Lines and Colors art blog
  • Eye Candy for Today: Asano Takeji woodblock print

    Snow at Ginkakuji Temple, Asano Takeji
    Snow at Ginkakuji Temple, Asano Takeji
    Snow at Ginkakuji Temple, Asano Takeji, woodblock print, sheet size 10 x 14 inches (26 x 36 cm); links is to Ukiyo-e Search, large file here.

    Asano Takeji was a 20th century Japanese printmaker who worked in the manner of both the shin hanga (new prints) and sōsaku hanga (creative prints) schools of woodblock printmaking. The former is a collaborative effort between an artist, a carver, a printmaker and a publisher. In the latter, the artist does the entire process.

    In the case of this beautiful evocation of a temple in the quiet of snow — one of the artist’s earliest prints — he is working in the shin hanga manner.

    Happy Winter Solstice!


    Snow at Ginkakuji Temple, Ukiyo-e Search

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  • Harold Knight

    Harold Knight
    Harold Knight

    Harold Knight was an English painter active in the late 19th end early 20th centuries, and the husband of noted painter Laura Knight (née Laura Johnson), who he met when both were art students.

    Harold Knight was known as a portraitist and genre painter. I find his formal portraits of men to be well executed but somewhat prosaic.

    His genre paintings and portraits of women — usually engaged in some daily activity, like writing, reading, sewing. or playing music — are quite another thing.

    To me they speak of pleasure taken in the little, seemingly insignificant, moments of our lives, moments that can be elevated to special and important if only we would stop and observe.

    Some of his interiors remind me of the American painter Edmund Charles Tarbell, and of the apparent influence of Vermeer on both artists.

    I am especially drawn to Knight’s paintings in which the subject is portrayed in front of a window, which gives an indication of season and time of day, and adds to the feeling of being present in the moment.



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  • Eye Candy for Today: Peder Mønsted’s Sunlit Winter Landscape

    Sunlit Winter Landscape, Peder Mork Monsted
    Sunlit Winter Landscape, Peder Mork Monsted (details)

    Sunlit Winter Landscape, Peder Mørk Mønsted, oil on canvas, 28 x 39 inches (72 x 98 cm); Link is to Bukowski’s auctions, large version can be found here.

    Another beautiful winter scene Danish painter Peder Mørk Mønsted, who I count as one of my favorite landscape painters.

    I love the suggestion of a delicate tracery in the tops of the bare trees Mønsted has created with careful control of color and value and a delicate touch with the brush.



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  • Martina Krupičková

    Martina Krupickova palette knife painting
    Martina Krupickova palette knife painting

    Martina Krupičková is a czech painter who focuses on landscape and cityscape.

    Her website is in both Czech and English, with the English paragraphs right after the Czech ones.

    Krupičková paints with painting knives. By varying her marks, she avoids the uniform sameness I sometimes see in paintings done entirely with a painting knife.

    She adjusts her palettes to her subject, with high value contrasts and high chroma accent colors for sunlit landscapes, and muted grays for rain slicked site streets and overcast days.

    Krupičková has a YouTube channel. Most of the videos are close-up views of individual paintings rather than process. An exception is a time-lapse video of her painting her entry in the British Landscape Artist of the Year competition for 2018.



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  • Eye Candy for Today: Anton Pieck’s The Roof Painter

    The Roof Painter, Anton Pieck
    The Roof Painter, Anton Pieck

    The Roof Painter, Anton Pieck

    20th century Dutch illustrator, printmaker and gallery artist Anton Pieck was noted for his charming winter scenes. Here, he shows an artist, perhaps meant to be a representation of Pieck himself, finding a view of the town that requires him to climb to a roof peak. A boy brings him hot soup while a cat casually takes in the activity.

    This was one of a series of graphics sometimes referred to as his Christmas Cards, that were actually intended as New Year’s cards.


    The Roof Painter, from antonpieck.eu
    Related posts:
    Anton Pieck (update)
    Anton Pieck

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  • Ernst Grillhiesl (“ErnstG”)

    Ernst Grillhiesl watercolors
    Ernst Grillhiesl watercolors

    Ernst Grillhiesl, who signs his work “ErnstG”, is a contemporary German painter who works in watercolor. His landscape subjects usually include architectural elements, often set almost on the horizon with a deep but de-emphasized foreground.

    Grillhiesl’s style is a combination of crisp, precise rendering of buildings and other artificial objects and a looser, somewhat softer approach to trees and shrubbery. The result is a visually appealing blend of accuracy and freedom.

    He appears to live in a part of Bavaria where many of the houses and other buildings have red roofs, and a number of his compositions have a nicely subdued complementary color relationship in the setting of red roofs among the greens of summer grasses and foliage.

    Though he has a websiite that includes images of his work, it’s not easy to navigate, particularly for non-German speakers. It’s much easier to view his work on his blog, which is arranged as a website with multiple image galleries.

    The tagline on his blog, as translated by Google Translate, reads: “Everyday life brought to paper with a brush and paint”.

    I have not been able to find much information on either location about how large his paintings are or whether they are for sale.



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Vasari Handcraftes artist's oil colors

Charley’s Picks
Bookshop.org

(Bookshop.org affilliate links; sales benefit independent bookshop owners; I get a small percentage to help support my work on Lines and Colors)

John Singer Sargent: Watercolors
John Singer Sargent: Watercolors

Sorolla the masterworks
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The Art Spirit
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Rendering in Pen and Ink
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Urban Sketching: Understanding Perspective
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World of Urban Sketching
World of Urban Sketching

Daily Painting
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Understanding Comics
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Charley’s Picks
Amazon

(Amazon.com affiliate links; sales go to a larger yacht for Jeff Bezos; but I get a small percentage to help support my work on Lines and Colors)

John Singer Sargent: Watercolors
John Singer Sargent: Watercolors

Sorolla the masterworks
Sorolla: the masterworks

The Art Spirit
The Art Spirit

Rendering in Pen and Ink
Rendering in Pen and Ink

Urban Sketching: Understanding Perspective
Urban Sketching: Understanding Perspective

World of Urban Sketching
World of Urban Sketching

Daily Painting
Daily Painting

Drawing on the right side of the brain
Drawing on the right side of the brain

Understanding Comics
Understanding Comics