Régis Pettinari is a French painter whose work I have admired for years, but am just now writing about — perhaps because every time I visit his blog, I find myself spending way too much time looking back through his extensive archive of work instead of writing my post.

Pettinari is a painter of Paris, in the eyes of many (your humble writer included), the most beautiful of cities. Like a number of artists who have found Paris an irresistible subject, Pettinari has a special fascination with the Seine, the beautiful river on which the city was founded, and around which much of the activity at the heart of Paris still revolves.

In the Seine, its varied quays, boats and barges, beautiful bridges and surrounding architecture, Pettinari finds endless inspiration. His compositions explore the area’s range of moods — in sun, overcast, rain, snow, and all manner of light and shadow.

Pettinari’s work is more painterly than it might appear in small reproductions. In recent posts, he has been working smaller and looser, with a more painterly surface. He has also recently been posting his paintings on the blog with larger reproductions than in past years, much to my delight.

Though Pettinari’s paintings can feel casual and relaxed, they are founded on strongly geometric compositions, a solid grasp of linear perspective, sensitive value relationships and a subtle handling of color.

In addition to his website, you can find his work on the site of Galerie DDG.

If you go back far enough through his blog, you’ll find older posts in which he has both French and English comments. He has since settled on more simple listings in French, but Pettinari’s paintings, like the beauty of Paris itself, need no translation.

It would be easy to simply classify Montreal-based artist Pierre Raby’s work as “photorealistic”; but to do so, I think, is to miss the point.

Raby’s paintings of cups, saucers, glassware and silver are marvelous wonderlands of light — reflected, refracted and bounced from one surface to the next in a cascade of color changes.

Raby’s still life objects imbue one another with color, reveal themselves in contrasts and harmonies, and perform a complex interaction with dark backgrounds in the interplay of their lost and found edges.

He works in oils in a classic glazing technique, building his colors in thin layers of translucent paint.

In addition to still life, Raby paints urban landscapes and portraits, all with a refined approach and an eye for the actions of light.

Raby’s primary web presence is his blog; there is also an older, though no longer updated, separate blog devoted to smaller works. You can also find a selection of his work on the site of the Miller Gallery.

River Landscape with Ferry, Salomon van Ruysdael

Original is in the National Gallery of Art, DC.

Though his name was largely eclipsed by that of his nephew, Jacob Isaakszoon van Ruisdael, early 17th century painter Salomon van Ruysdael contributed to the movement away from the formal Italianate landscapes brought to a peak in the same century by French master Claude Lorrain, and into the more naturalist compositions and depictions of light and atmosphere that would characterize Dutch Golden Age landscape painting.

Here, as in many of Salomon van Ruysdael’s works, the composition is dominated by the sky, filled within windswept clouds into which the rise of the central mass of trees seems even more dramatic than it would be if it was larger in relation to the sky.

I love the beautifully controlled atmospheric transition between foreground and background just at the base of those trees, at one end of the ferry (images above, second down).