Lines and Colors art blog
  • Jordi Lafebre

    Jordi Lafebre, comics
    Spanish comics artist and illustrator Jordi Lafebre works for both the Spanish and the Franco-Belgian comics audience, the latter being the largest in Europe.

    He notably teamed with writer Zidrou for the highly regarded graphic albums Lydie (FR) and La Mondaine (FR) from French publisher Dargaud.

    I particularly admire Lafebre’s succinct but visually charming rendition of the environments within which his characters play out their stories. His characters are likewise portrayed with verve, wit and engagingly emotional expressions.

    Lafebre’s understated coloring allows the character of his drawing to enliven his panels. His wonderfully elegant and fluid inking style uses both brush and pen, augmented with a bit of marker.

    I addition to his website, Lafebre has a blog. You may find some of the same images on both, but if you respond to his work as I did, you’ll go entirely through both and wind up wanting more.

    Unfortunately, there are no English translations of his albums that I’m aware of, but the French and Spanish editions may be available; a few are listed on Amazon (if you can ignore the #@$&! Kindle Edition BS they keep shoving at you). I haven’t yet tried ordering directly from Dargaud or Lambiek. The U.S. resource I used to depend on for ordering European comics is no longer available; if I find a new one, I’ll try to add it to the post (suggestions welcome).

    [Note: the linked sites contain some nudity and should be considered NSFW.]



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  • Hsin-Yao Tseng

    Hsin-Yao Tseng
    Originally from Taipei, Taiwan, Hsin-Yao Tseng studied painting in the U.S. at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco.

    Tseng varies his approach, from refined and finished to loosely gestural, often with areas of the canvas left unpainted. At times he combines the two approaches to superb effect, with a refined subject appearing to emerge out of areas of the composition that are brief suggestions of the continuation of a figure or landscape.

    Some of his pieces are rendered in brusque textural chunks of paint, thickly applied and adding motion with directional strokes. In addition to the images on Tseng’s website, and the galleries listed below, there are some high-resolution images of his work on Art Renewal, in which you can better see his paint application and textural surface.

    Throughout, Tseng adeptly utilizes nuanced control of values and variation in edges to direct the eye and make the compositional elements cohere in a way that makes the relationship of the finished and unfinished areas blend with a natural grace.

    Hsin-Yao Tseng’s work will be featured in a solo exhibition at the Waterhouse Gallery in Santa Barbara, CA that opens on October 10, 2015.



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  • Alice Pike Barney

    Alice Pike Barney
    American painter and pastellist Alice Pike Barney was active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries — a time when outspoken, involved, skilled and independent-minded women like herself were the model for what was seen by proponents of early feminism as the “New Woman”.

    Based in Washington, DC, she travelled to Paris, where her two daughters were attending school, and studied with Sargent’s teacher Carolus-Duran, as well as with James Whistler, during the brief time he operated a school.

    Barney was adept in both oil and pastel, in the latter medium often taking a free approach, with vibrant colors and loose, gestural handling. Her interest in theater shows in her portraits cast in theatrical roles and costume.

    She painted numerous portraits of her daughters at various points in their lives, as well as a number of self-portraits (above, bottom). Her subjects inclided such noted figures as Whistler and George Bernard Shaw.

    A patron as well as an artist, Barney was active in working to make Washington, D.C. a notable city for the arts, helping to move it out of the shadow of New York, Philadelphia and Boston.



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  • Mark Stewart

    Mark Stewart, watercolor
    Mark Stewart is a Texas based watercolor painter and architect. Though his architectural training shows in his adept representation of rural buildings and interior spaces, I find it interesting that the majority of his paintings appear to focus on organic landscape elements and portraits rather than citycapes.

    Stewart lists among his influences Winslow Homer, Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper, and his admiration for them informs his approach to composition, light and texture.

    Throughout his work is a fascination with subtle variation in light and shadow, particularly as revealed in the play of light across textural surfaces.

    The textural element is particularly strong in his approach, which makes the relatively small images on his website a bit frustrating. There are a few larger images on the Broadmoor Galleries website.



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  • Eye Candy for Today: Charles Le Brun’s The King Governs by Himself

    The King Governs by Himself, Charles Le Brun
    The King Governs by Himself, Charles Le Brun

    Zoomable version on Google Art Project; high-resolution (57mb) downloadable version on Wikimedia Commons; view from the other direction on The Athenaeum; original is in the Palace of Versailles.

    This is the centerpiece of a remarkable series of large scale works by 17th century French painter Charles Le Brun for the ceiling of the Hall of Mirrors in Louis XiV’s Palace of Versailles. These weren’t done as frescoes, but as paintings on canvas that were attached to the ceiling by the process of marouflage, in which the surface of the wall or ceiling is prepared with white lead and oil and the canvas pressed into it.

    The panels were meant to be looked at from either side as they straddled the vault of the hall horizontally.

    There are so many metaphors and allusions to gods and myths and muses and history and all sorts of glorious glory of the glorious king in this image — not to mention games and music and feasting and lions(!) and just odd goings on in the various parts of its two sides — that I don’t even know where to begin.

    Somehow, I can’t help but think of a New Yorker cartoon I once saw, in which a court painter has presented his composition glorifying a king to his royal highness, who says: “Give me more angels, and make them happier to see me.”


    The King Governs by Himself, Google Art Project

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  • Milind Mulick

    mulick_450, watercolor
    Milind Mmulick is a painter based in Pune, India, who paints in watercolor, primarily transparent, but also works with opaque watercolor (gouache).

    He often takes a nicely textural approach when portraying cityscapes and landscapes, conveying the gritty feeling of paving stones and weathered walls with passages of dry brush and spatter. He uses both muted and full value ranges, working with the character of each to evoke sunlight and overcast days. His backgroud in commercial art and architectural rendering shows in his efficient rendering and solid grounding in perspective.

    His still life subjects, which often make use of opaque passages, are usually of kitchen items, frequently reflective to the point where they form a mini-self portrait of the artist.

    According to his website, Mulick teaches workshops in his local area; he also has several instructional watercolor books, that are available here in the U.S.

    There are several watercolor demo videos featuring Mulick on YouTube.



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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
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

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