Laurel Daniel is a painter from Austin, Texas, whose fondness for the practice of plein air painting gives her larger studio works a similar freshness and immediacy.

She studied at Wheaton College with additional coursework at San Francisco Academy of Art and Austin Museum Art School. In addition to painting full time she also teaches at the Austin Museum of Art.

Daniel has a web site on which you can see her plein air work, as well as studio pieces, divided into landscapes and waterscapes. Unfortunately, the images are small.

You will find larger images on her blog, on which she posts recent works and offers them for sale. She also has a second painting blog devoted specifically to small works; it’s an interesting and I think nice idea to sort them out that way.

Her former career in graphic design serves her well, in that it undoubtedly informs her strong compositions and clear, forceful use of color. Another aspect of her work, both in the studio and out, is a well developed sense of when to stop; avoiding the temptation to overwork a piece whose strength often comes from the crisp clarity of an immediate statement.

Don’t let my nit-picking about the web site dissuade you from visiting it as well as the blogs, there are delightful works to be found in all three locations.

Ukrainian/Russian painter Ivan Constantinovich Aivazovsky (Hovhannes Aivazian) was born in Crimea, an island-like peninsula that extends the southern part of Ukraine into the Black Sea. In a career that spanned a good deal of the 19th Century, he painted nearly 6,000 canvases, over half of which were seascapes.

He painted the sea at rest and roiled with storms, studded with ships and clear of human presence, in day and night, Winter and Summer, through war and peace and from shore to open ocean. He is known as one of the great sea painters of the era.

Born into an Armenian family of few means, he earned a sponsorship to the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, from which he graduated with the Gold Medal at the age of 20. He was sent to Italy for further study and developed into a master painter who would earn the respect of greats like Delacroix and Turner, the latter referring to him as a genius.

His work is in the collections of numerous museums, including the Hermitage in St. Petersburg and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and his increasingly valuable work (at times fetching millions at auction) is reportedly a frequent subject of forgeries, perhaps because of the confusion of provenance created by his prolific output and the political instability of the region.

If Aivazovsky had a second fascination, it was with light. In his landscapes, light is an actor, moody, capricious and mercurial. In his seascapes, light and water are dancing partners, sweeping through a dizzying array of movement and theatrics. Illuminated clouds form a second seascape, an inverse of the subject in many of his works, and are portrayed in a dazzling variety of colors.

Fortunately there are several good resources for Aivazovsky’s work.

Addendum: Someone from All Art News was kind enough to remind me that Aivazovsky is also well represented on AllPaintings.org (see my post on AllPaintings.org). I’ve also added it to the list below.

As much as I happen to enjoy paleontological reconstruction art, which is essentially paintings of no longer extant animals, I have to say that I usually don’t respond well to contemporary wildlife art.

Too often it feels staged and artificial, and seems to lean on over-rendering and sentimentality in place of more solid artistic concerns. Of course there are plenty of exceptions to those (perhaps unfair) generalizations. Ralph Oberg is a case in point.

His paintings of landscapes in the western mountains of the the US and some of the larger wildlife of the area are fresh, painterly and immediate. The impression I had when I first encountered his work was that he was a landscape painter who happened to include animals, rather than a wildlife artist.

That impression was borne out when I read his biography. After attending Colorado State University on an art scholarship and studying at the Seibel School of Drafting in Denver, Oberg briefly worked in commercial illustration and then devoted himself to wildlife painting for ten years. He then became interested in plein air painting, and has dedicated himself to that practice for the past ten years, only recently reintroducing the study of animals into his work.

The result is a lively combination of plein air and alla prima techinque with a knowledge of animal anatomy and characteristics that come from long study.

Oberg uses an almost impressionistic application of paint that gives even his more finished studio canvases the feel of outdoor painting; and his wildlife subjects are rendered with the same painterly approach. Oberg’s years of plein air work have honed his sense of color and ability to suggest complex textures with an economy of brushwork.

His animals are represented naturalistically, incorporated into their settings rather than staged against a backdrop of landscape. Oberg avoids the overly dramatic poses of animals sometimes found in the genre, and incorporates them into his compositions as though they were as much a natural part of a landscape as rocks or trees; which, of course, they are.