Madonna and Child with Saints Catherine and Thomas (sacra conversazione), Lorenzo Lotto
On Google Art Project, high-resolution downloadable file on Wikimedia Commons, original it in the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna.
The 16th century venetian master gives us an idyllic tableau of serene faces, beautifully painted. The angel is just… angelic.
Concept artist and matte painter Olivier Pron has film credits that include Cloud Atlas, Watchmen, X-Men: The Last Stand, Iron Man 3 and Guardians of the Galaxy.
It looks at though he may be using a combination of digital painting and models, but I can’t be certain. His blog was only started this month, and there is little background information.
The selection of his work, though not extensive, is impressive, particularly in his ability to use atmospheric and linear perspective to suggest vast scale.
[Via Concept Art World]
Studies of Two Pollard Willows, Abraham Bloemaert
Pen and brown ink with watercolor. Roughly 8×12 inches (20x30cm). In the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Simple, direct and beautifully economical observation from nature. Not a superfluous line.
California based painter Kenny Harris paints landscapes, still life and figurative works, but it is his extraordinary room interiors that captured my attention.
Bathed in soft, often indirect light, punctuated by brighter passages of windows or doorways, his interiors are rendered in subtle, dimensional layers of muted colors and painterly textures.
Harris studied Fine Art at the Colorado College in Colorado Springs, and then continued studying the classical tradition at the Charles Cecil Studios in Florence, Italy, and at the Art Students League in new York, where he was a student of the prominent American painter and teacher Frank Mason.
Though he studied in Italy, to my eye, his interior paintings carry echoes of the interiors of Dutch masters like Pieter de Hooch, Vermeer and Gabriel Metsu — and perhaps even more so, 19th century Amreican painters who were influenced by them, like William McGregor Paxton and Edmund Charles Tarbell. (I was immediately reminded of Tarbell’s sketch for Across the Room, when I saw Harris’ sketch shown above, bottom.)
Harris is a painter whose interpretations of light, while poetic, seem unerringly true. In particular, I love the way he portrays light from doors and windows splashing across the surfaces of aging wooden floors (again bringing Tarbell to mind).
Whether these artists were actual influences on Harris is just conjecture, as the biographical information on his website is not extensive.
What is to be found on his site, however, is a beautiful selection of his work, from his apparently extensive travels, as well as his immediate surroundings. Be sure to click on the initial images in each section to bring up the larger images, which reveal his work to be more painterly than you might think from smaller reproductions.
[Exhibition update: The work of Kenny Harris will be on display in NY at the George Billis Gallery, from September 30 to October 31, 2014.]
Autumn Landscape with Four Trees, Vincent van Gogh
You might come across versions of this image on the web that are much more colorful — with bright oranges and reds — but despite Van Gogh’s penchant for brilliantly high-chroma paintings in his later career, I don’t believe that’s the case here.
I haven’t see the original, but this is from the middle of Van Gogh’s career, a point at which he was surprisingly true to nature (and to the 17th century Dutch painters from which he initially took inspiration), and it looks to me like these are brown leaves on an overcast day.
The best reproduction I’ve found is on WikiArt (large version here). The original is in the Kröller Müller Museum, whose small, dim website reproduction is not very helpful.
Brina Miller is a Colorado based illustrator who brands himself as Orlin Culture Shop. His clients include Adobe, GQ Magazine, Popular Mechanics, Scientific American, and Penguin Publishing, among others.
Miller works in a sharp, angular style that feels both modern and delightfully retro (maybe modern-retro-futuristic, or something like that). He utilizes both high and low chroma palettes in his compositions, often working with textural gradations in ways that add dimension to areas that might otherwise be flat.
His website has a selection of his work, as does the site of his rep at IllustratorsOnline, and his Behance portfolio; but his blog is of particular interest — featuring alternative versions, detail crops and preliminary drawings, that are often similar in composition but different in feeling from the finished pieces.
[Via Sploid/Gizmodo/Kinja]
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