Lines and Colors

Lines and Colors is a blog about painting, drawing, sketching, illustration, comics, cartoons, webcomics, art history, concept art, gallery art, digital art, artist tools and techniques, motion graphics, animation, sci-fi and fantasy illustration, paleo art, storyboards, matte painting, 3d graphics and anything else I find visually interesting. If it has lines and/or colors, it’s fair game.

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Promoting some friends and some clients of my website design business

Joseph Pennell

March 4, 2007

Some artists are drawn to nature’s raw and wild beauty, some to fantasies of other times or imagined worlds, but few follow Joseph Pennell’s fascination with the urban and industrial landscape of his time. He was more interested in a riverbank flanked by factories throwing columns of smoke into the air than one in pristine nature lined with willow trees.

Pennell was an american artist and writer. He was most renowned for his etchings. Born in Philadelphia, he studied here at the Pennsylvania School of Industrial Art and later at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; but, like his friend James McNeill Whistler, he was soon drawn to Europe. Pennell lived there from 1883 to 1917, when he moved back to the U.S. and settled in New York.

Pennell’s etching style is dramatically influenced by Whistler, which is a Good Thing, as Whistler, at least in my humble opinion, is probably the second greatest etcher in Western art, behind only Rembrandt. Pennell’s lines seem softer than Whistler’s, but both had an amazing ability to project mood, surface, light and atmosphere with their etched lines.

In Europe he drew the streets, buildings and factories of London and other European cities (image above, top), and, on his return to the U.S. did a remarkable series of etchings of New York city. Many artists might be overwhelmed by the visual complexity of the early 20th Century New York cityscape, with its beautiful buildings textured with ornate cornices, elaborate window ledges and hundreds of windows.

Pennell had a remarkable eye, matched by surety of hand, for reducing that complexity to a simple visual language that still retained the feeling of the complex within his deceptively simple rendering (image above, lower left).

There is a nice inexpensive Dover book of his remarkably evocative simplifications of the complexity of New York skyscrapers and city streets, Pennell’s New York Etchings: 90 Prints, and a less common book of Joseph Pennell’s pictures of Philadelphia, as well as books of his etchings of London, New Orleans and the the Panama Canal. (Unfortunately, many of the books linked here are out of print, but you may be able to find them with a little digging.)

This was at a time when photography was in its infancy and people could only see other parts of the world through the eyes of artists like Pennell.

Pennell is also the author of several books on illustration and pen drawing, particularly one I’m fortunate to have a copy of, Pen Drawings and Pen Draughtsmen. Their Work and Their Methods. If you can’t find a copy to buy, look for it in libraries.

Pennell was also an illustrator, perhaps most famous in that role for his World War II poster for war bonds (image above, lower right), which showed New York city under attack, and the Statue of Liberty engulfed in flames and smoke. [ Erratum: mark Morris has written to let me know that the poster was for World War I, not WW II. See this post’s comments. ]

One of the best sources I’ve found form Pennell images on the web is the site for the Philadelphia Print Shop, from which you can buy original Pennell etchings.

Philadelphia Print Shop” Pennell
Library of Congress
Illustrations from In the Land of Temples
Bilindex (2 posters)
Athenaeum (2 watercolors)

Categories:
Gallery and Museum Art, Prints and Printmaking
“Painting a Day” Blogs (Round 6),
The Daily Painters Guild

March 3, 2007

I’ve been following the phenomenon of “painting-a-day” blogs since my post on the originator of the practice, Duane Keiser, in October of 2005.

At the time only Keiser, and Julian Merrow-Smith were engaged (as far as I know) in this practice of painting one small, roughly postcard-size, painting a day, posting it on a blog and offering it for sale directly over then net at a cost much lower than would be feasible through a gallery.

Before long, other artists began to take notice and adopt the practice. In the past six or eight months, the phenomenon has snowballed, as more and more painting-a-day blogs have appeared.

There seem to be two major philosophies about the practice. The first goes something like:

If I adopt the practice of painting one small painting every day, I will grow and become more disciplined as a painter, learning more rapidly, becoming stronger in my ability to grapple with challenges and push through artistic blocks. If I make my practice public by posting my daily painting to a blog, I will be more encouraged to keep to my schedule, I’ll have a visual record of my progress, and I may also be able to make some money in the process by selling my small works on the net.

The second is more like:

If I start a painting-a-day blog, the world will beat a path to my door and I’ll make lots of money.

The former is a worthwhile endeavor, the latter is folly.

Unfortunately, the latter seems to be a dominant factor in the decision of many to jump on the bandwagon, and those who are doing so with that intention are finding themselves in a crowded field.

Painting-a-day bloggers must clamor for attention now amid their own growing numbers, and quickly find that the practice of daily painting is no longer a novelty or a draw in itself.

Micah Condon’s Daily Painters Art Gallery, at one point an attempt to provide a single portal for daily painters, is up to 50 daily painters, and the once open roster is now juried. The site now seems devoted specifically to promoting itself as a marketing vehicle for the members, for which it now charges a monthly membership fee.

I think the the level of ability of the painters on that site varies widely, partly because the “juried” aspect came late in the process, and is indicative of how the phenomenon has become watered down.

By “watered down” I don’t mean to suggest that anyone should refrain from the practice because of their current level of development as a painter. On the contrary, I think it is a superb discipline for any painter, but it should be undertaken in the spirit of the first philosophy I mentioned, not the latter.

However the ‘painting-a-day label used to be associated with artists who were already disciplined and had benefitted from long periods of study and hard work that had matured them as painters.

These artists, unfortunately, are receiving less attention now in their painting-a-day practice than they should because of the sheer number of those who have adopted the label (to the point where some have stopped associating themselves with the “painting-a-day” phrase).

Many of these painters recognized the quality evident in the work of their compatriots and began listing each other’s blogs on their blogrolls, forming a loose association of sorts. In visiting their blogs I would notice many of the same names consistently.

David R. Darrow has written to let me know that several of those painters have now formed a more direct association in an attempt to be seen again above the background radiation of the large number of “daily painters”. The result is the Daily Painters Guild, a group of (at the moment) 15 painters who share a common, professionally consistent, site in addition to their own blogs.

Though the Guild doesn’t include “Painting a Day” originator Duane Keiser, or Julian Merrow Smith, who followed close after, neither of whom need such an association to keep their profile high, the list otherwise reads like the cream of the crop of the daily painters of which I’m currently aware.

Most of them are artists I have already mentioned on lines and colors, many of them in the course of my posts about Painting a Day blogs, like

Louis Boileau (Round 3),
Justin Clayton (Round 4),
David R. Darrow (Round 1), and
Darren Maurer (Round 3).

Others are artists I have had a chance to feature individually, like

Belinda del Pesco,
Jeff Hayes,
Neil Hollingsworth,
Karin Jurick,
Carol Marine,
Mick McGinty, and
William Wray.

Many of these painters were featured before they started their painting-a-day blogs, so check on the Daily Painters Guild site for their current blog URLs.

The remaining four I haven’t gotten to yet, though two were on my list for the next round of “Painting a Day” blogs, and the other two I hadn’t visited yet.

M Collier
J Matt Miller
Vivienne St. Clair
Peter Yesis

The Daily Painters Guild site has links to the artists’ blogs and websites as well as individual pages with short bios. You can bypass the somewhat awkward drop-down navigation from the main page by clicking on the artist’s name for their DPG bio page, an on the “Click here to see more” link for their blog. There is also some general information about the Guild on the “About” page.

Membership in the Daily Painters Guild is by invitation, but they also maintain a large list of Worldwide Daily Painters, to which artists can be added by request.

I don’t mean to imply that the members of the Guild are the only daily painters working at this level, simply that they are representative of the practice at its best and can serve as an example for other artists who are interested in investigating the phenomenon.

I certainly wouldn’t want any of this to intimidate or discourage any artist, whatever their current level of accomplishment, from taking on the challenge of the painting-a-day discipline.

Allowing yourself to be intimidated by the accomplishments of others is one of the deadliest traps an artist can fall prey to (I speak here from experience). Rather, artists who are starting down this road can simply take the Daily Painters Guild as a signpost of where others are going.

If you take up the practice daily painting with the intentions of the first philosophical approach I mention above, you may find that the result is a quicker advancement toward that signpost and beyond.

www.dailypaintersguild.com/
Previous “Painting a Day” Posts:
A Painting a Day (Duane Keiser)
“Painting a Day” blogs
“Painting a Day” Blogs (Round 3)
“Painting a Day” Blogs (Round 4)
“Painting a Day” Blogs (Round 5)
All lines and colors posts tagged “Painting a Day”

Categories:
Gallery and Museum Art, Painting a Day
Alyssa Monks

March 2, 2007

Alyssa Monks paints figures. Starting from that simple statement, her figures are explorations of the forms within the human form, something that figurative artists have found compelling for hundreds of years.

The figures in her compositions are sometimes collapsed into contracted positions, arms wrapped around themselves, almost, but usually not quite, fetally. My guess is that this is not so much conceptual as visual, a desire to perceive the forms as forms, often revealed in sheets of light and shade cascading across their surface.

If you look through her online galleries, which are arranged by year, you will find excursions into more traditional figures, laying in beds, standing in rooms or arranged almost as portraits, but her most intensely focused work isolates the figures in the space of the composition, with just a bit of the surrounding environment. She uses the white of beedsheets or, in her recent work, the porcelain bathtubs or wall tiles of bathrooms, to compose the figure as dark elements against light.

There is an erotic element in her work, but I think it is fairly subdued, and comes through stronger in her images of clothed figures, like Surrender from 2002 (second row of thumbnails, middle image) than in her nudes. Her work can sometimes feel intimate, but more often the viewpoint feels objective and detached, as though we are an observer, but not a participant in the scene.

In her work from the past year, she is focusing in more closely on small parts of the figure, like part of a face and neck, a composition consisting of a breast, hand and cheek, or other small glimpses of the form, accenting the perception of the figure almost as landscape.

In her work from 2002, the environment came forward, and some of her paintings from that year are interiors without figures, or interiors in which the figure is only a small element. It’s fascinating to look at her eye for these spaces and compare it to her exploration of the figure as both a form and a place.

Link via Neil Hollingsworth

http://alyssamonks.com

Categories:
Gallery and Museum Art
Adam Phillips

March 1, 2007

Unlike many of his compatriots, animators who left Disney Studios when the company ovelords decided to abandon their 100 year heritage and close their 2-D animation studios in favor of CGI, Adam Phillips left his position running the effects department of the Sydney-based studio of his own volition.

His focus since then has been on his own short animations, composed in Flash and posted on the net. His Hitchiker short won the Flash Forward Film Festival in 2003, followed eventually by the first of what has be called the “Brackenwood” series of short animations, which are simply remarkable. One of the early shorts from that series, Prowlies at the River, really made people in the animation community sit up and take notice, and set new standards for the use of Flash in animation.

The “Brackenwood” stories focus around Bitey, a mischievous faun-like character who taunts and teases other creatures, and usually gets his comeuppance. They take place in some mythical place or time, populated with unreal creatures that, in Phillips hands, act and feel very much like real animals. The image above is from LittleFoot, the most recent in the series.

You will find most of the Brackenwood animations on the Animations page of Phillips website, as well as some other shorts on the Bitey Castle page. Don’t forget to go back to the home page, though, and check out the great little shorts in the 30 days: 30 shorts section, linked by small numbered boxes in the upper right.

There is also a 3-part interview with Phillips on the Cold Hard Flash site. (Here are parts 2 and 3.)

Phillips’ professional background is apparent in his superb command of timing (which is everything in animation), his fluid ability to tell a story visually (most of the Brackenwood animations are wordless, or at least not in any language I recognize), and to compose and frame images dramatically. He combines those skills with a great sense of color, atmosphere and lighting, and a nuanced ability to suggest the complex with the simple, to immerse you in his wonderful pseudo-mythical world.

What really sets Phillips apart as a Flash animator is the ingenious way he has worked within the limits of vector based animation to achieve a wonderful sense of studio-level animation. He occasionally uses Swift 3-D, a vector based 3-D animation app that compliments Flash, for some camera moves, certain types of animation and a bit of modeling, but Flash is the main tool, and he really makes it look like it was created for character animation, rather than motion graphics.

It is his thorough understanding and clever application of the limits and strengths of vector animation that make his work shine. Look, in particular, at the way he suggests dappled light and shadows, and the remarkable way he creates the effects of moving water.

Phillips has been able to generate enough interest to keep producing his independent animations, which get a large audience, but still has to put projects on hold, like his much anticipated Waterlollies, the latest in the Brackenwood series, while he takes on freelance animation jobs. Phillips indicates that he has plans for a Brackenwood feature film, which is something to look forward to.

Link via Cold Hard Flash

www.biteycastle.com
Animation
Blog
Cold Hard Flash interview (parts 2 and 3.)

Categories:
Animation, Motion Graphics & Flash
Milton Caniff

February 27, 2007

It’s hard to imagine these days, but newspaper comics were once a place where adventure reigned.

Alongside genuinely funny humor strips (also hard to imagine in this day of watered-down, milquetoast comics pages where blandness seems a requirement), there were wonderful adventure comics, like Prince Valiant, Tarzan, Flash Gordon, Rip Kirby, Wash Tubbs, Buzz Sawyer, The Phantom, Mandrake the Magician, Red Ryder, and many others (some of which still exist as pale shodows of their former incarnations). Two of the best and most influential were Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon, both created by Milton Caniff.

Caniff has been called “The Rembrandt of the comic strip”, fitting perhaps both because of his importance in the ranks of great comics artists and, in particular, for his mastery of chiaroscuro, the use of highly contrasting areas of dark and light.

Caniff was a pioneer of the adventure strip and one of the undisputed masters of the form. He was very influential on other comics artists (and illustrators) of his day, and was featured on the cover of Time magazine in 1947.

Caniff’s remarkable high-contrast style, shared in part with his early collaborator Noel Sickles, also a fantastic adventure comics artist, has been a tremendous influence on modern comics artists like Alex Toth, Frank Robbins, Jamie Hernandez, Mike Mignola, David Mazzuchelli, Tim Sale and, in particular, Frank Miller, notably in his work in the Sin City books, as well as a number of other comics artists who are working in a high-contrast style (often influenced by Miller and perhaps unaware of how much he has carried over from Caniff).

Both Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon were adventure stories in the 30’s and 40’s adventure film mold (think Indiana Jones), about wild spirited pilots in search of adventure and trouble. Caniff left a successful 17 year run on doing Terry and the Pirates for the New York Daily News, and started Steve Canyon for for the Chicago Sun because he wanted more control over his work. During World War II, in the latter part of his run on Terry, Caniff also did a strip called Male Call, (strips online here) which ran in military newspapers and for which he accepted no payment; he considered it a contribution to the war effort.

While both Terry and Steve Canyon are great strips, I tend to prefer Terry and the Pirates (from which we get the term “Dragon Lady”) because of its atmospheric, far-Eastern strange-lands-and-pirates milieu; and despite its occasional unflattering portrayal of women, non-white races and otherwise politically incorrect leanings. These were perhaps more a reflection of the times than any intentional meanness on Caniff’s part, but criticism has been leveled in hindsight at Caniff for that, as well as his participation in such government sponsored weirdness as this illustrated WWII pamphlet fot the U.S. Army called How to Spot a Jap.

Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon are both terrific top-of-the-form classic adventure comics. Most of the Reprints of Terry that I’m aware of are out of print, but worth looking for. Steve Canyon, on the other hand, is available in a number of inexpensive volumes. Unfortunately, the strips, though printed OK, are small. Early daily comic strips were printed large, often at the full width of a newspaper page, as contrasted to the tiny splotches they’ve been reduced to by modern newspapers as part of their concerted campaign to drive away readers.

There is a new biography and analysis of Caniff’s work, not yet published but due soon, Meanwhile…: Milton Caniff, Terry and the Pirates, and Steve Canyon by R.C. Harvey, that also promises to be a fascinating look at the art and business of newspaper comics in their heyday. You can read bit more on Harvey’s site about his previous book on Caniff, Milton Caniff Conversations.

There are some extensive bio pages The King of the Comic Strips, Milton Caniff (page 2 here) from Steve Stiles. There is also a good short bio on Comiclopedia (from which I borrowed two of the clippings shown above).

A special treat right now is that the original Steve Canyon strips are being made available online, with permission from the artist’s estate, on the Humorus Maximus site. They start here. (There is no “Next page” button, click on the next date, in this case January 22, to advance.) This is a rare opportunity to read one of the great newspaper adventure strips day-by-day, as if it were a currently running strip. Compare it to what passes for newspaper comics today and be amazed.

Steve Canyon strips on Humorous Maximus (start)
Male Call strips on AuthenticHistory.com
Bio on Comiclopedia
The King of the Comic Strips, Milton Caniff (bio)
Metafilter link

Categories:
Comics, Pen & Ink
Arthur Getz

February 26, 2007

I love New Yorker covers. For years the venerable magazine has been featuring illustrations, often by cartoonists and illustrators working in a cartoon-like line and color style, that can be funny, poignant, beautiful, wistful and, at their best, reminders of the beautiful in the ordinary, glimpses of commonplace scenes that are suddenly brought into light as remarkable and worthy of attention.

Over the years some of the most effective of the latter have been by Arthur Getz. Getz was an illustrator and painter who created more New Yorker covers than any other artist (213). His palette ranged from the darks of night scenes to the bright, almost bleached out light of sunny days. He had a knack for composing paintings out of scenes that other artists might never notice and painting them with a deceptively casual style that actually reveals a superb eye for composition, color and the effects of light.

In addition to his New Yorker covers, Getz did hundreds of pen and ink spot illustrations for the magazine, as well as illustrations for Esquire, Fortune, The Nation and other publications. He also created murals for public spaces, including one for the 1939 World’s Fair. He was also a well-respected instructor at the School of Visual Arts in NYC, the University of Connecticut and other schools.

Feeling his name as an illustrator would interfere with his gallery work, he exhibited his gallery paintings for many years under the pseudonym of his middle name, “Kimmig”.

Getz also illustrated children’s books, including four he wrote himself. There is a web site devoted to Getz’ work, maintained by his daughter, Sarah. One of the best places to see work is in the CartoonBank archive, from which you can purchase original artwork as well as prints of his remarkable New Yorker covers. There was also a nice piece about Getz in the New Yorker in 2002, called Cover Gallery: Glimpses of Light.

Link suggestion courtesy of Don O’Shea

www.getzart.com
New Yorker Store (Getz overview and originals)
New Yorker Store (Getz covers only)
Cover Gallery: Glimpses of Light (New Yorker article about Getz)
Getz bio from Ogunquit Museum of American Art

Categories:
Illustration