Starting from a sketchbook drawing, which is revised and refined as it is scaled up, sometimes to wall-size, Alison Elizabeth Taylor creates her images (which she calls “paintings”) out of wood veneer.

Using different kinds of wood, sometimes 100 or more varieties in an image, she applies the sections in ways that allow the natural color and grain of the wood to contribute to the image, like a cross between brushstrokes and mosaic tiles.

The process is called wood marquetery, a form of decorative art that was developed to a high degree during the Renaissance, but hasn’t exactly been a household word or staple on art school curriculums since.

Taylor, a graduate of the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, took her original inspiration from a whim to make a portrait out of cheap wood-grain contact paper.

After moving to New York to go to graduate school at Columbia University, she encountered the Studiolo from the Ducal Palace in Gubbino at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Studiolo means room or cabinet, and refers to small rooms that royals would use as studies or sitting rooms, that contain their books, papers and works of art. The piece in the Met is a wood marquetery version of the interior one such room, its faux cabinets and trompe l’oiel books and lutes arranged around the interior of a small room in life-size approximation of the actual room, in what is perhaps one of the earliest examples of virtual reality.

Taylor was immediately struck by the process and inspired to begin working earnestly in real wood, a painstaking process.

Taylor sets her pieces into position in her intricate representational images and holds them there temporarily with a tacky plastic film used in sign making, until they can be glued into place with a press.

For a new installation called “Room” that is her modern take on the Studiolo, the pieces were too large for her own studio and she had to enlist the facilities of a architectural woodworking firm with a commercial veneering press.

Unlike her Renaissance counterparts, but in keeping with her other work, Taylor’s images are not of nobles and their rich belongings, but of the everyday and mundane, even the ugly, but represented with captivating beauty of the grains, colors and textures of wood.

There is an article on the New York Times site, with a slide show of her work. She has a show currently at the James Cohan Gallery in Chelsea until June 21, 2008.

[Link via Kottke.org]

I’ve long been fascinated with the cross-pollination of ideas and styles between the artistic traditions of Asia and Europe. Even though they are technically on the same continent they were effectively separate worlds for much of the time their artistic methods and traditions were developing.

Now, of course, the world is melting together, connected by strands of optic fiber and jet contrails, but the traditions are being maintained in some quarters and mixed in others

Tang Wei Min is an artist from Hunan Province in China who applies the painting styles and techniques of the European masters to subject matter drawn from the traditional costume and ceremonial dress of historic China.

In paintings that carry the feeling of Baroque era European painters, particularly Rembrandt, Tang Wei Min paints rich, incisive portraits of people in decorative robes and head dress (something Rembrandt himself was quite fond of), and at times, gives a nod to his inspirations by mimicing the composition of particular paintings by Rembrandt and others, including the pose from Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring (above).

I really enjoy his Rembrandtesque chiaroscuro and great chunks of impasto white highlights, combined with the fascinating clothing and intensely portrayed faces of his sitters.

I couldn’t find a dedicated web site for the artist; I came across his work on the Art Renewal Center, and with a little digging found that he is represented by a number of galleries in China and the U.S.

Though most of the horrors you’ll see in the art on these pages are imaginary, like movie monsters and fantasy creatures, some horrors are quite real, and we occasionally need to stop an remind ourselves of them.

For those in other parts of the world, I’ll mention that today is Memorial Day here in the U.S. Though it’s a day associated with barbecues, trips to the beach and the unofficial start of Summer; it is a holiday created to honor those who have lost their lives in military service over the course of the nation’s history.

In recent years, much of that observance has focused on World War II, the surviving veterans of which are at an age where those who remember the war directly are rapidly shrinking in number.

It occurred to me to look back at another generation to the previous large scale conflict, World War I, from which there are fewer surviving witnesses, mostly those who were children at the time, but enough to remember that the horrors of war don’t diminish with distance in the past.

Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson was a British artist, associated with the Futurist movement and the less well known Vorticists, who became an official war artist in 1917. The Vorticists were a short lived but influential group of British artists who took the geometric latticework of Cubism and Futurism and sent it whirling through their interpretation of motion in the painted image.

Nevinson brought the fractured dynamics of the group’s style to the portrayal of scenes from “The War to End All Wars”, at first in service of the image the government wanted to portray; but eventually, from his experience as an ambulance driver, in a revulsive response to the atrocities of war.

His painting Paths of Glory, in which the stylized angles of Vorticism are abandoned for a more direct approach, (above) was initially banned by the military censors, but Nevinson managed to display it during the war outside of official channels.

Nevinson was one of the artists chosen to paint large works for the Imperial War Museum’s Hall of Remembrance; where his painting Harvest of Battle hangs along with John Singer Sargent’s famous Gassed (see my post on Art of War).

Art depicting the horror or war is not often brought to the fore, even in museums where major pieces are part of the collection, so it often falls to places like the Hall of Remembrance to keep it on display.

Actually, it’s up to us to look up and remember the images with which artists have tried to impress on us the inhumanity and tragedy of war, particularly when we are asking our friends, neighbors or sons and daughters to face it for any reason.