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.

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Promoting some friends and some clients of my website design business

Eric Drooker

February 16, 2011

It’s worth a visit to the website of illustrator, painter and graphic novel artist Eric Drooker for his beautifully realized, humorous and thought provoking New Yorker covers alone.

You can add to this his expressive paintings and graphically powerful drawings, along with previews of some of his illustrated books, notably Howl (images above, 3rd from bottom), a graphic novel illustrating Allen Ginsburg’s landmark poem, based on the animation Drooker designed for the recent feature film.

Drooker has collaborated with Ginsburg before on a volume called Illuminated Poems, and the poet wrote a bio of Drooker that appears on his website.

One of Drooker’s other graphic stories, Flood! A Novel in Pictures, is drawn in his stark, woodcut-like black and white style, in some ways reminiscent of the groundbreaking graphic stories of Frans Masareel.

When visiting Drooker’s website, be sure to note that the sections devoted to individual books include previews of the books and more, often with additional illustrations.

Many of his drawings and paintings share with his New Yorker covers a “stop and think” visual twist, like the wonderful “X-Ray Manhattan” (images above, 2nd from bottom and detail, bottom).

There is an additional gallery and a brief slideshow about his process on the site of his artist’s representative, Richard Solomon.

In addition to The New Yorker, his illustrations appear in publications like The New York Times, The Village Voice, The Nation, The Guardian and Heavy Metal.

Drooker often gives lectures at colleges, universities and similar venues, and will be appearing at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco on Wednesday, March 16, 2011, for an event called The Surreal World of Eric Drooker, described as “a slide lecture with live musical accompaniment by the artist”.

www.drooker.com
Eric Drooker on Richard Solomon, Artists Representative
Eric Drooker on The New Yorker
Bio on Wikipedia

Categories:
Comics, Illustration
“Watercolour” at the Tate Britain

February 15, 2011

Watercolor, or watercolour, with an added “u” if you learned your English in England (grin), has a long history, perhaps going back to cave paintings that predate most of recorded history.

Watercolor involves the creation of paint by suspending pigment in a water soluble binder, for a long time animal hide glues or plant sugars, but as of the 19th Century, gum arabic, made from the sap of acacia trees.

Though watercolor has been around for all of that time, its use by artists was predominantly relegated to studies, location sketches and personal notation. It wasn’t until the 18th Century that artists, most notably in England, brought watercolor to the fore as an artistic medium for finished works.

A new exhibition at the Tate Britain seeks to celebrate and expand on that heritage. Simply called “Watercolour“, the exhibit traces the history of watercolor back over 800 years, features a wide variety of artists, styles, periods and subject matter, and of course brings forward the greats of the “English School” of watercolorists, including William Blake and JMW Turner along with the Pre-Raphaelites and a number of contemporary painters.

It seeks to broaden the perception of watercolor as a medium, beyond the bounds of the common association of watercolor with landscape, amateur painters and sketches.

Unfortunately the Tate hasn’t put much of the exhibition online, but there are a few images and some videos on the site (one of which shows you Turner’s portable watercolor palette), as well as other images on the Tate Blog.

The best selection of images from the exhibition is probably in the Guardian article, Watercolor at Tate Britain – in pictures, and accompanying the text articles Tate Britain makes a splash with watercolours and Tate Britain’s Watercolour: Awash with inspiration (they’re so witty, those British), and Watercolour at Tate Britain – review.

There is a book accompanying the exhibition, also simply titled Watercolour (also here), authored by its curator, Alison Smith.

Watercolor at Tate Britain runs until 21 August 2011.

(Images above: JMW Turner, Rachael Pedder-Smith, Paul Sandby, JMW Turner, William Blake, Thomas Girtin)

Watercolour at Tate Britain, to 21 August 2011
Tate Blog, also here
Watercolor at Tate Britain – in pictures, Guardian

Categories:
Gallery and Museum Art, Watercolor and Gouache
Van Gogh’s yellows turning brown

February 14, 2011

Much has been made of the advances over the centuries, and particularly in the last century or two, in paint chemistry, allowing artists to work with an ever-broadening array of pigments, and often providing much needed replacements for older, plant-based pigments that were fugitive over time.

Not all advances in paint technology are for the better in that respect, however. A case in point is the mystery of why the brilliant yellows in many of Vincent van Gogh’s paintings have been turning brown with age.

A recent study, carried out with an ultra high-tech process, using high intensity x-rays generated by a synchrotron at the ESRF, a center for the study of materials in France, has found the chemical reaction responsible for the unfortunate degradation.

It turns out that Van Gogh was fond of using the relatively new color, chrome yellow (also here), made from lead chromate. This is an inexpensive pigment that produces a bright orange-yellow (think school bus color), but is prone to darkening. Presumably, Van Gogh choose chrome yellow over the also relatively new cadmium colors (also here) because of their relative expense.

The mystery in the pronounced degree with which Van Gogh’s yellows have been turning brown is apparently due to his penchant for adding white paint, of a kind that contained barium and sulphur, to his yellow. The combination of the other materials accelerated the darkening of the chrome yellow.

Research is continuing into how to stop, and possibly even reverse, the changes to his paintings.

The Van Gogh Museum has for some time been studying his materials, and their sources, in an effort to better conserve the works, and conservators have encountered other uses of fugitive pigments (see my post on the Restoration of Van Gogh’s The Bedroom).

One of the paintings examined in the recent study was Van Gogh’s Bank of the Seine (above). The Van Gogh museum’s page for this painting also has an interesting video about their comparison of the work, and the techniques used, with that of his contemporary, Monet.

[Via io9]

Van Gogh paintings degraded by UV-driven reaction, BBC News
Deterioration of Chrome Yellow Pigments, Van Gogh Museum
Bank of the Seine, Van Gogh Museum

Categories:
Gallery and Museum Art, Tools and Techniques
Olga Antonenko and Arseny Gutov (update)

February 13, 2011

When I first wrote about Russian concept artists, matte painters and illustrators Olga Antonenko and Arseny Gutov back in 2006, I was disappointed that their shared website, CGpolis didn’t assign credits for individual pieces, so it was impossible to determine which works were by one artist or the other, or whether any or all were collaborative.

The bad news is that I still can’t find much about the two artists individually, short of a small gallery on CGSociety credited to Antonenko, and two digital portraits on CGSociety and a small deviantART gallery devoted to Gutov.

The good news is that the CGplis site has been expanded and added to with more of their work. It’s divided into sections devoted to concept art, matte painting, 3D Graphics, compositing, cartoons and personal artworks in both digital and traditional media.

Of particular interest to me were the cartoons and concept art sections, where their boldly colorful and wonderfully stylized work for a number of projects comes to the fore.

http://cgpolis.com
My previous post on Olga Antonenko & Arseny Gutov

Categories:
Concept & Visual Dev.
Caravaggio in Rome

February 12, 2011

Michelangelo Merisi, AKA Caravaggio, was one of history’s great painters. Born in Milan, his later assigned name come from his father’s association with the town of Caravaggio.

Caravaggio spent a good part of his checkered life in Rome, where an exhibition of his work ~~goes~~ went on display on the 20th of February and ~~runs~~ ran until 13 June, ~~2011~~ 2010. [Sorry: got the year wrong – this was last year, I got caught in an internet time warp. I’ve changed tense in the rest of the article See addendum below.]

The exhibition marked the 400th anniversary of the artist’s death and was at the Scuderie del Quirinale, a museum housed in what was once stables for a palace.

The exhibition consisted of 24 paintings, seemingly a small number for a major exhibit, but the curators eschewed the usual practice of including works “related to” or “of the school of, or “from the workshop of” and limited the selections to works accepted without question to be from the master’s hand.

On loan from a number of sources were some of Caravaggio’s most striking and iconic works, a surprising accomplishment given the anniversary year.

The museum’s pages for the exhibition have information and a viewer for the works. The latter is unfortunately a poorly designed Flash module, in which you must painstakingly click through the thumbnails three at a time (how much simpler a page of linked thumbnails would have been, but museum sites love their little widgets).

The reward, after clicking on the larger preview image, is a pop-up with a reasonably large image of the painting. It’s tedious, but worth clicking through just to see the impressive selection of works included in the exhibit.

For better reproductions, see a resource like the Web Gallery of Art, or one of the many other resources for Caravaggio listed on ArtCyclopedia.

[Correction: I saw a notice about this exhibit in Rome, that is current and runs to 15 May, 2011. I did a Google search and came up with the other one from last year. Sorry to disappoint, but the online resources are still there and make a good jumping off point for digging into Caravaggio, always a worthwhile pursuit. – Charley]

Caravaggio at Scuderie del Quirinale, 20 February – 13 June, 2011
Review on Boston.com
Caravaggio on Web Gallery of Art
Caravaggio on ArtCyclopedia
My previous related posts:
Caravaggio
Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus comes to Chicago
Rembrandt vs Caravaggio

Categories:
Gallery and Museum Art
The Lighthouse Keeper

February 11, 2011

The Lighthouse Keeper is a beautifully realized short (3 minute) animation that won the award for “Best Graduation Film” from the 2010 Annecy festival.

The film was created by a team of students (credits on the Vimeo page) graduating from the amazing Gobelins, l’école de l’image in Paris.

(See my previous posts about Gobelins students’ animations for Annecy, or a general search of Lines and Colors for other mentions.)

[Via Irene Gallo’s Saturday morning cartoons]

The Lighthouse Keeper, on Vimeo

Categories:
Animation