Athur Mathews was a California painter active in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.

Mathews is sometimes thought of as an Art Nouveau artist. He and his wife Lucia Mathews, also an artist and one of his former students at the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art in San Francisco, brought together influences from the European Art Nouveau artists, the burgeoning American Arts and Crafts movement (of which they were an influential part) and the ideals of classical art, and created a style that came to be called the California Decorative Style.

Arthur Mathews was trained as both an artist and an architect. He studied painting at the San Francisco School of Design and later at the Academie Julian in Paris. There, like many American painters of the time, he was exposed to the creative explosion of avant-garde European art. Unlike most of his compatriots, he did not become enamored of the techniques of the French Impressionists, but took his inspiration from the graceful elegance of Art Nouveau (see my post on Alphonse Mucha) and the sublime tonalism of Whistler. (It’s sometimes hard to remember that Art Nouveau and Impressionism were essentially contemporary, Mucha and Gauguin shared a studio for a time.)

Mathews returned to California and became director of the San Francisco School of Design; and brought his various influences to bear on the creation of brilliantly colored and elegantly naturalistic California landscapes. He became an influential teacher and, though he was not a proponent of Impressionist ideals, counted among his students major figures of California Impressionism and plein air painting like Granville Redmond.

Arthur and Lucia produced a range of artistic and decorative works — stained glass, carved frames, furniture, graphic design and illustration. After the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, they joined with like minded artists and artisans and tried to make their part in rebuilding San Fancisco a guiding and enlightening role, with the dream of making the city a cultural utopia.

Unfortunately, there aren’t lot of high-resolution images of their work on the web just yet. As their influence and importance is rediscovered, that should change.

Those in the Ohio area can see an exhibit currently at the Akron Art Museum (originally organized by the Oakland Museum of California) called California as Muse: The Art of Arthur and Lucia Mathews that runs until September 7, 2008.

For the rest of us, there is a new book created to accompany the exhibit, The Art of Arthur & Lucia Mathews by Harvey L. Jones.

There is a nice post about Arthur Mathews, with several images, on the 2blowhards blog, and I’ve listed what other resources I could find for you below.

[Exhibit link via Art Knowledge News]

Naoto Hattori is a Japanese artist based in new York. He attended the School of Visual Arts there a well as receiving a BFA in illustration from the Tokyo Designers College.

Though he lists his profession as including illustration and graphic design, most of the work that can be seen on his web site and other venues seems to be gallery art. He works in acrylic watercolor and ink, creating his dreamlike visions of imaginary worlds with rich textures and a muted color palette.

His often grotesque figures, in turn doll-like, human, alien, animalistic or plant-like in nature, grow, twist and intersect with one another, and parts of themselves, like out of control collisions of mixed DNA set on super growth mode.

Figures intertwine and morph into other shapes, hands extend, body parts distort and eyes appear everywhere as Hattori escorts you through his phantasmagoric dreamscapes.

As in the image above, Inspiration, Hattori gives us an immediate tactile sensation on which to base our perceptions, particularly in the rendering of skin and the textures of materials like wood and stone.

He playfully works in bits of pop culture in places and likes to play with historical culture, particularly the Mona Lisa, of which he has several fanciful variations (I can’t give you direct links because his site, for reasons that are lost on me, is in frames. See also my post on the Mona Lisa.)

His web site contains a small selection of available originals (though all currently sold), with larger images linked to the thumbnails. There is also a section of older sold works, that are unfortunately only shown as small thumbnails. The limited editions section contains the best images, often with nice large detail images.

I’ve listed some other places to view his work below. You might also see his list of gallery showings and check the individual galleries; there is a nice selection of large images on the Copro Nason Gallery.

There is also a selection of Hattori’s work on the beinArt Surreal Art Collective, along with an interview. Hattori is included in their collection, Metamorphosis. There is also a dedicated collection available on one of the the artist’s two web sites.

Some will, of course, find Hattori’s work more appealing than others; and its strong appeal in certain circles may be indicated by the availability in his store of specialized items like prints on perforated blotter paper.