Croatian artist Mato Celestin Medović was best known as a history painter, creating large, elaborately detailed tableaux of coronations and other events from recent or ancient history. In these he excelled in capturing the kind of subtly rich color and sensitive attention to surfaces and materials for which his contemporary Victorian English painters and French Academic artists were noted.

Though his early education at a Fransciscan monastery near his home eventually led to his early artistic training in Italy, it was later study at the Academy of Arts In Munich that was more in keeping with his initial artistic direction.

In his later career, he left the Franciscan order and lived in Zagreb, where he began to infuse his work with more vibrant color.

In the latter part of his career he returned to his native area on the Pelješac peninsula, where he lived alone and painted subjects uncharacteristic of his earlier work, and of Croatian artists in general at the time — still life, seascapes and landscapes, many of which were smaller and directly from nature.

In these later works Medović experimented with Pointillism and explored the impasto brushwork, short strokes and intense color associated with Impressionism.

Unfortunately, I have not been able to find many sources of images by Medović. I learned of his work from the excellent blog of contemporary Croation artist Valentino Radman where I came across his article about a Medović retrospective earlier this year, and found another mention of Medović here. There is also an article mentioning Croatian masters on Radman’s blog with additional images on Underpaintings.

There are few images on Wikimedia Commons and a Wikipedia bio.

I also found this site, which is set in a little frame so small it’s bizarre; I’ve broken out the individual pages for the gallery and bio.

New York based artist Todd M. Casey is originally from Massachusetts, and credits his background with developing his attraction to still life subjects that have a feeling of history and suggest a narrative.

Casey worked for a time as a graphic designer in New York. While beginning studies in animation at the Academy of Art in San Francisco, discovered a love of painting that led him back to New York where he has studied with at the Water Street Atelier of Jacob Collins, as well as independently with Max Ginsburg, Camie Davis and Carlos Madrid.

On Casey’s website and blog you will find figures and portraits, both drawings and paintings, in various stages or finish, along with his beautifully composed still life subjects, as well as preliminary studies for many of them, though not always together as I’ve shown here. (I always find comparing studies to finished paintings fascinating.)

I particularly like the way he works with lighting and the play of shadows in his still life arrangements. There are also some landscape studies and sketches.

(The blog is one of those Blogspot arrangements that can be viewed in different ways. If you find the default Blogspot arrangement of “Magazine” as poorly thought out as I do, choose “Classic” in the green bar at the top of the page.)

You can also find a gallery of Casey’s work on Cavalier Galleries.

http://toddmcasey.com

http://toddmcasey.blogspot.com

Cavalier Galleries