Author: cparker
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Leyendecker’s Santas
Even though it was Thomas Nast who fleshed out the old fellow, pipe and toys in hand, Reginald Birch who gave his suit its colors and Haddon Sundblom who often incorrectly gets the credit (much as I like him), I still maintain that our modern concept and image of Santa Claus owes more to J.…
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Dutch Winters at Schiphol
Also in keeping with the Winter Solstice (see my previous post), the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has mounted an exhibition of 19th Century Dutch paintings of winter that will be on exhibit at the Amsterdam Airport Schiphol from 21 December 2011 to 26 March 2012. The museum’s page for the exhibition doesn’t directly link to the…
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Picturing Winter on Tor.com
In what I think is both a terrific idea and a beautiful result, Irene Gallo, art director of Tor Books, posted a column yesterday on Tor.com to mark the Winter Solstice in which she had asked 20 contemporary illustrators to suggest some of their favorite images of winter. The article features images of some of…
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Elwood H. Smith (update)
As I mentioned in my previous post about him from 2007, Elwood H. Smith has a delightful illustration style that carries echoes of great comic strips from the early part of the 20th Century, and somehow manages to look both retro and modern simultaneously. Smith hits the right balance for me between old and new,…
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Antoine Vollon
Though he also painted landscapes, interiors and figures, 19th Century French painter Antoine Vollon was best know for his lushly painted still lifes. Vollon was greatly influenced by the superb still life painter Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, and followed in his love of simple food and kitchen related genre subjects. At his most expressive, Vollon’s thick, fluid…
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Where They Draw
I don’t know about you, but I find photos of other artists’ workspaces fascinating. The fascination is probably partly simple curiosity and partly looking for ideas, with perhaps a touch of finding reassurance that other artists function in spaces that are as messy as mine (grin). Where They Draw is a Tumblr blog devoted to…