Month: August 2008
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Wang Meng
On the first day of the Beijing Olympics, I thought I might visit some of the Olympian heights reached, and painted, by a great Chinese artist from the past. Wang Meng was a Chinese painter who is considered one of the four great masters of the Late Yuan Dynasty (mid-14th Century in European terms). The…
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Austin Briggs
I mentioned in my recent article on Giovanni Bellini that our perception of artists is often altered by the gravitational lens of closely associated artists, the more well known artists often eclipsing those who are less familiar. When I first encountered Austin Briggs, it was in collections of his work on the Flash Gordon newspaper…
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Katherine Tyrrell
There is a fascinatingly fuzzy line, if you’ll excuse the expression, between “drawing” and “painting” when working with mediums like pastel and colored pencil. Both can obviously be used as drawing media, and can also be applied to renderings that have many of the characteristics of paintings. UK artist Katherine Tyrrell calls them “dry media”…
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DUSSO (Yanick Dusseault – update)
Many of the images that we accept, almost without question, as the backgrounds for scenes in motion pictures, are in part or in total the creation of matte painters. These image can make us believe the action is taking place in a fantastic other world, or in a slightly modified version of this one. DUSSO…
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Michael Koelsch
My previous post about Art Nouveau posters reminded me that there was another era of poster design with very different intent and aesthetics. Contemporary California illustrator Michael Koelsch has an affinity for the wonderful pulp illustrations and B-movie posters from the 1940’s, 50’s and 60’s. He affectionately applies his study of those styles to modern…
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Art of the Poster 1880-1918
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…