David Gray paints elegant, refined still life paintings and beautifully realized portraits in the classical realist tradition.

In both his portraits and still life paintings, he evokes a feeling of stillness and contemplation, though in the portraits that feeling is often pierced by the quiet but intense aliveness projected by his subjects.

Similarly, Gray works with muted, limited palettes that are often punctuated by a single intense color. That kind of duality, in color, in emotional tone, in light and dark, and in the compositional contrasts of form and negative space that define his compositions, seems to pervade his work.

Many of his portraits are part of a series in which he explores a fascination with head wraps, and the contrasts of folded cloth against smooth skin. Though I was immediately drawn to a portrait of his daughter that seems very Vermeer-like, echoing the pose and colors from Girl With a Pearl Earring (images above, second down), Gray states that Vermeer was not in his mind when he composed and painted the piece; and that he takes his inspiration for figure and portrait painting most prominently from Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres.

Gray was a finalist in the Figurative Category in the ARC 2009-2010 Salon (larger image here), and was an invited artist in the 2010 American Art Invitational.

David Gray is the subject of a featured article in the March 2011 issue of Southwest Art magazine. The online version of the article, which also includes a gallery of Gray’s work, can be read here.

Though I doubt they were intended to be so, the striking works of Japanese artist Manabu Ikeda, seen at this juncture, can seem chillingly prophetic.

The structures, shapes and waves of objects in his work are portrayed as enormous in scale, as revealed by the astonishingly complex textural elements of countless smaller items of which they are composed.

His works are large and created in pen ink and acrylic on paper mounted on board. The level of detail is striking, even though it is just hinted at in the images available on the web.

Ikeda was born in Saga and is now based in Tokyo. He studied at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music.

He is represented by the Mizuma Art Gallery, which has a selection of his work online. He doesn’t seem to have a dedicated web presence of his own (or else I don’t know how to find it as a Japanese language website).

The largest images I’ve been able to find are on Art Inconnu (click for larger versions). I’ve listed some articles and other resources below.

Ikeda is represented in the group exhibition now at the Japan Society in New York, Bye Bye Kitty!!! Between Heaven and Hell in Contemporary Japanese Art, which runs until June 12, 2011.

[Via Art Daily]

Most people who are familiar in passing with Art Nouveau artist Alphonse (Alfons) Mucha (see my recent post on Alphonse Mucha on Gallica Digital Library) are not aware of his body of work that is in a very different style.

The most important and striking examples of this are a series of 20 very large canvasses called The Slav Epic, which Mucha considered the most important work of his lifetime and the culmination of his artistic career.

The paintings tell the history of Slavic people, and are housed in a castle in the small town of Moravský. There is long standing controversy about plans to bring them to Prague.

The paintings are little known outside of the Czech Republic and images of them are not readily available. There are few, if any, in most books on Mucha, though Mucha by Sarah Mucha is listed as containing some information and images on the Slav Epic paintings, even if incomplete. I haven’t seen the book myself.

There are a few scattered examples on the web, notably on the Mucha Foundation, Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons and a complete set with commentary on the site of John Price, and an even better, larger set on the blog, A Journey Through Slavic Culture.

There is also a post on the Golden Age Comic Book Stories blog that features alternate states and preliminary photographs of some of the works.

[Golden Age Comic Book Stories link via @francisvallejo]