Ivan Titor is a Czech painter whose work floats in that hazy twilight between representational and non-representational painting. He paints objects, but they are often not identifiable. You might fit them into the category of freely imagined or hallucinatory landscapes.

As such he puts me in mind of Surrealists and Dadaists like Yves Tanguy and Max Ernst; though if I see the direct influence of any Surrealist painter in Titor’s work, it would be Dalí in his “Atomic” phase, in which objects deconstruct themselves (or construct themselves) in apparent defiance of the laws of time and gravity.

Occasionally Titor will indulge in more directly recognizable objects, but he plays with them in impossible spatial arrangements, exploded into suspended fragments, like assembly diagrams for dreamscapes.

Titor studied at the University of Ostrava, Department of Arts, and is now a senior lecturer there in the Painting Studio.

His web site has a selection of his work, as well as a Studio section in which you can see some of his working methods and the scale of his work. The studio section shows him working with a variety of media, but most of the work in the gallery is in oil.

[Via Peter Gric (see my post on Peter Gric)]

William James Aylward was a student of the great American illustrator Howard Pyle, and carried forth Pyles’ masterful control of tone, color and pictorial drama.

Aylward was born in Milwaukee Wisconsin, son of a shipbuilder and Great Lakes ship captain, and had a lifelong fascination with ships and marine subjects, which Pyles’ wonderful pirate ships and sea stories furthered nicely.

Pyle used his influence to convince Theodore Roosevelt to allow Aylward to go on a supply ship that was part of the flotilla accompanying a floating dry dock that was being towed from Maryland to the Philippines. During the voyage he painted twenty illustrations for Schribner’s documenting the trip.

Aylward went on to illustrate many seafaring stories and ship related books, including Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and sea stories by Joseph Conrad and Jack London.

He also illustrated numerous other subjects, and did advertising art as well.

Aylward was commissioned as an official war artist (see my post on combat artists, and here) in the Engineer Reserve Corps during World War I.

He was a member of the Salmagundi Club and the American Water Color Society, taught at the Pratt Industrial Art School (now Pratt Institute) and wrote a book called Ships and How to Draw Them.

There is a great article on Aylward on Paul Giambarba’s 100 Years of Illustration, from which I’ve borrowed the image above, that goes into more detail and has many images (see my post on 100 Years of Illustration and Design), and a nice post from David Apatoff on his blog Illlustration Art in which he perceptively points out the strength of Aylward’s mastery of value.

Golden Age Comic Stories has a nice series of articles, accompanied by large illustrations, of Aylward’s work for Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (even though some of the preview images are missing, click for large versions), as well as illustrations from Scribner’s and The Century Magazine.

[Suggestion and information courtesy of Jim Vadeboncoeur]

As I mentioned back in February, illustrator Maria Kalman is continuing her illustrated blogging for the New York Times with her current blog And the Pursuit of Happiness.

In her piece for July 30, 2009, Can Do, she focuses on my favorite of the United States’ “founding fathers” — inventor, raconteur, publisher, writer, ambassador, ladies man and all around interesting fellow, Ben Franklin.

(I’ll take advantage of this article to point out for the benefit of any “Freedom Fries” wingnuts who happen on it, that if Franklin hadn’t convinced the French to jump into opposing the British during the Revolutionary War, thereby pulling our fat out of the fire, we would still be a colony of England. I’ll also mention a favorite quote from Franklin, one that is terribly appropriate for our “war on terror” paranoia-filled times: “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”)

I digress; but then, so does Kalman, delightfully wandering from Franklin to Mellville to Tesla and back again by way of a Jell-o mold competition and a green-eyed man named Fritz; celebrating along the way the inventive spirit that runs through the fabric of U.S. history like a bright fiber-optic thread.

[Via Daring Fireball and Kottke.org]