Jake Baddeley gives little information about himself on his website, save to call himself a symbolist painter and artist.

Looking through his work, I see classical training, influences from the Surrealists and Magic Realists, and a fascination with the art and invention of the Renaissance.

He uses a muted, controlled palette, with passages of restrained but rich color, and his compositions often have feeling of deliberately arranged tableaux, with questions posed and hints of meaning scattered through the subjects. Often there are objects floating, either in frozen motion or defiance of gravity, and repeated themes of masks, blindfolds and curtains, suggesting subliminal meaning.

The paintings on his website are arranged by year, the sections for which provide a click-through navigation of Next and Previous, though there are no thumbnails. In addition there is a gallery of drawings in the “Other work” section.

You can also find a selection of his paintings on the Ten Dreams Gallery in an arrangement that more readily gives an overview of his work. There are also galleries of his paintings on the beinArt Surreal Art Collective and the imaginary realism art print site.

Prints of his work are also available directly through his web shop. Editions of a book called Dreamscapes, that feature a number of artists, including Baddeley in the 2009 and 2010 volumes, are available from both his shop and the imaginary realism site.

For those in the U.S. and Europe digging out, or still being covered in the titanium whites and cobalt blues of winter precipitation, I’ll relay a gentle reminder from American artist George Gardner Symons, noted for his beautiful winter scenes, that yes, snow can be beautiful, and yes, it eventually melts, and yes, Spring will indeed come back some day.

For more, including links to image resources, see my previous post on George Gardner Symons.

Charles Le Brun was a major figure in 17th Century French Painting. Here, in his Adoration of the Shepherds (also here), he displays his skill with composition, color and light, using them to gently guide our eye through several aspects of a complex scene.

The immediate focus, of course, is on the mother and child, their illuminated figures accented by the darkened silhouettes of the foreground figures. Our eye then sweeps upward with the rising smoke, through the curves of the angelic banner and out into the heavens which have opened into our scene. When we settle back into the foreground, we have a wealth of other figures, earthly and etherial, on which to focus in turn.

Le Brun’s rich blues and deep orange-reds balance and complement each other beautifully, reinforcing the path of our eye and giving the painting a lively, vibrant character overall.