Australian painter Colley Whisson has been painting from the age of 20, encouraged by his father, Eric Whisson, also an artist.

Colley Whisson uses a bright palette and an appealingly textural rendering technique, in which forms are defined by bold strokes of heavy paint, laid on with very visible evidence of the brush.

He utilizes both crisply delineated edges and contrastingly blurred passages. You can see this better when his work is reproduced larger than the small images I’ve displayed above. I’ve included a detail crop of the last image at bottom.

Whisson has a fascination for boldly defined forms, both in their geometry and in the value and color contrasts in which he delights. I particularly enjoy his room interiors, in which the geometry of forms and his economy of rendering come to the fore.

Whisson’s art has been featured in magazines like International Artist and Australian Artist. He is the author of the instructional book Impressionist Painting Made Easy.

Whisson conducts workshops in Australia and the U.S. There is a video here of one of his workshops at the Tuscon Art Academy, and painter Ed Turpening gives a description of his experiences with a Whisson workshop, including a video demo and a description of Whisson’s approach and materials.

Karin Jurick continues to impress me, not just with her wonderfully fresh, bold and immediate painting style, but with her relentless pursuit of her art.

Feeling stymied in her progress as a painter last summer, she took on a personal challenge to paint 100 faces, choosing as her subjects mugshots from all over the country.

The result, from face number 1 (images above, top), which she started on August 7th, to number 100 (above, bottom), which she finished on February 1st, is an amazing array of features and face shapes, skin tones and hair colors, and of course, expressions. Some reflect the harsh demeanor one might expect from mugshots, others are surprisingly compassionate and sympathetic; all are painted with Jurick’s crisp, geometric, almost sculptural chunks of color.

There is a page of thumbnails of all 100 faces; each thumbnail is linked to the original blog entry Jurick posted on its completion. She also created a separate blog just for the the series, called BUST-ED, though they lack the comments that accompany the posts on her original blog, including a step through of the her process on face number 19 (image above, second from bottom).

There is also a YouTube video that looks through the paintings as a slideshow, accompanied by oddly appropriate music, and Jurick has published the series in a book titled 100 Faces BUST-ED.

On her regular blog, A Painting Today, Jurick has continued beyond the series with a new smaller series, based on the comment of a writer who collects her work that the mugshot paintings looked like Charles Dickens characters.