Jan Toorop (also known as Jean Theodoro Toorop or Johannes Theodorus Toorop) was a Dutch Symbolist painter with a wonderfully unique style.

He was born in Purworedjo, Java, at a time when Java was a Dutch colony. Ne moved to the Netherlands in 1872 and studied in Delft and at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam.

Toorop’s work fits loosely into the category of Symbolist painting (a bit of a grab bag to begin with), as well as Art Nouveau. At times in his career he flirted with various styles, including Realism, Impressionism, Pointillism and Applied art.

His paintings combined both European and Javanese elements and aesthetics. The long thin arms of the figures in the image above, bottom, are indicative of Javanese shadow theatre.

In The Young Generation (image above, top), we see Toorop’s young daughter, Charley, seated in her high-chair, arms outstretched toward the strange and wondrous world that beckons her. Charley Toorop would also become a respected artist, as would her son.

In addition to his gallery work, Jan Toorop also created book illustrations, posters and stained glass designs.

There is an extensive site devoted to the artist, The Jan Toorop Research Center, which has a comprehensive gallery of his works, arranged by year, along with a bio, writings and section devoted to his experiments with different art movements.

Michigan born painter Sally Tharp graduated from the University of Rhode Island with a BFA, but considers herself a self-taught painter.

Her web site features several series of painting themes, including outdoor sign letters and a series of still life objects on shelves and other still life subjects.

Her primary focus, however, is a wonderful series that she calls Glass Paintings, featuring a variety of glass objects that prominently include home canning jars, apothecary bottles, glass marbles and coke bottles.

These are marvels of refraction and reflection, often with multiple objects arranged behind one another, and cropped close, creating a sort of refractive geometric lattice of color, within which are the representational characteristics of the image.

Tharp has a blog called Sally is Painting Today in which she posts images of current works, oil sketches on different subjects, including her contributions to Karin Jurick’s Different strokes from Different Folks (see my posts here and here).

She also occasionally posts images of her work hung in galleries, from which you can see the large scale of her paintings, such as this image of the painting at top, Sometimes I Feel Like You Look Right Through Me.

Eric Joyner has a seemingly endless fascination with robots; not just any robots, mind you, specifically those wonderfully bizarre tin robots from the 1950’s, largely made in Japan and often constructed in inexplicable configurations; oh, and doughnuts, lots of doughnuts.

Joyner was an illustrator with clients like Random House, McGraw-Hill, Levi’s, Sprint, Hasbro Warner Brothers and Microsoft; and had received awards from the Society of Illustrators and Spectrum art collections. He began to enter juried shows with his own paintings of urban landscapes, Mexican masks, cartoon characters and… tin robots. The latter captured his attention and as his presence as a gallery artist grew and he transitioned into gallery art full time, he focused largely on that theme; oh, and doughnuts, lots of doughnuts.

Joyner’s site has galleries of his work, arranged by year, in which you can find numerous examples of his favorite subjects, which also include plastic robots, particularly the Rock ‘Em, Sock ‘Em Robots, and a few movie an TV robots, like Robbie the Robot from Forbidden Planet (my personal favorite) and the Robot from Lost in Space (who I found out actually had a name: “B-9”, as in “benign”); oh, and doughnuts, lots of doughnuts.

When browsing the galleries, be sure to click on the images to see the larger versions. His work is much more painterly than you might assume, and large in scale. He doesn’t give the dimensions in on the site, but you can see some of his pieces in this video interview on Art Babble.

You can also find a few more images of his work on his blog, Ruminations from a Tin World, though it’s only a few posts.

There is a book of Joyner’s work, titled, as you might expect, Robots and Doughnuts.

As you go back in years through his blog, you’ll find other somewhat related subjects, like tin spaceships, hot rod models (driven by tin robots, naturally), tin cars and other collectibles; oh,… and doughnuts, with and without sprinkles.