Lines and Colors art blog
  • Eye Candy for Today: Hal Foster Prince Valiant comics panel

    Octopus in a well, Hal Foster Prince Valiant comics panel
    Octopus in a well, Hal Foster Prince Valiant comics panel

    I place comics artist Hal Foster, creator, author and artist of the early to mid 20th century Prince Valiant newspaper comic strip, among the greatest pen and ink artists of the last two centuries

    The Prince Valiant strip in its heyday was given a full comics section page. Here, in a single panel from a multi-panel page, we have a dramatic example of his skill, not only in draftsmanship and rendering, but in economy of notation.

    At bottom we see an indication of how this panel would have appeared printed in a color Sunday comics section, with stark complimentary colors adding to its eerie appearance.

    In the detail image, note the way he has indicated a few areas of texture on the edges of the topmost ring of stones, giving your eye the impression that texture can be assumed all the way down.

    As your eye descends into the well, the actual indication of detail, even in the delineation between individual stones, diminishes, to the point of being mere strokes of the pen suggesting individual stones in the more severe foreshortening of the wall nearest our view.

    Look at how he has brilliantly indicated the top limit of the water with a reversal of the balance of light to dark, stark contrast, and a few arcs making wavelets around the tentacle that extends above the surface

    The creature itself is a marvel of chiaroscuro with the arrangement of the suction cups indicating the rotation of the tentacles as they menacingly twist and turn.

    Fantastic.



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  • Benjamin West’s portrait of King George III of England

    Portrait of George III, Benjamin West, oil on canvas
    Portrait of George III, Benjamin West, oil on canvas (details)

    Portrait of George III, Benjamin West, oil on canvas, roughly 100 x 72 in. (255 x 183 cm), in the collection of the Royal Collection Trust.

    American born painter Benjamin West, successful in the US, and specifically here his home state of Pennsylvania, moved to England after a European tour at the age of 25, where he became a founder of the Royal Academy of Arts and a favored portraitist to the king.

    In this life-sized portrait, the ruling monarch of Great Britain is dressed in his soldierly uniform and presented as a strong, forceful military commander, with outlines of troop deployment in his hands, and soldiers, generals, encampments and warships behind him, but the regalia of his absolute power as a king are close at hand.

    King George is shown preparing for his latest crisis, an impending invasion by the combined French and Spanish fleets. This was only a few years after we (with the critical help of the French, who Ben Franklin convinced to come to our aid) had kicked his royal butt out of our newly founded constitutional republic.



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  • Paint List

    Paint List
    Paint List

    Paint List is an independent artists’ paint testing, review and information website and YouTube channel created by Melissa Carmon and Jonathan Myers.

    I’m not sure how I was unaware of this until now; there is quite a bit of accumulated material, though the YouTube channel was only started two years ago.

    This is an excellent, well arranged, highly searchable and useful index of artists’ paint information that can be accessed an a number of ways.

    From the home page you can search for a brand, pigment name, or pigment index code, and sort initially by medium. Once with a search you can click “Open Filters” and refine your search from there, including by additional criteria specific to the medium, such as different binders for oil paints.

    There are in depth articles and reviews as well as brief blog posts.

    The YouTube channel, while less extensive, features informative, pleasantly and effectively presented reviews of various brands (such as their review of Vasari Classic Artists’Oil Colors), and topics comparing the same pigment in different brands or spotlighting individual pigments.

    They point out that the site is supported by affiliate links, but from what I’ve seen, I don’t think they let that interfere with their desire to be accurate and even-handed in their reviews.



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  • Eye Candy for Today: Joseph Bail genre scene

    Joseph Bail genre scene
    Joseph Bail genre scene (details)

    Young kitchen boy playing with a cat, Joseph Bail; oil on canvas; roughly 43 x 28 inches (109 x 71 cm); I don’t know the location of the original, the link is to a gallery site, through which the painting evidently passed at one time, so my assumption would be that it’s in a private collection.

    I share with 19th century French painter Joseph-Claude Bail his obviously intense admiration for 18th century French painter Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin.

    You can see the similarities in his frequent subject matter of simple kitchen themed genre paintings, his strong contrast between dark and light and his beautiful handling of the textures and visual appearance of objects.

    In this painting, the large metal (brass?) pot is strongly reminiscent of Chardins’s handling of similar objects.

    Bail was influenced by other painters, of course, and put his own distinctive take on things, but my eye was immediately captured by the Chardin-like elements of this scene.



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  • Eye Candy for Today: Whistler’s Symphony in White, No. 1

    Adoration of the Shepherds, Gerard van Honthorst
    Adoration of the Shepherds, Gerard van Honthorst

    Symphony in White, No 1: The White Girl, James McNeill Whistler; oii on canvas, roughly 84 x 42 inches (213 x 108 cm)

    It’s been my observation that in master paintings the majority of edges are soft, reserving the hard edges for focusing the viewer’s eye on the primary area of interest.

    In this remarkable full-length portrait by Whistler of his frequent model Jo Hiffernen, it looks as though almost all of the edges are soft, with the exception of elements of the dress and the bear rug.

    Normally in portraits with soft edges around the face and hair, there is at least hard edge focus on the eyes if nothing else. Here, even the eyes are soft, lending the entire face a somewhat etherial look.

    What is present, however, are rough brushy textures throughout – a fascinating contrast to the softly defined edges.

    This painting was also notable at the time in the presentation of of his model as a full length portrait. This was a luxurious treatment usually reserved for portraits of the elite of society, not a not a relatively undistinguished Irish immigrant – an “ordinary” girl.

    The painting is in the National Gallery of Art, DC, which offers both a zoomable and downloadable image. The latter is not as large as the former, however; so for a high res downloadable file, I’ll send you to Wikimedia Commons, where you can download a 10,509 × 21,071 pixel image.



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  • Thomas Paquette – Haven

    Thomas Paquette - Haven
    Thomas Paquette - Haven

    Thomas Paquette has long been one of my favorite contemporary painters. Since I discovered his work and wrote about him back in 2007, I’ve featured him on Lines and Colors five additional times (see links below); this post makes seven overall.

    Paquette has a unique style I find particularly appealing. On one level, his work appears naturalistic, beautifully composed scenes of woodlands, lakes and roadways and wilderness areas, that seem to sparkle and glow with color. On closer inspection, you can see that he is accomplishing this with ingenious juxtapositions of colors, often complimentary, at the edges of forms. These accentuate the forms, send the colors vibrating and give everything a scintillating glow. Somehow, Paquette manages to corral these elements into harmonious compositions filled with brilliant light and deep shadow.

    Paquette works both at a large scale in oil, and at an intimate scale in gouache.

    Both will be on display in an upcoming show titled Haven at the new location of the Gross McCleaf Gallery, which has recently relocated from Center City to the Manayunk section of Philadelphia.

    The show opens this Saturday, May 3rd, 2025, with a reception from 1:00 to 4:00 pm. I have long considered the Gross McCleaf to be the most prestigious, and certainly most interesting, gallery in the city.

    Paquette has also just released a new book reproducing his recent small gouache paintings, titled The Intimate Landscape. I have Paquette’s earlier book titled Gouaches (which is still available), and as a gouache painter myself, I have enjoyed it many times over. I’m very much looking forward to the new one.

    If you like the sample images above (all of which were drawn from the gallery’s preview of the show), I can’t recommend the show (and the books) highly enough.



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