Though he was considered part of the Hudson River School of artists, it was for his evocation of the drama of the landscape in the western United States that Thomas Moran is best known.

His watercolor location sketches of the landscape in Wyoming (image above, 4th down), along with photographs by William Henry Jackson, were instrumental in convincing Congress to create the first U.S. national park at Yellowstone.

Born in England, his family emigrated to the U.S. to an area near (now part of) Philadelphia in 1844 when Moran was 7. He started his art career as an apprentice in an engraving firm, quitting to join his brother Edward who was already established as an artist. He painted landscapes in the area around PHiladelphia (image above, top: Tohickon Creek, Bucks County) and established a reputation as a landscape artist.

At one point, Moran had the opportunity to study in England, where he encountered the dramatic landscapes of J.M.W. Turner. They would remain an influence in Moran’s mature work, particularly in his seascapes.

Moran became an illustrator for magazines. An assignment for an article in Scribner’s Magazine led to his opportunity to chronicle the wild beauty of Yellowstone in the summer of 1871.

On his way to Yellowstone, Moran embarked from the train in Green River, where the otherworldly rocky landscape would become the subject of several future works, including the striking Green River Cliffs, Wyoming, painted in 1881 (image above, second from top). This painting was just acquired by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, a gift of patrons.

Moran painted in many other places, areas of the Rocky Mountains, the grand Tetons (where Mt. Moran is now named for him), Europe, Florida and Long Island, where he later settled and painted many of his dramatic seascapes.

I particularly enjoy his beautiful series of luminescent views of Venice (above, bottom).

Moran’s paintings are large in scale, and the small images I’ve posted above don’t begin to do them justice. If you can’t visit a museum where you can see his work in person, at least look for some larger reproductions.

One of the best selections online is The Athenaeum (note links to three pages of thumbnails linked at top, click image on detail page for larger image). There is also a more quickly accessed selection on Wikimedia Commons. I’ve listed other resources below.

This book on Thomas Moran is well reviewed on Amazon, but I haven’t seen it myself; there is also a book of his Field Sketches.

[News of NGA acquisition via ArtDaily]

I wrote about Polish painter Jacek Yerka back in 2006 and again in 2007. A recent visit to his website showed it to be updated with new paintings and worth another visit.

Yerka, who some might label Surrealist, but I think of as a magic realist, primarily creates landscapes — of a sort. They are landscapes in which Yerka has reached down the throat of reality an yanked it inside out, toes to head and back to front.

His playful and fantastic rearrangements of the physical world have the wonderful ability to rearrange our perception of the relationship between objects, the role of ground and sky, land and sea, animate and inanimate, causing that sublime shift that reveals the ordinary as new.

Unlike the early 20th Century Surrealists, whose paintings often pushed out at you, pugilistically inserting their dream state delerium into your conscious space, Yerka’s paintings invite you in, offering intriguing paths into the strange and wonderful.

In addition to Yerka’s primary website, there is a Russian site with larger versions of some of the images. You can also get an overview on the beinArt Surreal Art Collective and on Zuza Fun.

I think The Fantastic Art of Jacek Yerka: A Portfolio of 21 Paintings is out of print, but you can find copies from other sellers on Amazon.

Mind Fields: The Art of Jacek Yerka : The Fiction of Harlan Ellison, matching Yerks’a work with Ellison’s stories, is in print and available.

Yerka starts his pieces with a pencil sketch, develops the color ideas in crayons, sometimes carries them to a more developed state in pastels and works his finished paintings in acrylic, ideal for his sharply delineated and often highly detailed work.