Arto Isotalo, a self-taught painter living in Espoo, Finland, appears to have taken as his source of instruction his admiration for painters like Anders Zorn and Joaquín Sorolla.
He wears his influences on his sleeve, and wears them well, with fresh, fluid brushwork, crisp value delineations and subtle control of color in his figures, portraits and landscapes.
The galleries on his blog/website are divided into those categories, along with drawings. In the figurative section you can find figures in streams or in the shallows at the seaside, a wonderful practice of Zorn and Sorolla espectively.
Set aside some time when going through Isotalo’s blog. It includes a number of works you will find in the galleries, but many additional pieces, along with detail crops and several step-throughs of paintings in progress.
Also, in a practice I particularly enjoy, he often provides photographs of his location and painting setup along with the respective plein-air landscape paintings. He sometimes sets up the photos in a Magritte-like juxtaposition of the painting against the real landscape (images above, bottom) — a nice touch, made possible by the fact that he generally works sight-size.
There is also a good post on photographing oil paintings.
If that weren’t enough, Isotalo has been generous in sharing high-resolution photographs from his visits to the Museo Sorolla, the Zorn Museum and several other museums and exhibits. (The posts on Zorn make Isotalos’ blog one of the better resources for Zorn on the web, which is sorely lacking in large images of his work.)
