Naoto Hattori is a Japanese artist based in new York. He attended the School of Visual Arts there a well as receiving a BFA in illustration from the Tokyo Designers College.

Though he lists his profession as including illustration and graphic design, most of the work that can be seen on his web site and other venues seems to be gallery art. He works in acrylic watercolor and ink, creating his dreamlike visions of imaginary worlds with rich textures and a muted color palette.

His often grotesque figures, in turn doll-like, human, alien, animalistic or plant-like in nature, grow, twist and intersect with one another, and parts of themselves, like out of control collisions of mixed DNA set on super growth mode.

Figures intertwine and morph into other shapes, hands extend, body parts distort and eyes appear everywhere as Hattori escorts you through his phantasmagoric dreamscapes.

As in the image above, Inspiration, Hattori gives us an immediate tactile sensation on which to base our perceptions, particularly in the rendering of skin and the textures of materials like wood and stone.

He playfully works in bits of pop culture in places and likes to play with historical culture, particularly the Mona Lisa, of which he has several fanciful variations (I can’t give you direct links because his site, for reasons that are lost on me, is in frames. See also my post on the Mona Lisa.)

His web site contains a small selection of available originals (though all currently sold), with larger images linked to the thumbnails. There is also a section of older sold works, that are unfortunately only shown as small thumbnails. The limited editions section contains the best images, often with nice large detail images.

I’ve listed some other places to view his work below. You might also see his list of gallery showings and check the individual galleries; there is a nice selection of large images on the Copro Nason Gallery.

There is also a selection of Hattori’s work on the beinArt Surreal Art Collective, along with an interview. Hattori is included in their collection, Metamorphosis. There is also a dedicated collection available on one of the the artist’s two web sites.

Some will, of course, find Hattori’s work more appealing than others; and its strong appeal in certain circles may be indicated by the availability in his store of specialized items like prints on perforated blotter paper.

Nancy Worth is a Colorado based artist who has been artist-in-residence at Rocky Mountain National Park and still leads an annual workshop there, as well as teaching in other capacities, including classes at the Cottonwoods Artists School. She attended Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.

Despite her southwest and mountain state surroundings, the most appealing of her paintings that I have seen on the web are of Paris, particularly her paintings of the sun dappled quays of the Seine River.

Worth worked in oil originally and then moved to transparent watercolor, to which she devoted herself for a number of years.

She has recently returned to to oil painting, bringing with her the years of watercolor technique, and her oils have a fascinating quality of feeling a bit like both mediums, with some of the airy lightness of transparent watercolor next to the rough painterly textures possible only in oil.

It has long been a tradition for artists to learn by studying and copying the works of masters who came before them. In the middle of the 19th Century, it also became common practice to paint scenes from the lives of great artists, along with composers, poets, writers and other historical figures.

Here we have Scottish painter William Dyce giving us his fanciful interpretation of the great Venetian painter Titian as a child, inspired by a statue of the Virgin and Child, (and perhaps contemplating the pose as a painting), and experimenting with the colored juices of crushed flowers.

Titian’s actual experimentation with color was likely in the studio of his master Giovanni Bellini, but in Titian Preparing to make his First Essay In Colouring (larger image here), Dyce has given us a wonderful vision of an artist he studied and admired deeply finding his inspiration in nature, as did Dyce himself.

Perhaps because of those sentiments, Dyce was one of the few established artists to sympathize with and champion the young Pre-Raphaelite painters when the critics were savaging them (with the notable exception of John Ruskin, who supported the Pre-Raphaelites and also praised this painting by Dyce, as well as his strikingly detailed landscape Pegwell Bay, also here).

Dyce took his influences from Renaissance masters, the Pre-Raphaelites and painters like Johann Overbeck and put them to work in religious and historically themed works; and a series of frescos, notably those in the Houses of Parliment that depicted scenes from the Authur legend.

Dyce was also a musician, scholar and essayist, winning the Blackwell prize for an essay on the now quaint topic of animal megenitism and publishing a dissertation on Gregorian music.

Dyce is sometimes listed as a Pre-Raphaelite painter, but that’s not correct. He influenced and was influenced by them, but was never an official member of their circle.