Born in the Czech Republic, Peter Gric emigrated to Austria at the age of 12, and studied at the Academy of Arts in Vienna.

His paintings are representational, but they largely depict imaginary objects or landscapes, that can at times seem architectural, at times organic and at other times, a combination of the two.

Gric paints in acrylic and sometimes oil, and uses computer graphics and 3D software to help visualize and work out perspective and compositional problems before, or even while painting.

His structural imaginings can take curvilinear forms that seem to be obeying some hidden geometry, as if some stone-like material was assembling itself along invisible lines of force.

Other images show the apparent dissolution of structures or material formations, with walls or cliffs dissolving into a gravity defying shower of stone blocks. His paintings sometimes include female forms that are apparently made of stone and either dissolving or gathering themselves together from inorganic elements.

Gric’s website has his paintings arranged by year, so you can browse back through some of his previous explorations of similar and disparate themes.

There is also a shop with prints of images from various times. Gric has also illustrated a number of book covers, largely in the science fiction genre, and you can see some of them in the “Other Projects” section of his site.

There is a gallery for Gric’s paintings on the beinArt Surreal Art Collective, which is where I encountered his work, as well as an interview with the artist. He is also featured in the first volume of the Collective’s Metamorphosis collections (see my post on Metamorphosis, Volume I).

For those familiar with the English Pre-Raphaelite painters, the phrase “modern Pre-Raphaelite” may sound as much an oxymoron as the Surrealist phrase “Soluble Fish”, in that the Pre-Raphaelites named their group after their desire to return to the “pre-Raphael” purity of the early Renaissance.

John William Waterhouse was never a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, he wasn’t born until the year of their first exhibition, but he was very much influenced by them, took on many of the same literary themes in his paintings and is often associated with them from the perspective of a century and a half into the future.

Unlike the Pre-Raphaelites, who made a point of breaking away from the Royal Academy and deriding it’s leadership, Waterhouse was completely comfortable with the Academy and was active as a member.

For all of his classical training and Pre-Raphaelite leanings, Waterhouse was indeed modern in his time, particularly in his later work, when he moved away from his more tightly controlled early style, somewhat in the vein of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema and other romantic history painters, toward a more open and lively handling of paint.

Influenced though he was by the Pre-Raphaelite painters in subject matter and emotional tone, Waterhouse differed in his approach to painting, specifically eschewing the detailed techniques that Millais at one point complained took a whole day painting an area “no larger than a five shilling piece”, and embracing instead the painterly, open brushstrokes of the French Impressionists and the English painters who had taken up their style. Not that Waterhouse painted in an Impressionist manner, but more of a lively synthesis of Academic and Impressionist inspired techniques, a sort of painterly and richly colored academic classicism.

If Academic painting, plus Pre-Raphaelite literary romanticism plus Impressionist color and brushstrokes sounds like an improbable combination to you, the images above, and many others, will attest to its success. Waterhouse is not only a favorite of mine, but of millions. His images are among the most popular and frequently reproduced in the canon of Western art.

J.W. Waterhouse: The Modern Pre-Raphaelite is an exhibition organized by the Groninger Museum, the Netherlands in cooperation with the Royal Academy of Arts and the Montreal Museum of Fine Art. It is the first major international exhibition of his work, and includes eighty painting and numerous drawings.

J.W. Waterhouse: The Modern Pre-Raphaelite is at the Royal Academy of Arts from June 27 to September 13, 2009, and will be at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts from October 1, 2009 to February 2, 2010.

There are numerous books on Waterhouse, including a new one that accompanies this exhibition. I haven’t seen that one, but I can recommend J.W. Waterhouse by Peter Trippi. The latter volume, while perhaps not the most luxurious with illustrations, shows a curator’s keen eye in their selection and accompanies them with well thought out text that gives them a depth and artistic history many art books lack.

I don’t know if the images I’ve chosen above have any relation to the exhibition, I’ve just picked them to be representative of Waterhouse, both in his most familiar and somewhat lesser known forms.

For more, see my previous posts about John William Waterhouse and The Pre-Raphaelites.

[Via Art Knowledge News]

In addition to receiving a degree in physics from Haverford College in 1944, and an appointment to work on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, Clark Hulings studied art with George Bridgeman (whose books on anatomy are among my favorites) and influential teacher Frank Reilly (see my post on Frank Reilly) at the Art Student’s League in New York.

Health issues prevented Hulings from joining the atomic bomb project and he turned to his love of art for his career.

He started in portraiture, but the demands of sitters made him more inclined to a career in illustration. Even as he established a successful career as an illustrator, his desire to pursue easel painting, particularly landscape, led him to study in Florence, Italy for three years, and on his return to the U.S. he pursued landscape painting while continuing his illustration career.

Hulings eventually transitioned from illustration to gallery painting full time. He became an accomplished and well respected painter. His careful observations and tonally complex compositions make for evocative images from his travels across the globe, but particularly shine in his portrayals of rural Mexican village life, from colorful markets to humble shelters to quiet domestic scenes.

Hulings’ paintings interweave patterns of light, often brilliant white against walls and the sides of buildings, with areas of more subdued contrast that are rich with visual texture.

The intricate interplay of light and texture, and his attention to visual detail, can make his paintings seem tighter than they actually are when seen in reproduction, an impression that is unfortunately not dispelled by the small images on his own site and elsewhere on the web. However, if you take a look at the zoomable image of this painting on the Sotheby’s auction site, you can see the actual loose and painterly quality of his work.

Also unfortunate is the fact the the Flash slideshow on the Painting Gallery section of his web site doesn’t function properly (image sections overlap and cover other sections); however there is an older Image Gallery still linked from the Contact page, that is more straightforward.

There also images on the Store page. In addition, there are books and DVDs available directly from his web site; and others, some out of print, available from sources like Amazon.

There are a few videos on YouTube and Hulings’ Facebook page that are audio excerpts of his lectures at the Art Students League, as well as an additional gallery on Facebook.

[Suggestion and links courtesy of James Gurney]