Colley Whisson

Colley Whisson
Australian painter Colley Whisson has been painting from the age of 20, encouraged by his father, Eric Whisson, also an artist.

Colley Whisson uses a bright palette and an appealingly textural rendering technique, in which forms are defined by bold strokes of heavy paint, laid on with very visible evidence of the brush.

He utilizes both crisply delineated edges and contrastingly blurred passages. You can see this better when his work is reproduced larger than the small images I’ve displayed above. I’ve included a detail crop of the last image at bottom.

Whisson has a fascination for boldly defined forms, both in their geometry and in the value and color contrasts in which he delights. I particularly enjoy his room interiors, in which the geometry of forms and his economy of rendering come to the fore.

Whisson’s art has been featured in magazines like International Artist and Australian Artist. He is the author of the instructional book Impressionist Painting Made Easy.

Whisson conducts workshops in Australia and the U.S. There is a video here of one of his workshops at the Tuscon Art Academy, and painter Ed Turpening gives a description of his experiences with a Whisson workshop, including a video demo and a description of Whisson’s approach and materials.

 
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Massimo Carnevale

Massimo Carnevale
Italian comics artist and illustrator Massimo Carnevale sent me two links back in 2006, suggesting that I check out his blog and an entry on his work in the Italian edition of Wikipedia.

Unfortunately, as often happens with my long and ungainly list of potential topics for Lines and Colors, his suggestion fell between the cracks, and the blog he listed is no longer extant.

Sometime last year, I noticed a Zelda Devon mention of Carnevale (on Twitter, I think), checked out his work, was very impressed and bookmarked it for future use, but again let it pass beneath the waves.

Finally, I’ve recently noticed several mentions, on Daring Fireball, Drawn and elsewhere, of his new blog, sketchessnatched, in which he is posting delightful digital paintings and drawings inspired by movies (images above, bottom two in color, plus black and white).

Massimo resides in italy, where he has been contributing to Italian comics since 1987, in many cases in collaboration with screenwriter Lorenzo Bartoli. In 2003, he started to do work for the American comics company DC. They hired Caranavele to do painted covers, which has become his speciality.

Carnavale worked on covers for the Vertigo imprint titles, Y: The Last Man and Northlanders (image above, top), and has also done covers for Dark Horse Comics’ Terminator 2029 (above, second down).

The links in the paragraph above are to listings on Comic Vine, which also lists Carnevale’s work on Del Ray Comics’ The Talisman: The Road of Trials. The thumbnails in each listing are linked to a detail page with a larger view of the cover. There is also a text bibliography of his work for US publishers on Comic Book DB.

There is a book of Carnevale’s work, Icon Artbook Vol 03 Massimo Carnavale Italian, available form Forbidden Planet (also listed in Italian here).

Outside of his new movie scene inspired blog, I can’t find a dedicated web presence for Carnevale. The best other source I’ve found for his work is a section on Comic Art Community. I’ve listed the few other resources I can find below.

[Addendum: Luigi of House of Mystery was kind enough to write (see this post’s comments) and add to the list of resources for Carnevale’s work:
Covers of the monthly series John Doe, covers of Don Zauker and Garrett ]

 
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100 Faces (Karin Jurick)


Karin Jurick continues to impress me, not just with her wonderfully fresh, bold and immediate painting style, but with her relentless pursuit of her art.

Feeling stymied in her progress as a painter last summer, she took on a personal challenge to paint 100 faces, choosing as her subjects mugshots from all over the country.

The result, from face number 1 (images above, top), which she started on August 7th, to number 100 (above, bottom), which she finished on February 1st, is an amazing array of features and face shapes, skin tones and hair colors, and of course, expressions. Some reflect the harsh demeanor one might expect from mugshots, others are surprisingly compassionate and sympathetic; all are painted with Jurick’s crisp, geometric, almost sculptural chunks of color.

There is a page of thumbnails of all 100 faces; each thumbnail is linked to the original blog entry Jurick posted on its completion. She also created a separate blog just for the the series, called BUST-ED, though they lack the comments that accompany the posts on her original blog, including a step through of the her process on face number 19 (image above, second from bottom).

There is also a YouTube video that looks through the paintings as a slideshow, accompanied by oddly appropriate music, and Jurick has published the series in a book titled 100 Faces BUST-ED.

On her regular blog, A Painting Today, Jurick has continued beyond the series with a new smaller series, based on the comment of a writer who collects her work that the mugshot paintings looked like Charles Dickens characters.

 
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Art Blocks for Ghana

Art Blocks for Ghana: Armand Baltazar, Kevin Turcotte, Kevin Hawkes, Tom Wichitsripornkul, David Leonard, Tohru Patrick Awa, Katy Hargrove, Ron DeFelice, Steve Purcell, Steve Purcell
There are numerous tragic situations around the globe today, some sudden and unexpected, some ongoing; you might think of them as acute and chronic.

Art Blocks for Ghana addresses one of the latter, and though it may seem small in scope, it is with small direct actions that we most effectively make changes in the world.

The press release describes the event more succinctly that I could:

The Picture Book Project Foundation (PBP) presents Art Blocks for Ghana — an exhibit and charity art auction to benefit orphaned children in Ghana, West Africa. Sponsored by Digital Domain Media Group and AOL Artists, Art Blocks for Ghana features original works created by top artists within the animation and illustration community. The collection will be auctioned online beginning March 12, 2011. Additionally, PBP will host fundraising events in New York and Los Angeles where guests can preview the collection before it goes up for auction and meet some of the artists involved.

PBP created the Art Blocks for Ghana project to raise money to pay for the boarding school costs of 13 orphaned children who were formerly cared for by the now defunct Save the Widows and Orphans Development Center in Ho, Ghana. Contributing artists are employed by studios such as DreamWorks Animation, Pixar Animation Studios, Blue Sky Studios, Marathon Media, ILM, Disney, Sony, Digital Domain, AOL Artists, as well as award-winning illustrators. A variety of artists have contributed from Canada, France, Sweden, Australia, Germany and The United Kingdom.

PBP provided the artists with wood panels to serve as the canvas for their creations. Each panel represents the “building blocks” every child needs to build a bright future – food, shelter, education and opportunity. All artwork was created around the common theme, “Home.” With children who do not have a single place to call home in mind, the artists explored the concept of the word and its many different meanings, such as comfort, life, nature, shelter, friends, love.

A wide variety of mediums – from oils, acrylic and gouache to mixed media, collage, screen print and sculpture – were used to create the pieces. Contributing artists and PBP are documenting the development process on a dedicated Art Block Process blog.

Preview events will take place:

New York:
Special Event: February 26th 2011 at The New Art Center 580 8th Ave. 5th floor, New York NY 10018; purchase tickets: http://artblocksnyc.eventbrite.com

Los Angeles:
Display: March 9th – March 14th 2011 at Gallery Nucleus 210 East Main Street, Alhambra CA 91801
Special Event: March 12th 2011 at Gallery Nucleus; purchase tickets: http://artblocksla.eventbrite.com

In addition to the Art Block Process blog (image above, bottom), there is a blog devoted to Artist Bios. The individual listings for the pieces in the main blog also include brief descriptions and links to the artist’s websites or blogs. There is an impressively long list of participating artists in the right hand column.

The Art Blocks for Ghana online auction will be held March 12th, 2011.

(Images above: Armand Baltazar, Kevin Turcotte, Kevin Hawkes, Tom Wichitsripornkul, David Leonard, Tohru Patrick Awa, Katy Hargrove, Ron DeFelice, Steve Purcell, Steve Purcell process photo)

 
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Terry Miura (update)

Terry Miura
Since I wrote about California painter Terry Miura in 2007, his website has been redone and updated with new paintings, divided into sections for Landscapes, Cityscapes, Figurative and Small Works.

Miura’s softly geometric, atmospheric paintings emphasize color harmony and composition and have an emotional resonance for those brief, almost unnoticed moments when we are struck by time of day, slanting light, passing shadows and hints of change.

While light plays an important part of many of his compositions, particularly the cityscapes, it is more often the role of atmosphere that defines the work, not just in the sense of muted colors and decreased value contrasts, but in a palpable feeling of being surrounded by air of a certain kind, of warm sun or cool mist.

Miura teaches figure painting at the School of Light and Color in Fair Oaks, CA, as well as teaching occasional workshops. He has recently published a painting demo booklet from his plein air painting workshops.

Miura also maintains a blog, Studio Notes. A recent post mentions that one of his paintings has just been acquired as part of the permanent collection of the Crocker Art Museum.

 
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Mukesh Singh

Mukesh Singh
Mukesh Singh moved from working with a gaming company as a 3D artist and concept designer into drawing comics, working for the then new Virgin Comics publishing house.

He moved from his base in Mumbai to new quarters in Bangalore and took on comics full time. He has worked on titles like Devi, Guy Ritchie’s Gamekeeper and Jenna Jameson’s Shadow, but first came to my attention with I saw his striking work for Grant Morrison’s 18 Days (images above), an adaptation of the ancient Sanskrit epic Mahabharata.

The latter title isn’t comics format but an illustrated book with story and art on facing pages, apparently from scripts Morrison has been working on for an animated version of the story. There is a great preview of some of the images, and the best example I can find of Singh’s work, on Parka Blogs.

Beyond that, I can find little information about Singh; he doesn’t appear to currently have a web site or blog. What little I know about his background comes from an interview conducted by Saurav Mohapatra on Comics Waiting Room.

[Addendum: Siju Thomas (see this post’s comments) was kind enough to let us know that Mukesh currently lives and works in Mumbai, is working with Liquid comics and is on LinkedIn.]

 
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