OK all you conspiracy buffs and fans of The Da Vinci Code, here’s your chance to get all up close and personal with the master’s famous fresco from the comfort of your computer chair.

The folks at Haltadefinizione, who previously posted zoomable ultra-high resolution images of Gaudenzio Ferrari’s wonderfully intricate Vita di Cristo, and Andrea Pozzo’s amazing trompe l’oeil vault, Gloria di Sant’Ignazio, at 8.6 and 9.8 gigapixels respectively, have posted a new 16 (count ’em!) gigapixel image of Da Vinci’s The Last Supper.

To give you some idea, that’s 1,600 times higher resolution than a typical 10 megapixel digital camera. You can get down to the level of examining individual chips of plaster if you want, but you’ll probably want to stay out at about 6-10% of the potential magnification just to be able to see recognizable parts of the image.

Actually, I find the hi-res version of Pozzo’s ceiling more rewarding to explore this way, flying in and out through his imaginary sky. The controls allow you to immediately turn off the inexplicable music, zoom and scroll, and even tuck the smaller preview window out of the way.

The da Vinci image is unfortunately watermarked, but it’s still fascinating to be able to see it up close. The curator points out: “You can see how Leonardo made the cups transparent, something you can’t ordinarily see.”

Intended to make examination of the painting possible for numerous scholars, particularly amid some controversy about Milan’s ability to protect the work, which has deteriorated seriously, from the city’s severe pollution problem, the image has been made available to the public, and you can zoom, scroll and examine to your heart’s content.

Leonardo reportedly used some experimental techniques in the painting, diverging from the traditional methods of fresco that have made it one of the most durable painting methods known to mankind, with unfortunate results.

For those interested in the pop-culture phenomenon of the Dan Brown’s book and the atrendant movie, you can zoom in on the figure to Christ’s right and see that it is pretty easy to interpret it as feminine. Also, if you print the image out on a vinyl disc and play it backwards on a phonograph, it says “I buried Paul…”.

[Link courtesy of Karl Kofoed]

When thinking about “plein air” painting, which is simply a French term for painting out of doors, the thought is naturally one of landscape. More unusual is the practice of plein air portrait painting, as practiced by classical realist painter Allan R. Banks.

The infrequent pursuit of this approach is understandable. The usual controlled lighting and background conditions, employed to make portrait painting easier, are replaced with the much harder to manage background integration (painting essentially a portrait and a landscape) and the fleeting lighting conditions inherent to outdoor painting.

The result of taking on that challenge, however, is a refreshingly different kind of portrait.

Banks works in the tradition of academic painters from the late 19th Century who also did notable figutative works set in landscapes, like Jules Bastien-Lepage and Daniel Ridgeway Knight, as well as “impressionistic” realists like Sorolla and Sargent.

Banks studieed with noted painters Richard Lack and R.H. Ives Gammel and has achieved notice in realist and naturalist painting circles and has for some time been the President of the American Society of Classical Realism. His essay, Clarion Call, from the Classical Realism Journal, is prominently reprinted on the Art Renewal Center, which also features a gallery of his work.

For a number of years his web presence has been a section at classicalrealism.com, which is essentially an extension of the Gandy Gallery.

Those pages have apparently not been updated for a few years, and Banks has a new site at allanbanks.com. Though the new site is notable for having newer works, the older presence is still relevant as the new site is apparently suffering some newbie pains, like galleries without thumbnails and some incorrect links.

One of the problems, though, turns out to be a plus. What I thought at first was a slow sever connection, resulting in glacial page loading even over high bandwidth, turned out to be the result of a common amateur web design mistake of resizing large images in the HTML rather than providing correctly sized images for the pages, linked to larger ones. Also, whoever is doing the site is posting huge, uncompressed BMP files instead of compressed JPEGs.

Much to my delight, however, the images that are posted are large in physical size as well as file size, which is one of the areas where many artist’s sites fail, providing images that are too small to really get a good impression of the work. If you contextual-click on the images on Banks’ new site and open them in a new window, you’ll find many of them are large enough for you to actually get a real feeling for the appeal of his work; which is beautifully handled, rewarding in the details, and surprisingly painterly; characteristics that smaller images don’t reveal.

Hopefully, the new site will eventually get thumbnail navigation and correct image file handling, but I certainly hope the large images of Banks’ paintings remain. You will also find some reasonably large images of Banks’ work on the Art Renewal Center.

In addition to his plein air portraits, Banks paints more traditional indoor portraits, plein air compositions in which the landscape is dominant (thought they usually also include figures) and still life.

Banks often chooses the subdued lighting of overcast days or places his figures in shadow, perhaps partially for the easier handling of diffused outdoor lighting which doesn’t change as dramatically in short periods of time as direct sun, but perhaps more to be in keeping with that practice among the artists who have worked in that tradition.

The temptation is there, of course, when attempting to describe Jacek Yerka’s fantastical and dreamlike paintings, to use the term “surreal”. I will persist, though, in my cranky insistence on reserving that term to refer to a specific group of artists, and the devotion to images derived from the unconscious that was their manifesto.

So I’ll use “magic realism” to refer to Yerka’s visions of doorways to other worlds, disorienting juxtapositions of scale, brain-tickling suggestions of relationships between the seemingly unrelated, and clever manipulation of perspective, proportion and other visual cues.

I wrote about Jacek Yerka back in 2006. Since then, he has acquired a domain name, yerkaland.com, and handed maintenance of his site over to others, and the site has been revised and updated. My other post still has relevant links to books and other galleries.

Unfortunately, I think the new site is a bit more scattered in the presentation of images than the old one. You will find several pages (links at the bottom) of images in the Giclee gallery as well as in the How do I create my paintings page, as well as in the My worlds and Art for sale sections. The Art for sale section has the largest reproductions.

There is also now a Jacek Yerka gallery on beinArt Surreal Art Collective, and I came across a nice article with images on Dark Roasted Blend.

First, a little bit of Wikipedia-style disambiguation. Since I’m likely to write here about either topic, I’ll point out that this article is about the gallery artist named Doug Braithwaite, as opposed to the comic book artist that some readers might associate the name.

Doug Braithwaite is a painter who works primarily en plein air, or on studio works that are based on plein air studies. His subject matter comes from his surrounding Utah countryside, mountains or town scenes.

He says in his artist’s statement: “I often worry that it will be hard to continue to be a landscape painter in a place where you have lived and worked all your life. But I have found that what used to seem a limited resource is, in fact, quite limitless. The more I paint, the more options for paintings are opened up.”

Braithwaite approaches his subjects with a fresh, painterly style that comes from the brevity of notation necessary for successful plein air painting.

“Painterly” is a term frequently used to describe paintings in which brush strokes or the surface of the paint itself are a visible characteristic of the image. Though it’s not always easy to tell because the images of his paintings are not reproduced as large on the web as they might be, Braithwaite seems to have the ability to capture many of the major shapes or “color notes” in his paintings with single brushstrokes.

It might be a fence post, a tree trunk, the side of a distant house or the plane of a face of rock, Braithwaite captures it with a quick confidence that leaves the impression that the painting was executed without hesitation or doubt.

His color notes are so accurate that the images can at times appear “photographic”, but I think that is again a limitation of the size at which they’re reproduced, and closer examination gives a suggestion of their geometric lattice of visible brush strokes.

In keeping with the geometry of his strokes, Braithwaite’s compositions have a strong underlying geometry as well. In this regard, viewing the even smaller versions of the thumbnail images lets you see the large, bold shapes of color areas that form the foundation of his paintings.

[Suggestion courtesy of Karin Jurick, (see my post on Karin Jurick)]