Bury It

Bury It Chvrches and Haley Williams, animated by Mighty Nice, Jamie McKelvie
Bury It” is a very nicely realized animated music video for a song by Chvrches and Haley Williams — animated by Mighty Nice with a design direction established by comics artist and illustrator Jamie Mckelvie, who has worked with the band previously on poster designs.

I’m not certain if Mckelvie actually directed the short or just provided artistic direction, I didn’t find detailed credits.

The video has something of a super-hero/sci-fi theme about powers of telekinesis, but any story is really secondary to the look and feel.

 
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Eye Candy for Today: Gabriel Metsu portrait

Portrait of Lucia Wijbrants (Portrait of a Woman), Gabriel Metsu
Portrait of Lucia Wijbrants, Gabriel Metsu

Link is to zoomable version on Google Art Project; downloadable high-resolution file on Wikimedia Commons; original is in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

This splendid 17th century portrait by Metsu was for a long time known simply as “Portrait of a Woman”, but the Minneapolis Institute of Arts website reports that the subject has been identified.

Metsu’s dazzling skill is evident in the surprisingly painterly rendering of the face, hair and hands, and the remarkable handling of the fabric of the woman’s gown — in particular the sparkles of light that play across the decorative elements.

For more, see my other posts about Gabriel Metsu, linked below.

 
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Van Gogh’s drawings

Van Gogh's drawings
As I’ve mentioned in my previous posts showcasing some “Not the usual Van Gogh’s” (and here), we are often given the impression that an artist’s oeuvre is much smaller that is really is because art publishers and even museums tend to emphasize an artist’s “greatest hits” over and over, at the expense of exploring a wider range of work.

This is particularly evident in the case of Vincent van Gogh, whose famous works are so familiar as to be cultural icons, but whose more extended range of works lies largely unknown to the general public.

In particular, Van Gogh’s more than 1,100 drawings, which represent over half of his known works, don’t get nearly the exposure they deserve.

I remember being particularly struck by his drawings when I had a chance to see a number of them in person as part of an exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art some years ago. They were larger and more accomplished than I expected from seeing them in reproductions, and I found them exceptionally captivating.

Van Gogh has been quoted as saying “Drawing is the root of everything, and the time spent on that is actually all profit.” and he devoted much time and effort to drawing.

He went through numerous periods of concentrating exclusively on drawing — sometimes out of financial necessity, sometimes out of a desire to return to core principles and concentrate on the fundamentals. He seemed to find drawing a kind of artistic anchor in times of uncertainty.

Van Gogh’s periods of devoting himself entirely to drawing include the beginning of his efforts to train himself as an artist. During that time, he wisely focused on learning to draw, understanding that it would be the necessary foundation on which painting would be based.

In his early drawings, which are often figures and faces as well as landscape and other subjects, you can see him struggling with the basics of proportion and perspective, relentlessly working to master the skills.

In his later period of more accomplished works, his drawings blossom into astonishing marvels of texture, created with energetic variations of line and stipple. These drawings, even monochromatic ones, have a feeling of color, in somewhat the same way as monochromatic Japanese and Chinese ink paintings.

I count Van Gogh’s landscapes of farms and fields to be among my favorite drawings. Though never as accomplished as masters of draftsmanship like Rembrandt or Raphael, Van Gogh’s personal vision and devotion to nature produced an approach to landscape drawing that is unique and visually entrancing.

Many of his drawings are of familiar compositions — copies after the fact of existing paintings sent home to his brother or other artists. He often added drawings to his letters, and you can see in the Van Gogh Letters site maintained by the Van Gogh Museum. You can also search through the museum’s extensive online catalog of his work, filtered for “drawings”.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has an essay on his drawings, and offers a publication, Vincent Van Gogh: The Drawings, that can be read online, downloaded as a PDF or ordered as a book.

Wikimedia Commons has a section of Drawings by Van Gogh; and the online Van Gogh Gallery can be sorted to show a list of drawings, though without thumbnails. The Web Gallery of Art has three sections for Van Gogh drawings (toward the bottom of the list), arranged by period.

You can also search through individual museum website collections for Van Gogh, and filter for “drawing”.

In researching this post, I came across a very nice five part series of posts on “Vincent van Gogh Drawings” on the Art and Artists blog, which gives a nice overview and goes into much more detail than I can here. (Look for links to the other posts in the series in the right hand column.)

Van Gogh’s drawings are a record of his life and career, perhaps even more than his paintings. They are personal, intimate and often show a clarity of observation and artistic focus that serve as a defining example of the core principles of artistic endeavor.

 
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Kevin Hong

Kevin Hong, illustration
Kevin Hong is a New York based illustrator who works in the fantasy art genre.

Having graduated from the School of Visual Arts in 2015, Hong’s portfolio is not yet extensive, but shows great promise in his engaging blend of influences from Japanese anime and US/European fantasy art.

I particularly enjoy his use of color in defining the relationships between objects in his compositions.

Several of the pieces on his website are accompanied by process step-throughs in the form of animated GIFs.

 
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Eye Candy for Today: Louis Buvelot’s Yarra Flats

Yarra Flats, Louis Buvelot
Yarra Flats, Louis Buvelot

Link is to zoomable version on Google Art Project; downloadable file on Wikimedia Commons; original is in the National Gallery of Victoria, which also has a zoomable version.

19th century Australian artist Louis Buvelot was influential on the generation of Australian painters who followed, including those known as the “Australian Impressionists”, and the Heidelberg School.

Here he captures the Australian landscape in a clear, deftly rendered watercolor.

 
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Imagery from the Bird’s Home: The Art of Bill Carman

Imagery from the Bird's Home: The Art of Bill Carman
There are certain contemporary artists in the field of fantastic art whose work I find a continual delight. Notable among them is Bill Carman, who I have written about previously here on Lines and Colors.

All too often, I find artists in contemporary fantasy, concept and fantastic art (as well as in “Pop Surrealism”) who just seem to be trying too hard — they give a sense of struggling to be weird, or surreal or shocking enough to get noticed.

Carman’s work is essentially the opposite of this: it feels effortlessly imaginative, as simply a natural expression of the artist’s mind.

Carman impresses me as one of those artists who is able to connect his unconscious imagination directly to his drawing and painting hand, and then get out of the way. (In this respect he reminds me of Jean, “Moebius” Giraud, though very different in style and execution.)

I was delighted, then, to receive a review copy of Bill Carman’s new book, Imagery from the Bird’s Home: The Art of Bill Carman.

For some reason, I was surprised when I opened the package, in that I wasn’t expecting the volume to be quite so large, deluxe and beautifully produced. I should know better, of course, because it’s published by Flesk Publications, a small publisher who has earned my admiration again and again for their superb volumes and great choice of artists.

Imagery from the Bird’s Home is big (9 1/2 x 11 inches), thick (192 pages) and packed from cover to cover with Carman’s delightful and beautifully rendered stream-of-consciousness imaginings. You’ll find repeated themes like glasses, lenses, birds (of course), cephalopods, dogs, and various other animals and characters, as well as subjects from pop culture.

Carman works in acrylic on a number of different surfaces, as well as in digital and other traditional mediums. His approach ranges from loosely sketched to highly rendered and intricately detailed — frequently offering much to look at in a single image. The book includes sketches, both random and preparatory for other works, as well as some alternate versions and progress sequences.

Imagery from the Bird’s Home can be ordered directly from Flesk Publications (which I believe to be more beneficial both for the artist and for a terrific small publisher), but if that’s not convenient, you can also order from Amazon.

You can find more images, and a video flip-through of the book on Parka Blogs.

You can see more of Bill Carman’s wok on his website and blog.

There is a brief video interview related to the book on the Flesk Publications site, and a more general interview with the artist on WOW x WOW.

 
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