Month: September 2010
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The Legend of Steel Bashaw, Petar Meseldžija
Serbian artist Petar Meseldžija, who I wrote about in 2008, has a career that has included outstanding work in comics, illustration, posters and gallery art. He has taken elements from all aspects of his skill range and applied them to the classic form of the illustrated storybook in The Legend of Steel Bashaw, an adaptation…
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Edgar Degas
Though considered a member of the original core group of French Impressionists, Edgar Degas (Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas), always stood apart, both in his approach to painting, in which he considered himself a realist rather than an Impressionist, and in his emphasis on drawing. Amid a group that downplayed the role of drawing in art…
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Arcimboldo, 1526-1593: Nature and Fantasy
Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s wonderfully bizarre blendings of nature and humankind, incorporating natural forms like vegetables, twigs and leaves as well as fish and other small animals in the representation of human faces, can still “turn heads” today, as they must have in the 16th Century. Largely forgotten shortly after his death and re-discovered in the 20th…
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OP-ED at 40: Four Decades of Illustration
40 years ago, the New York Times debuted a new page, the OP-ED or Opposite Editorial page, meant to be both physically and philosophically opposite the editorial page. In choosing the art for this page, the editors wanted to step outside the customary range of editorial cartoons and find an opposing style there as well.…
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Art of the American Soldier
I’ve written before about combat artists, soldiers called on (or inspired to) record their experiences in combat and in other aspects of a soldier’s life. Starting in World War I, the U.S. Army had a program of officially designated combat artists. Remarkably, they were told to record their experiences directly as they saw them, and…
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Divergent: The Art of Sterling Hundley
Sterling Hundley, who I’ve written about previously here and here, is the subject of a one man show at the University of the Arts here in Philadelphia. Divergent: The Art of Sterling Hundley opens today, September 24th, 2010, at the Richard C. von Hess Illustration Gallery, 333 South Broad St, Philadelphia, and runs until November…