View of Benevento, Edmund Kanoldt
On Google Art Project. Downloadable high-res file on Wikimedia Commons. Original is in the Getty Museum.
A beautifully complete, but still economical, graphite drawing by the 19th century German landscape artist. I love the way he has handled the tone and textural variation in the distance, middle ground and foreground — particularly his gestural definition of the trees.
Though New York based illustrator Chase Stone does editorial and conceptual illustration as well, he excels in particular at fantasy illustration.
One avenue for his fantastical imaginings is Magic: The Gathering, his illustrations for which are not only beautifully realized, but have a dramatic mythological flair.
His website is essentially a Tumblr blog. The gallery on the site of his Illustrators Representative, Richard Solomon, has a good sampling of his work, along with a process step-through. He also has a gallery on deviantART.
Since I last wrote about Hudson River Valley based portrait artist Paul McCormack way back in 2006, he has established a new website which, I’m glad to say, features much larger images of his work (click on the images for enlargements).
McCormack also maintains his McCormack Studio website, which includes additional paintings in watercolor and oil, as well as graphite drawings. It also lists the roster of his classes and workshops, books, and his custom designed watercolor palette.
As much as I admire his refined oil portraits (images above, bottom three) and beautifully finessed pencil drawings, it’s his striking watercolor portraits (above, top five) that I find most compelling.
Breakfast-Time, Hanna Hirsch Pauli
There is an often overlooked sub-genre of painting that I particularly enjoy; for lack of a better term, it might be called “outdoor still life”.
I’m hard pressed to think of a better example than this stunningly beautiful painting of a 19th century breakfast table in a sun-dappled garden by Swedish artist Hanna Hirsch Pauli.
Richly painterly, with color that is at once understated and vibrant, it catches that magical difference of presenting still life subjects in the colors of sunlight.
The link is to Google Art Project. There is a high-resolution downloadable version of the file on Wikimedia Commons.
The original is in the Nationalmuseum, Sweden, but their version of the image seems over-saturated. I haven’t seen the original, but my feeling is that this is one of those examples where the Google Art Project got the color right and the museum got it wrong.
Cherngzhi Lian is an artist based in Singaapore who works primarily in acrylic and watercolor, as well as drawing media.
There are galleries on his website, largely of scenes from his travels in Bhutan. There is a drop-down menu for subjects, accessed from “Painting” on the left (though I found it cranky in my copy of Safari).
There are also sketches under “Drawings” and “Travels”.
Lian has a Tumblr blog, on which he posts sketches, often photographed in the context of the scene he is sketching.
Many of his recent posts are devoted to his latest project, in which he is attempting to design “The Perfect Sketchbook”.
Utah illustrator Miranda Meeks conveys her often dark-edged subjects with a subtle touch, and a refined sense of value and color. She works in both traditional and digital media.
Her website arranges her work in several categories (accessed from a drop-down), but unfortunately relies on you to use the browser’s back button rather than allowing some way to progressively step through the images.
You can also find galleries of her work on Behance, and she maintains a Tumblr blog, on which she posts finished pieces as well as sketches, detail crops, works in progress and process articles.
