Władysław Czachórski was a Polish painter active in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Though he also painted still life, landscapes and other subjects, Czachórski was known primarily for his portraits and genre paintings of women, dressed in finery and expressively posed among flowers and elegant furnishings. These were rendered with academic realism and a finessed command of textures and tone.

Some of his compositions were apparently closely repeated with different models, perhaps because of requests from patrons, or because of the success of particular subjects.

He was also noted for his interpretations of scenes from Shakespeare’s plays.

Resources for images of Czachórski’s work are somewhat scattered, and a number of the reproductions are not of good quality, but you will find enough that are to give you a feeling for his style.

Amanda Sage is a visionary artist whose intricately patterned compositions are meant to represent states of awareness or inner visions as opposed to ordinary perception of the visual world.

Sage studied with Michael Fuchs, and his father Ernst Fuchs, a well-known pioneer of the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism and a mentor to the contemporary visionary art movement.

With them she studied the early Renaissance mischtechnik, or “mixed technique”, for which which Ernst Fuchs is credited with prompting a 20th century revival. In the original, egg tempera was used with oil paints and associated resins to create particularly luminous layers of color.

In the modern variation that Sage employs, a base of acrylic color is used, over which the painting is refined with casein and oil.

Common to works in the visionary art genre, many of Sage’s compositions feel influenced by 16th century Buddhist thangkas, and have a mandala-like symmetry, perhaps as an invitation for contemplation.

I also think that many of the artists in this field have been influenced by the layered imagery and geometric progressions of Salvador Dalí’s “atomic” phase.

Of particular interest in this type of painting is the indication of overlapping layers of fine-lined patterns, suggesting motion, and a different kind of visual depth than is usually encountered in painting.

Sage will be co-leading a workshop with Christopher Ulrich at beinArt Gallery in Brunswick, Australia on December 11, 2016.

She will also be teaching Mischtechnik at a three-week seminar at the Vienna Academy of Visionary Art July 8th – July 30th, 2017.

Billyo O’Donnell is a Missouri painter whose recent work, in addition to being painterly and color rich, is often highly textural.

I’ve had O’Donnell on my list of artists to cover on Lines and Colors for some time (it’s a long list), and his style has evolved since I first encountered his work. His newer work is thick with textural paint application.

At times it seems more prevalent than others, but it’s always difficult to get an accurate feeling of textural surfaces from photographs. There’s also the element of scale; small paintings presented in the same size photograph as large ones without reference for scale will appear quite different in surface characteristics.

O’Donnell frequently explores the effects of shadows in bright sunlight, with dappled patterns falling over houses, fields and objects. He makes use of bold value statements and high chroma passages of color as a counterpoint to the character of the paint application.

In 2001, O’Donnell took on a project to paint a plein air painting in each of the 114 counties in the state of Missouri. In collaboration with writer Karen Glines, the result was a book called Painting Missouri, that appears to be currently out of print after its third printing. I picked up a copy when O’Donnel was here in the Philadelphia area some years ago acting as a juror for a plein air event.

There is a dedicated website for the book, on which prints of individual paintings appear to be still available. The paintings in the book, which you can see in small previews on the Prints page, are in his older, still painterly but less physically dimensional style.

The images on his website are also somewhat small; you can see larger ones on the sites of galleries in which he is represented (linked below).