Originally from California and now living and working in Virginia, painter Armand Cabrera brings several aspects of his background into play when creating his vibrant, painterly landscapes, still lifes and figurative works.

He draws on his 20 years of experience as a visual development artist for the entertainment industry, in which his clients include LucasFilm Games, Disney, Zynga, Electronic Arts, Virgin Entertainment, Nickelodeon, Microsoft and Paramount Pictures.

He draws on his study of past masters, particularly the painterly realism of late 19th and early 20th century painters and illustrators, many of which he highlights in profiles on his widely read and always fascinating blog, Art and Influence.

Mostly, however, he draws from his own extensive experience as a plein air painter, and brings that sensibility of immediacy and economy of notation to his studio work as well.

Under the “Exhibit” link on his website you will find galleries of studio paintings, outdoor paintings, commissions and narrative paintings. (The major sections have multiple pages, linked numerically at the bottom).

His primary focus is on landscape, and within that genre he tackles a variety of subjects from both his local area and his travels in the U.S. and abroad: woodlands, rocky shorelines, mountains, vineyards, gardens, swamplands, farms and fields, as well as townscapes and marine scenes.

I particularly enjoy those landscapes in which his fascination with light effects is expressed in streaks of sunlight alternating with shadow sweeping horizontally across the composition. He also creates compositions in which value contrasts are reduced, in overcast conditions, but through all of his work is a feeling of color as an expressive element, creating a sense of mood as well as time and place.

You can also find examples of Cabrera’s work on his Art and Influence blog, interspersed with his articles about artists worth investigating (which have introduced me to a number of terrific artists) as well as how-to technical articles about painting process and problem solving, along with several step-through demos. You can find a helpful index of topics in the left column, and his articles are so extensive and interesting that I will give Art and Influence my Time Sink Warning, as you can get happily lost there for hours on end.

Cabrera also teaches workshops and classes, including one coming up this April in Athens, Georgia.

Cabrera’s work is currently on exhibit in a solo show at Interiors of Washington, in Bethesda, Maryland, that runs until April 30, 2013.

Utah based painter Tom Betts sees the world in a teacup, or at least finds fascination with light playing across the forms of teacups in various situations — in water, on tables, whole and broken. He also finds meaning and emotional resonance in the compositions he creates with teacups, seeing them as metaphors for aspects of life and the human condition.

In the most recent series of paintings on his website, his fascination with teacups carries over into arrangements in which teacups on tables, along with jars containing what appears to be preserved fruit or vegetables, are lit by strings of miniature lights. Light from the tiny bulbs reflects an refracts its way around and through the objects, including the translucent sides of the cups, and casts delicate, intricate shadows against walls and table tops.

Betts works from life, drawings and photographs of his subjects, using a controlled palette of nine or ten colors. He studied painting and drawing at the University of Utah and now teaches there.

If you go back further into his body of work (via the horizontal scrollbar at the bottom of his home page) you will find other subjects, including precursors to the current series as well as figurative work and nighttime cityscapes.

You can find additional work on the sites of galleries in which his work is represented (listed below), and an article discussing his work and process on Artists Network.