Steven Assael is a New York artist who paints and draws figurative works that feel simultaneously sharply focused and viscerally textured.

Assael also looks for texture of another sort, in the vivid personalities of his subjects, often drawn from the enthusiasts in the body art subculture and carrying their own secondary visual texture in the form of tattoos, interesting piercings and a bit of costume.

He also takes on more mundane subjects, but sets them off in thought provoking compositions, like his dreamily posed Bride I (above, with detail) in which the bride seems to float, as if buoyed by an invisible, curved body of water.

Asael works from life, eschewing photographic reference for the experience of painting from life, and the more direct and acute observation it affords.

His subjects can also be straightforward portrait or figure paintings in addition to his more formally arranged compositions, but there is always a feeling of a pause, a contemplative suspension of time, in his portrayals.

Of particular interest to me are his drawings, both life studies and portraits, with their subtle line, carefully observed tone and an ability to capture a feeling of the sitter’s character.

Asrael studied at Pratt Institute, including independent study in Europe on a Pratt Scholarship, and currently teaches at both Pratt and the School of Visual Art in New York.

There is currently a show of his work at the Forum Gallery in New York that runs until May 2, 2009.

There is a book of his drawings, a collection of paintings, and an earlier collection of both paintings and drawings; all out of print, I think, but sometimes available through Amazon and other book search services.

[Via Art Knowledge News]

Note: Some of the images in the sites linked below should be considered NSFW.

In 1911, Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait of a noblewoman, titled Portrait of Lisa Gherardini, wife of Francesco del Giocondo, sometimes titled La Gioconda, and known popularly as the Mona Lisa, was stolen from its place in the Louvre in Paris.

The event caused an enormous stir, eclipsing for a time talk of an impending war, and was the focus of much attention worldwide; until the crime was apparently solved 28 months later with the apprehension of the thief and the return of the famous painting to its former space.

When I say “apparently solved”, I don’t mean to imply that the painting returned was not the original, that was established without doubt; but Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler, in their book The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection, suggest that there was more to the theft than was apparent, and that the true crime went unsolved.

Stealing Mona Lisa is excerpted on the Vanity Fair site and makes for an interesting read.

If it’s true, I only have this to say about the real “victims” of the crime — it couldn’t have happened to a more appropriate bunch of selfish creeps.

[Via Kottke.org]

George Loftus Noyes was an American painter, born in Canada of American parents, who started painting at an early age, and became a noted landscape painter in the Boston area just after the turn of the 20th Century.

Noyes studied with English artist George Bartlett in Boston, and later studied in Paris at the ateliers of Gustave Courtois, Joseph-Paul Blanc and Paul-Louis Delance. It was there that he joined in the new enthusiasm among French painters for painting “en plein air“, and was undoubtedly influenced by the French Impressionist works making headlines at the time.

Noyes was able to exhibit successfully at the Paris Salon, and on his return to Boston, established himself as a landscape painter, painting many coastal paintings. Noyes was one of the first painters to paint Cape Cod. He also painted in the mountains of New Hampshire and Vermont.

Noyes is generally mentioned in association the the Boston School, though I can’t find any indication if he was in direct contact with artists of “The Ten American Painters” like Tarbell or Twatchman, of if he was in contact with the Cos Cob or Old Lyme art colonies.

He did travel and and paint with Frederic Edwin Chruch, including a painting trip to Mexico.

Noyes was also a teacher, whose Summer class students included Henry Peck, Clifford Warren Ashley and N.C. Wyeth.

Tragically, much of his work was lost in a barn fire. I’ve found a few reproductions showing a bit of variety in his approach over time. In the image above, The Gorge, which I assume is of the mountains in New England, he reminds me a bit of Daniel Garber’s paintings of the Pennsylvania countryside.