New York based artist George Boorujy creates striking images of animals, rock formations and other natural and man made objects using ink on paper.

His website, and the few interviews I’ve been able to find, don’t include much information about what kinds of inks or other details about his process, but the results are highly detailed, textural and visually forceful.

Boorujy’s work is currently on display in a show titled “Blood Memory” at the P-P-O-W gallery in New York that runs until April 14, 2012.

The gallery on his website includes detail crops, sometimes more than one, for some of the images. I’ve taken the liberty of applying an outline to the full versions of his works, that often include white or very light backgrounds, so you can more clearly see his compositions (which some of the blog articles listed below obscure by only posting detail crops).

I learned of the exhibition from the Wired Science blog, which has a nice additional gallery of his work.

Claude Gellée, also known as Claude Lorrain (from his birthplace, the Duchy of Lorraine, once an independent nation in what it currently northeastern France), or simply as “Claude” (rhymes with “road”), was the most important landscape painter in the 17th century, and one of the most important and influential in the history of the genre.

Though born in France, Claude spent most of his life and career in Rome, where he bacame fascinated with the ruins of the empire and created the genre known as “classical landscape” combining those architectural artifacts with his love of the natural world.

As much as I admire his paintings, it is Claude’s drawings that I find particularly wonderful, particularly those drawn in pen and wash in a manner somewhat similar to Rembrandt’s wonderful landscape drawings.

Claude was also noted as a printmaker. There is a new exhibition at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt that features a broad overview of his career and his work in all three mediums. Claude Lorrain: The Enchanted Landscape is on display until 6 May, 2012.

Unfortunately, the museum’s website doesn’t have a gallery of works from the exhibition, though there is a video on the exhibition page (in German with English subtitles).

There is also a new exhibition at the National Gallery in London that focuses on Claude’s influence on the English Landscape master J.M.W. Turner. Turner Inspired: In the Light of Claude is in display until 5 June, 2012.

The occasion gives me a nice excuse for an update post on Claude, for whom a number of additional internet resources have been added since my previous post.

There are two web exhibits that accompanied previous museum exhibits and feature his drawings: Claude Lorrain: The Painter as Draftsman, Drawings from the British Museum at the Clark Institute in 2007 and Claude Lorrain: The draftsman Studying Nature from the Louvre in 2011.

The latter is particularly of interest for its large reproductions of Claude’s drawings. There is even one in which you can see his perspective construction lines (images above, bottom, with detail, from here).

Claude was known for his intensive outdoor studies in which he strove to capture the light of the landscape for later reproduction in his large studio works, and as such not only influenced Turner’s search for light, but that of the later French Impressionists.

(The images above aren’t necessarily in the exhibition, I just picked them because I like them.)

Contemporary American painter John Morra paints elegantly refined still life canvasses of both common and unusual subjects.

His website has galleries of his work in categories like Still Life, Food, Mixers and “Mertz” as well as Plein Air landscapes and Portraits.

Morra says in his artists’ statement that he was influenced by Vermeer, and in particular, Chardin. The influence of the latter is evident in his paintings of crockery, aged metal pans and similar Chardin-like subjects found in the “Still Life” section.

He also has a fascination with the forms, colors and textures of food mixers, particularly those that appear to be from the mid 20th century.

My favorite compositions of his, however, are to be found in the section he calls “Mertz”. I don’t know the derivation of the word (though it seems rather Dada-like), but these are wonderful paintings of complex arrangements of mechanical, electrical and wooden or metal objects that include old fashioned light bulbs, vacuum tubes, glass power line insulators, plumb bobs, vacuum cleaner parts, wooden spindles, musical instruments, funnels, kitchen utensils and, of course, mixers.

He often sets these arrangements against skies or suggestions of skies, presenting them as landscapes of still life objects, and portrays them as bathed in soft light or in muted overcast.

You might call the subjects “found objects” or “junk”, I call them the contents of my parents basement, and I love them for that as well for his beautiful handling of the subjects.

Morra has taught at the New York Academy and the School of Visual Art in New York, and, though I don’t know his current involvement, he is listed among the instructors for The Grand Central Academy of Art, the Teaching Studios of Art in Brooklyn and Oyster Bay, Long Island, and the Gage Academy of Art, Seattle. The latter site has a more extensive bio than his own site.

There is also a brief bio and a gallery of his work on the website of the Eleanor Ettinger Gallery.