Author: cparker
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Allan R. Banks
When thinking about “plein air” painting, which is simply a French term for painting out of doors, the thought is naturally one of landscape. More unusual is the practice of plein air portrait painting, as practiced by classical realist painter Allan R. Banks. The infrequent pursuit of this approach is understandable. The usual controlled lighting…
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Kevin Mack
Kevin Mack’s digital compositions are like a roller coaster for your eyes. You glide into them on big swooping forms that recede into the depths, looping and swirling among themselves like the veinous system of an android, or vibrating into a crenulated landscape of primary colors. As you go further into the images (and “into”…
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Jacek Yerka (update)
The temptation is there, of course, when attempting to describe Jacek Yerka’s fantastical and dreamlike paintings, to use the term “surreal”. I will persist, though, in my cranky insistence on reserving that term to refer to a specific group of artists, and the devotion to images derived from the unconscious that was their manifesto. So…
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Jack Unruh
Interestingly, Kansas illustrator Jack Unruh divides his online portfolio into two enigmatically defined sections, What is real and What is not real. Presumably, the latter has more conceptual and imagination based illustrations, although in both you will find his wonderfully drawn portrait/caricatures of well known figures, images of fish, bears and other wildlife, and scenes…
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Doug Braithwaite
First, a little bit of Wikipedia-style disambiguation. Since I’m likely to write here about either topic, I’ll point out that this article is about the gallery artist named Doug Braithwaite, as opposed to the comic book artist that some readers might associate the name. Doug Braithwaite is a painter who works primarily en plein air,…
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BibliOdyssey (the book)
Ephemera is defined as printed or written material that isn’t intended to be preserved. Magazines and newspapers, for example, are meant to be transitory, disposed of once read (the pile of National Geographics in your grandfather’s attic notwithstanding.) Even many books are meant to be ephemeral; computer instruction manuals, for example, are out of date…