Todd Ford is a painter and art teacher living and working in Texas.

Ford paints in a deftly rendered realist style that pays particular attention to smooth surfaces and sharp contrasts in sometimes closely related colors (greens and blues, oranges and yellows).

He has some frequent subjects, including a series of paintings of plastic toys (which I didn’t particularly respond to) and a more recent series of liquids and immersed objects in jars, and another of cloth partially inserted into jars (both of which I like very much), as well as the apparent beginnings of two newer series of reflective globes and drapery, and close ups of reflective spoons containing pools or drops of colored liquids (which I’m looking forward to seeing more of).

There is also a slightly older series of close ups of the details of old farm trucks, that I find fascinating for the juxtaposition of the weathered surfaces of painted metal with the smooth, shiny surfaces of glass headlights and chrome bezels.

Ford has both a blog and a web site that feature his paintings.

He takes several interesting tacks at his still life subjects. He has several paintings of broken glass, with close ups of bottle necks and the remains of the bases of broken bottles, rendered with an attention to color and transparency, rendering and finish that might be given to portraits of museum quality glassware.

My favorites are his compositions combining the transparency, color shading and tonal drama of colored glassware and drapery, usually in the form of cloth partially in and partially out of colored jars or bottles. There is also a related series of objects like spoons or brushes partially immersed in liquid in similar jars, that explores some of the same visual territory of transparency, translucency, reflection and refraction.

Ford also has a few paintings with light bulbs, broken, whole and even submerged in liquid in jars, the delve into the same challenges.

I’m particularly fond of some of the recent posts on his blog in which the paintings are photographed in place on the easel, giving you a sense of scale usually missing from photographed works.

[Link via Art & Critique]

Julian Alden Weir, more commonly called J. Alden Weir, was one of the wonderfully diverse group of artists that get lumped together under the catch-all heading of “American Impressionists”.

Weir was a member of The Ten American Painters, a loosely tied group of painters in New York and Boston who broke away from the Society of American Artists, which was itself a splinter group from the National Academy of Design. His compatriots in the Ten included Childe Hassam, Robert Reid, Willard Metcalf, Frank Benson, Edmund Tarbell, Thomas Wilmer Dewing, and eventually, William Merrit Chase.

Most important among them for Weir was John Henry Twatchman, with whom Weir formed a long lasting friendship. The two artists painted together, often exhibited together, and were both teachers at the Art Students League in New York. Weir also taught at, and was a member of, the Cos Cob Art Colony, an artists community that sprang up around Twatchman’s home in Greenwich, CT, along with Hassam, Theodore Robinson and Robert Reid.

Members of the Cos Cob Colony were involved with the staging of the 1913 Armory Show, famous now for introducing European modernist art to America; over which Weir resigned from his presidency of the Association of Painters and Sculptors.

As a student, Weir trained at the National Academy of Design, and then in Paris at the École des Beaux-Arts, where he studied with Jean-Léon Gérôme and was friends with Jules Bastien-Lepage, who became something of a mentor.

When he returned form Europe Weir intended to make his living painting portraits, but was unsuccessful in obtaining portrait commissions for some time, so many of his portrait works from the time are of family and friends.

Weir’s style and approach changed dramatically over the course of his career, from traditional landscapes that have a feeling of Corot and Courbet and portraits influenced by Manet, to later works in which he came to adopt some of the stylistic characteristics of French Impressionism (which he at first despised), and a continuing influence from his fondness for Japanese prints.

He was also influenced by Twatchman’s tonalist aproach, possibly also the result of meeting Whistler in London before returning to the U.S. after his time in France. There was also the tonalist influence of his friendship with Albert Pinkham Ryder. Weir’s older brother, John Ferguson Weir, who I can find little info on, was also a painter, working somewhat in the tradition of the Barbizon School.

J. Alden Weir’s intimate interior scenes often put me in mind of those of Edmund Tarbell and Childe Hassam, with their muted light and tactile feeling for wood and cloth.

In his later career, Weir didn’t share his friends’ enthusiasm for traveling to paint in various locations, preferring to remain on his Connecticut farm, which is now a National Historic Site.

In his Impressionist influenced works, Weir sometimes breaks up his canvas into the short strokes of brilliant color associated with the style of Monet, Sisley and Pissarro, but just as often uses rough scumbling to achieve his broken color, giving his canvasses a fascinating textural quality.

Like a number of the other painters labeled American Impressionists, Weir didn’t feel the need to follow the lead of his French counterparts in throwing out the academic traditions of drawing and solidity of form; and his style is often a delightful blend of the two seemingly contrary artistic factions, which is one of the reasons I find Weir and the other American painters of his circle so appealing.