Originally from Scotland and now living and working in southern Sweden, Colin Fraser paints his luminous still life, landscape and figurative subjects in the painstaking medium of egg tempera. Fraser’s dedication to egg tempera is notable given the time consuming nature of the medium and the scale at which he works.

Almost all of Fraser’s work is or incorporates still life, often in landscape settings. Light is the other player in all of his compositions, wrapping itself around his still life objects and filling his room interiors like a physical mist.

I can’t find a dedicated web presence for Fraser, but the Catto Gallery in London seems to be his primary representation, and has a bio as well as a gallery of his work, In addition, there is a video, both on the gallery’s site and on YouTube, in which the artist discusses his work, and another, longer one on Vimeo.

Cornelis Vreedenburgh was a Dutch painter active in the early 20th century, whose work is wonderfully painterly, richly colored and beautifully atmospheric.

I can find little information about him, and only one image archive with a significant number of paintings: WikiPaintings.

The reproductions there, however, are a bit small to appreciate how terrific Vreedenburgh’s paint surface and brush work are. The best source for that is the Bonham’s auction site, which is where I first encountered his work, and the Christie’s and Sotheby’s auction sites.

Unfortunately, the Sotheby’s site has suffered from a recent WTF “upgrade”, that has left it much harder to navigate and their local search functions almost useless. The best way to search it is from the outside using Google’s Advanced Image Search, with the URL of the site being searched in the “site or domain” field, or by typing: “Cornelis Vreedenburgh site:sothebys.com” into the regular search field.

I’ve listed links for search returns for Bonham’s and Christie’s below. If they don’t work, go to the home page of the site and do a fresh search. Once you find an individual entry, use the zoom function for high-resolution details.

Jacques-Émile Blanche was a French painter and portrait artist active in the late 19th and early 20th century.

He was friends with Marcel Proust, whose portrait he painted (above, top), as well as other literary and artistic figures of the time such as Aubrey Beardsley (second down).

I haven’t found a lot of information on Blanche; I’ve listed a few resources below.

Originally from Russia and now living in the U.S., Michael Cheval’s flights of imaginative visions might be called “magic realism”, though classifying this kind of work is always a slippery process.

Certainly not “surrealism”, a term often used casually and incorrectly to describe fantastic art, though you may see nods to the visual language of Surrrealist painters like Dalí, Magritte and Paul Delvaux in Cheval’s work, you’ll find even more reference to baroque and classical painters.

In classifying his own work, Cheval bypasses these concerns by using the term “absurdity”, referring to his various series by names like “Nature of Absurdity”, “Eternity of Absurdity”, “Illusions of Absurdity”, and so on.

In addition to the galleries on his website of those series, he also has a section of drawings, and another of portraits, in which he has cast his sitters in his absurdist roles and settings, often with reference to their occupations or preoccupations.

Cheval has obviously given some study to classical painting technique and brings a sophisticated touch to his freely imagined subjects. Cheval plays with scale, recursion, perspective and collage-like juxtapositions of objects and spaces, toying with the viewer’s expectations and preconceptions. He often repeats themes such as chessboards, marionettes, jesters, musicians, theatre and fancy dress balls.

[Note: some of the images can be considered NSFW]

[Via Artist A Day]