Month: May 2006
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Travis Charest
Over years I’ve been enjoying comics I’ve noticed that many comic book artists get to a certain level of proficiency and “hold” there, evidently feeling that they have sufficient skills to turn out acceptable work on a continuing basis. I’ll certainly grant that drawing a 24-page comic book on a monthly schedule can be a…
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Rob Gonsalves
Rob Gonsalves is fascinated with the twilight zone between worlds. The Canadian artist creates crisp, detailed acrylic paintings that walk that boundary by simultaneously representing both worlds, and the seemingly impossible connection between them, in the same image. In pursuing this he walks a shifting path himself, between the hauntingly connected juxtapositions of Magritte and…
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Frederick Lord Leighton
Frederick Lord Leighton (not to be confused with Edmund Blair Leighton, who I profiled last week), was one of the most influential of all Victorian Academic painters. He was very much within the academic neoclassical tradition, in contrast to the painters of that time who were favored in retrospect by the 20th century art establishment,…
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Alex Toth
To say that Alex Toth was a master of the comics art form is perhaps an understatement. I first encountered his uniquely elegant and spare drawing style in issues of Pete Millar’s CARtoons and Drag Cartoons, drag racing and custom car oriented comics magazines in which he stood out like a Corvette in a parking…
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Constable’s “six-footers”
John Constable, who is considered, along with J.W.M. Turner, to be the greatest of English landscape artists, made a decision midway through his career to move his landscape painting to a grand scale and began a series of large canvasses measuring approximately 6ft by 4ft (130cm x 188cm). The “six-footers”, as they came to be…
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NFCTD (Caleb Johnston)
Any of you who are familiar with Dover Books, know what a great resource they can be of public domain images from previous centuries, particularly from the 19th century when thousands of engravings were published for novels, texts, catalogs and periodicals. Many artists have used the Dover collections of these images as reference. Other artists…