course of […]
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 […]
California artist Ken Auster studied for his BFA at Long Beach State University in the midst of the 1960’s surfing craze, and applied his talents to successful lines of silkscreen prints and T-shirt designs that became icons of surfer culture. In the 1990’s Auster moved into plein air painting, capturing immediate scenes in a painterly […]
Frank Earle Schoonover as one of the notable students of the great American illustrator Howard Pyle. Though not the equal of Pyle’s most accomplished student, N. C. Wyeth (who was?), Schoonover was nonetheless one of the most prominent and successful American illustrators from the “Golden Age” of American illustration; and left a legacy of more […]
There’s a tendency to think of landscape painting as primarily a summer activity, or at least one of diminished interest in the Winter, both because of the inconvenience of painting in the cold, and the expectation of less color in the winter landscape. Quite to the contrary, many painters and illustrators found great subjects in […]
The era around the end of the 19th Century and the beginning of the 20th Century was the high water mark for the art of poster design. Technological innovations at the time allowed the use of mass-produced zinc plates instead of awkward and expensive lithographic stones to reproduce multiple images, and the artists could take […]