Lines and Colors

Lines and Colors is a blog about painting, drawing, sketching, illustration, comics, cartoons, webcomics, art history, concept art, gallery art, digital art, artist tools and techniques, motion graphics, animation, sci-fi and fantasy illustration, paleo art, storyboards, matte painting, 3d graphics and anything else I find visually interesting. If it has lines and/or colors, it’s fair game.

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Promoting some friends and some clients of my website design business

Neil Hollingsworth

May 11, 2006

One of the wonderful things about light, for those of us who are constantly fascinated by it, is the way it bounces around, changing and being changed by the objects it encounters.

I have to admit to a particular fascination with curved reflective surfaces and transparent objects, so Neil Hollingsworth, who paints both of these subjects with considerable finesse, had my attention as soon as I saw his work.

If you follow his eye, you can immerse yourself in a world of subtle patterns of light, shadow and contrast as sunlight, usually an angular streak slanting in through a window, cascades across, around and through the everyday objects that Hollingsworth has set up to paint. Wrapped in these soft beams, the tea kettles, coffee urns, milk bottles, glasses and cups become worlds in themselves with rooms reflected in objects and shadows revealing form as much as the light.

Hollingsworth has a quiet but intense eye for contrast and tone, and a remarkably fresh sense of composition that make his paintings more inviting and fascinating than the subjects themselves might suggest.

His still life paintings of fruit are handled with the same sensitivity for the description of form with light and shadow, usually composed with strong backlighting so that the shadows are central and the light wrapping around both edges, lending them a visual drama seldom encountered in still life.

Hollingsworth tackles other subjects, exterior scenes, architectural elements, figurative work and animals, but it is the intimate paintings of simple objects, and the not-so-simple ways that light interacts with them, that really shine.

Neil Hollingsworth is married to painter Karen Hollingsworth, who I profiled back in April. Though you can certainly see shared influences and common subjects like sunlight on draped sheets, they are both strong painters with their own sensibilities. (Their house must have great windows, though. It seems like they have “sunlight on tap”.) Both painters have a talent for transforming the mundane into the wonderful with their mastery of light and shade.

www.neilhollingsworth.com

Categories:
Gallery and Museum Art
Kean Soo

May 10, 2006

Jellaby is a web comics story by Kean Soo about a precocious but lonely little girl named Portia who finds a purple monster, also apparently lonely and alienated, in the woods behind her home. She befriends, and in turn is befriended by, the monster, perhaps in light of the famous quote from Shakespeares’s Portia that “the quality of mercy is not strain’d…” and “…blesseth him that gives and him that takes”.

The story is in turns wistful, sad, funny and charming, drawn in a style that might be suitable for children’s book illustration. Soo doesn’t show the artistic sensiblity of someone with formal training in drawing, but demonstrates a remarkable tendency to work and experiment with the graphic and narrative form of comics. His drawings can seem in turn naive and sophisticated.

I absolutely love the fascinating bit of narrative invention in in the sequence above, where Soo has controlled the intensity of the color so that the visual focus in the three panels follows the changes in the character’s focus in over time. Wonderful! A technique that could only work in the medium of comics.

The art for Jellaby is done in a purple duotone, occasionally punctuated with elements of other colors, another way in which Soo subtly controls the visual focus of the panels.

Soo is transitioning (or has transitioned) from a career as an electrical engineer to drawing comics full time. The front of his site is essentially a blog. There is a section for illustration, which seems a byproduct of his comics work rather than an end in itself, and a comics section which is divided in to three subsections.

At the top, in a section called exitmusic, is a series of short, apparently autobiographical comics stories that are accompanied by music (and sometimes lyrics) of existing songs that are an integral part of the stories.

Below that is the journal, a series of short autobiographical, sometimes confessional, slice of life vignettes in a variety of styles. The art and writing style varies with the emotional content of the piece.

At the bottom of the page is Jellaby, the link for which takes you to the strip which is hosted on a separate site called The Secret Friend Society. Jellaby co-exists on the SFS site with comics artist Hope Larson’s creation Salamander Dream, which apparently shares a world in which Jellaby’s Portia also exists. Jellaby is Soo’s venture into long form comics.

If you go to the Jellaby archive, and start at the bottom, you can read the strip in order to its most current page. Jellaby is currently on hiatus while Soo pursues other projects, but still makes a satisfying read.

Soo has print versions of his comics available, and has been in several anthologies, including Flight Volume 1 and Volume 2.

I’m not sure is the arrangement on Soo’s comics page is chronological, or if he has arranged the features in order of importance. If the latter, I would have to disagree and suggest that his work within the more traditional format is the most successful. All of them, though are worth checking out.

www.keaner.net/
www.secretfriendsociety.com/archive.php?cat=2

Categories:
Comics, Webcomics
The Ambassadors
(Hans Holbein the Younger)

May 9, 2006

Many artists of note have “stand-out” works – paintings, drawings or other works that rise to the top of their oeuvre and serve as the work associated with their name. Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Ambassadors not only fits that distinction, but stands out as one of the most enigmatic and unusual paintings in the history of art.

As I pointed out in my recent post on Holbein, The Ambassadors, the full title of which is actually Allegorical Portrait of Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve, is a painting worthy of discussion all on its own.

It is joint portrait, in itself unusual, most portraits are either a single individual or a group. Is presents two highborn French men, Jean de Dinteville (left), ambassador to England and Georges de Selve, Bishop of Lavur and ambassador to the Venetian Empire and the Holy See. The two were friends and are shown with a complex still life of objects in some ways related to their pursuits, a globe, an astrolabe, a sextant, a lute (with a broken string) and a math book, among others. All of them undoubtedly have their allegorical meaning within the context of Holbein’s intention for the image, but exactly what that intention is remains a matter of debate.

The most interesting object in the painting, however, is an elongated, indistinct object that seems to float in the foreground, just above the floor and in front of the subjects of the double portrait. When seen from a certain angle it becomes clear that this is an anamorphic image of a human skull.

An anamorphosis is an image that is distorted in such a way that it only assumes the proportions of a recognizable image when viewed from a certain angle, or by reflection in a curved surface.

Anamorphic images have a long history in art and have been in the public eye in recent years because of their use in the startling sidewalk art of Julian Beever and Kurt Wenner.

The image of the skull in The Ambassadors is only visible as a skull when viewed from below and to one side of the painting. It has been suggested that it was meant to be displayed above a staircase, so that those climbing the stairs would be startled by the apparition of the skull as they glanced upward at the painting. You can see a photographic restoration of the skull image as seen from that angle here.

The painting has been the subject of much speculation, both for the anamorphic skull and the meaning of the various objects arrayed behind and in the hands of the subjects. There are interesting essays here, here and here. There is a list of links on the site of the Department of Mathematics of the National University of Singapore and a short essay on the skull, and other features of the painting on the site of The National Gallery in London, which is where the painting resides.

There are even books devoted entirely to the painting, like Holbein’s “Ambassadors”: Making and Meaning (National Gallery London Publications) by Susan Foister, Ashok Roy, Martin Wyld (additional info here), and Holbein’s “Ambassadors,”: The picture and the men by Mary F. S Hervey.

There in no mention of the painting in Holbein’s extensive records of his major works, yet it is his largest work and the only painting he signed and dated (1533). It was apparently lost from view for for most of the years since it was created until it was “re-dscovererd” by an art historian in the late 19th century.

Symbolic, enigmatic, and masterfully painted, Holbein’s The Ambassadors is certainly a “stand-out” work.

Holbein’s The Ambassadors at the National Gallery (UK)
The Ambassadors at the Web Gallery of Art (with detail images)
The Ambassadors on Art Renewal Center (with detail images)

Categories:
Gallery and Museum Art, Vision and Optics
Howard Pyle

May 8, 2006

If we look at art over the course of time, we see an intricate web of the influences of one artist on another; influences that, in their crossings and re-crossings, eventually weave the tapestry of styles that we call art history.

Howard Pyle, who is often rightly called “The Father of American Illustration”, is one of those remarkable points within that tapestry where the threads converge, the design is pulled together, reworked and renewed and influence radiates out in fresh patterns.

Pyle revolutionized illustration, both through his own work, which introduced a new level of drama, action and visual excitement to what was largely a staid and restrained art form at the time, and through his influence on his students, who included some of the finest illustrators ever to put lines or colors on a flat surface. Collectively, Pyle and his students helped usher in the “Golden Age of American Illustration”.

Pyle’s impact on the art form known as illustration is hard to overstate. His Durer-influenced pen and ink illustrations are among the finest ever done. He was one of the first illustrators to embrace and understand the new four-color printing process, and his paintings are remarkable for their ground-breaking color, dramatic compositions and emotional impact.

Among Pyle’s most impressive accomplishments is the list of students that he nurtured, encouraged and influenced in his role a teacher, both at the Drexel Institute of Arts and Sciences in Philadelphia, (now Drexel University), and at his own school in Delaware and plein air sessions in nearby Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. The list is resplendent with great illustrators like N.C. Wyeth, Maxfield Parrish, Frank Schoonover, Harvey Dunn, Phillip Goodwin, Stanley Arthurs and many others.

At a time when it was highly unusual for women to train in the commercial field of illustration, over forty of Pyle’s 100 or so students were women, and included such amazing illustrators as Elizabeth Shippen Green, Jessie Wilcox Smith and Violet Oakley. Green, Smith and Oakley collectively came to be known as “The Red Rose Girls”, and are sure to be the subjects of future posts as they are among my favorites.

Pyle’s influence extended through his students to their students, and well beyond. The great Dean Cornwell, for example, was a student of Pyle’s student Harvey Dunn. Even though the art establishment and upper class snobs were already starting their scurrilous campaign to denigrate illustration as somehow inferior to “fine art” (a bit of class warfare that continues to this day), Pyle’s influence was felt in other artist circles as well. Vincent van Gogh collected clippings of Pyle’s illustrations from Harper’s.

Rather than try to write an entire book here, I’ll provide some links below to Pyle information and resources on the web. There are also some wonderful print resources of Pyles work. A good place to start might be Visions of Adventure: N. C. Wyeth and the Brandywine Artists by Walt Reed. Although it is not about Pyle specifically and features his brilliant student, N.C. Wyeth, more prominently, it is a terrific book that serves as a good introduction to the Brandywine School, puts Pyle in context and includes wonderful images by Pyle, Wyeth, Dunn, Schoonover, Gooodwin and Cornwell.

In the context of my point about Pyle’s place in the history of illustration, I would recommend a couple of other excellent books that include good sections on Pyle as well as showcasing many of the other greats of Illustration: America’s Great Illustrators and A treasury of the great children’s book illustrators, both by Susan E Meyer.

Pyle was an accomplished writer as well as an illustrator. Look for the wonderfully inexpensive Dover Books editions of the books that Pyle both wrote and illustrated in his luxurious pen and ink style: The Story of the Champions of the Round Table, The Story of Sir Launcelot and His Companions, Otto of the Silver Hand, The Story of the Grail and the Passing of Arthur, and many others including The Wonder Clock, from which the pen and ink drawing above is taken.

Pyle was born and lived most of his life in Wilmington, Delaware, not far from where I grew up, so I’ve been exposed to his wonderful illustrations for almost as long as I remember. Overall, the beneficiaries of Pyle’s influence came to be known as “The Brandywine School”, after the Brandywine Valley and its creek, which runs through Chadds Ford and into Wilmington. (See my post on N.C. Wyeth’s son, Andrew Wyeth.)

I’ve been visiting his paintings and drawings in the Delaware Art Museum, which houses the largest single collection of Pyle’s work, and, to a lesser extent, in the Brandywine River Museum, for so long that I’m sometimes tempted to take him for granted.

But every time I walk into the Delaware Art Museum and stand in front of Marooned, or Attack on a Galleon (above, left), I can feel those invisible strands of Pyle’s influence reaching out through generations of artists, and I’m reminded that you simply can’t take Howard Pyle for granted.

Howard Pyle at the Delaware Art Museum
Howard Pyle appreciation at 100 Years of Illustration (excellent!)
Howard Pyle at The Athenaeum
Howard Pyle at Art Renewal Center
Howard Pyle at The Camelot Project (pen and ink)
Howard Pyle links at the Artcyclopedia
Howard Pyle bio Bud Plant Illustrated Books
Howard Pyle bio on The Illustrators Project Howard Pyle on The Painter’s Keys
Howard Pyle and Twilight Land

Categories:
Illustration, Pen & Ink
On the Couch: Cartoons from The New Yorker

May 7, 2006

Yesterday, May 6, 2006, marked the 150th anniversary of the birth of Sigmund Freud.

For at least 80 of those years, since 1927, cartoonists at The New Yorker have been making fun of psychoanalysis with the familiar image of the analyst’s couch, therapist and diploma that has become more of a cartoon cliché anything except the desert island.

In honor of the occasion, and in celebration of the 80 years of wonderful mockery, the Museum of the City of New York, a city linked with the image of psychoanalysis if there ever was one, has mounted an exhibition of 75 of those cartoons entitled On the Couch; Cartoons from The New Yorker, which runs to July 23, 2006.

The Cartoon Bank has published a book of psychoanalysis cartoons, with the same title, that also acts as a catalog of the exhibition. The book is only available at the museum or through the Cartoon bank site.

There isn’t an online version or excerpts from the exhibit, but you can create your own virtual exhibit by going to the Cartoon Bank, the New Yorker’s online cartoon division (and subject of one of my first posts), and doing a search in Cartoon Prints for psychiatrist and Freud.

Some of them are as clichéd as the image and subject, but some, like the cartoon by the great Gahan Wilson, above, are “heads above” the rest.

www.mcny.org/exhibitions/current/366.html

Categories:
Cartoons
Illustration Friday

May 6, 2006

OK artists, illustrators cartoonists and painters, here’s where you stand: you have 6 more days to do “fat”.

“Huh?” you say, staring at me in wide-eyed perplexity, “Say what?”. “Fat”, I say, “6 more days to do ‘fat’, or at least your interpretation of fat”. You stare at me again like I had spoken in an obscure dialect of Siberian Eskimo, and I casually add: “Illustration Friday, it’s this week’s topic on Illustration Friday.”

“Don’t know about Illustration Friday?”, I say, limbering my typing knuckles in anticipatory blogger position, “Well, let me tell you.”

Illustration Friday is an idea, a word, more specifically a topic, served up once a week on the Illustration Friday website as an excuse or focal point for the creation of illustrations by hundreds of participants across the web. There is no client, no art director, no restrictive format demands or requirements for medium, size or proportions. It’s just the illustrator and the topic, dancing the dance of inspiration.

As artists, and particularly illustrators working with clients, we can easily find our joy in that dance dampened by the requirements, restrictions and editorial/art director conflicts that hang on it like a sour-mouthed, puritan chaperone. Deadlines, revisions, space restrictions, intrusive type and the stress of doing business can deflate our little balloon of joy in the act of creation in short order, and the idea of sitting down and doing an illustration simply for our own benefit, for the fun of it, seems remote.

Illustration Friday provides an excuse, a time and a topic for exercising our creative muscles in a little jaunt free of the usual restrictions. The site consists mainly of a topic, like “Fat”, Insect”, “Escape”, “Summer”, “Broken”, “Ancient” or “Lost”, and the artists who choose to participate create an illustration of their interpretation of that topic, in any size, proportion or medium, and post it to their own web site or blog. They then submit the location of that illustration to the Illustration Friday site through a simple form, and the links to the illustrations are listed on the Illustration Friday site, to be browsed through by other artists and interested art fans ’round the web.

There is a simple set of instructions on how to participate.

Everything is designed to encourage creativity, rather than suppress it. The topics themselves are usually submitted by participants, and the ones selected tend to be adjectives more often than nouns in an attempt to suggest possibilities other than the literal. “Fat”, for example doesn’t have to be obese individuals, it can be a steak dinner, a thick pencil, a large tree trunk, a thick to thin line or a caricature of Oliver Hardy, with or without his partner. Freeing your imagination is the whole point.

Illustration Friday is the inspiration of illustrator Penelope Dullaghan. Aided on the tech side by Brianna Privett, Penelope maintains the site and has just given it a major workover and expansion.

It now allows you to view the submitted illustrations by medium or by style rather than the previous simple list by number. Artists can now submit a thumbnail image, although most just use the same thumbnail to identify themselves, rather than providing a thumbnail of each work. It’s still useful for those browsing the list to pick out illustrations they’d like to check out.

The style, approach and level of artistic accomplishment can vary widely, but that’s a nice result of the process. This is a great place for fledgling artists to stretch their artistic wings, and put their work out for others to see.

The site also includes a list of artist resources, artist interviews and a discussion forum.

When browsing, clicking on the “Link Viewer” (just under this week’s topic) allows you to see the entries in a frame next to the list of links so you don’t have to keep opening and closing windows. Very nice feature.

Illustration Friday is one of the most widely linked sites I’ve seen on art related sites and blogs. Rarely do I encounter a site with a link to lines and colors that doesn’t also have one to Illustration Friday. So maybe I’m not telling you anything new, but consider it another reminder.

Yes, I know I’m telling you about “Illustration Friday” on a Saturday. I wanted you to see the process of the topic building in its early stages but with enough entries for the new topic up for you to get a good idea of how it works. The list of links will build throughout the week.

Readers and art appreciators can check it out as new illustrations are added daily. Artists, get out your pencils, pens, chaulks, brushes, and Wacoms and see what you can do with “Fat”. You have 6 days until the next Illustration Friday topic is posted.

Enjoy!

www.illustrationfriday.com/

Categories:
Gallery and Museum Art, Illustration