Lines and Colors – Page 107

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.

Relevant Blogs

Art, Painting & Sketch

“Painting a Day”

Other Painting Blogs

Gallery Art & Illustration mix

Juxtapoz
Artorama (RU)

Illustration

Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Illustration & Comics

Comics & Cartoons

Illustration & Concept

Animation & Concept

Paleo & Scientific

Tools & Techniques

Other

ColourLovers Blog

Lists of Art Blogs

Art Image Resource Links

Historic Art Images

Auction Consolidation sites

Auction sites

Image Search

Reverse Image Search (search by image)

Tin Eye
RevImg
Google Image Search (camera icon)
Bing Image Search (camera icon)

Promoting some friends and some clients of my website design business

Eye Candy for Today: Joseph Bail genre scene

June 9, 2025

Young kitchen boy playing with a cat, Joseph Bail; oil on canvas; roughly 43 x 28 inches (109 x 71 cm); I don’t know the location of the original, the link is to a gallery site, through which the painting evidently passed at one time, so my assumption would be that it’s in a private collection.

I share with 19th century French painter Joseph-Claude Bail his obviously intense admiration for 18th century French painter Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin.

You can see the similarities in his frequent subject matter of simple kitchen themed genre paintings, his strong contrast between dark and light and his beautiful handling of the textures and visual appearance of objects.

In this painting, the large metal (brass?) pot is strongly reminiscent of Chardins’s handling of similar objects.

Bail was influenced by other painters, of course, and put his own distinctive take on things, but my eye was immediately captured by the Chardin-like elements of this scene.

Young kitchen boy playing with a cat, AnticStore

Categories:
Eye Candy for Today, Gallery and Museum Art
Eye Candy for Today: Whistler’s Symphony in White, No. 1

May 5, 2025

Symphony in White, No 1: The White Girl, James McNeill Whistler; oii on canvas, roughly 84 x 42 inches (213 x 108 cm)

It’s been my observation that in master paintings the majority of edges are soft, reserving the hard edges for focusing the viewer’s eye on the primary area of interest.

In this remarkable full-length portrait by Whistler of his frequent model Jo Hiffernen, it looks as though almost all of the edges are soft, with the exception of elements of the dress and the bear rug.

Normally in portraits with soft edges around the face and hair, there is at least hard edge focus on the eyes if nothing else. Here, even the eyes are soft, lending the entire face a somewhat etherial look.

What is present, however, are rough brushy textures throughout – a fascinating contrast to the softly defined edges.

This painting was also notable at the time in the presentation of of his model as a full length portrait. This was a luxurious treatment usually reserved for portraits of the elite of society, not a not a relatively undistinguished Irish immigrant – an “ordinary” girl.

The painting is in the National Gallery of Art, DC, which offers both a zoomable and downloadable image. The latter is not as large as the former, however; so for a high res downloadable file, I’ll send you to Wikimedia Commons, where you can download a 10,509 × 21,071 pixel image.

National Gallery of Art, DC
Wikimedia Commons

Categories:
Eye Candy for Today, Gallery and Museum Art, High-res Art Images
Thomas Paquette – Haven

May 1, 2025

Thomas Paquette has long been one of my favorite contemporary painters. Since I discovered his work and wrote about him back in 2007, I’ve featured him on Lines and Colors five additional times (see links below); this post makes seven overall.

Paquette has a unique style I find particularly appealing. On one level, his work appears naturalistic, beautifully composed scenes of woodlands, lakes and roadways and wilderness areas, that seem to sparkle and glow with color. On closer inspection, you can see that he is accomplishing this with ingenious juxtapositions of colors, often complimentary, at the edges of forms. These accentuate the forms, send the colors vibrating and give everything a scintillating glow. Somehow, Paquette manages to corral these elements into harmonious compositions filled with brilliant light and deep shadow.

Paquette works both at a large scale in oil, and at an intimate scale in gouache.

Both will be on display in an upcoming show titled Haven at the new location of the Gross McCleaf Gallery, which has recently relocated from Center City to the Manayunk section of Philadelphia.

The show opens this Saturday, May 3rd, 2025, with a reception from 1:00 to 4:00 pm. I have long considered the Gross McCleaf to be the most prestigious, and certainly most interesting, gallery in the city.

Paquette has also just released a new book reproducing his recent small gouache paintings, titled The Intimate Landscape. I have Paquette’s earlier book titled Gouaches (which is still available), and as a gouache painter myself, I have enjoyed it many times over. I’m very much looking forward to the new one.

If you like the sample images above (all of which were drawn from the gallery’s preview of the show), I can’t recommend the show (and the books) highly enough.

https://thomaspaquette.com
Thomas Paquette books
Thomas Paquette – Haven at Gross McCleaf, May 3rd to 31, 2025
Thomas Paquette – artist page at Gross McCleaf
Related posts:
My previous posts on Thomas Paquette

Categories:
Gallery and Museum Art
Where in the World is Charley?

May 1, 2025

My apologies for the extended and unannounced hiatus. I’ve been dealing with personal issues that have kept me unable to attend to the blog. I’m fine, just overwhelmed.

Hopefully, I’m back and will be able to pick up speed as I go. Thanks for your patience.

-Charley

(Image above: detail crop from Vermeer’s Officer and Laughing Girl)

Categories:
Uncategorized
A Fresh Look: Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring

January 14, 2025

Hopefully — even if only for a moment — you got to see in the top two images Vermeer’s iconic painting with fresh eyes. The images are reversed left to right.

It is not an uncommon practice for artists to pause in the process of working on a painting or other artwork and view the work in a mirror. This briefly provides a fresh view of the work, a contrast to the the kind of familiarity that makes it difficult to see something objectively.

We can use the same effect to view images that are so culturally familiar they are difficult to see in the way we might have when first encountering them. The effect doesn’t last long; we soon become accustomed to the “new” view, but it’s nice to get a fresh view of something so familiar.

I’ve included an image of the painting in its normal orientation at the bottom.

Wikimedia Commons has a high resolution image of the painting, available from this page.

I did the same thing back in 2006 with Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, and in the process, I believe I gained some insight into her enigmatic smile/not smile.

Girl with a Pearl Earring, Wikimedia Commons
Related posts:
La Gioconda (The Mona Lisa), flipped for your viewing pleasure

Categories:
Eye Candy for Today, Gallery and Museum Art
Philip de Laszlo

January 1, 2025

Hungarian born painter Philip de László, who was active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, spent much of his life and career in the UK, where he was noted for his portraits of royalty and the wealthy.

The de Lazlo Archive Trust website features information about the artist, as well as a catalogue raisonné of his work.

de Lazlo Archive Trust
ArtUK
Wikimedia Commons
Wikiart
Invaluable
Wikipedia

Categories:
Gallery and Museum Art