Harry Clarke was a Irish illustrator and stained glass artist, active in the early 20th Century, in the latter part of the Golden Age of Illustration.

As an illustrator, he is known in particular for his work for Hans Christian Anderson’s Fairy Tales and Edgar Allen Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination.

You can see the influence of earlier Golden Age greats like Edmund Dulac, Kay Nielsen and Aubrey Beardsley, but Clarke wove his influences into a unique and fascinating style. You can also see Clarke’s influence carried forward, for example in the work of contemporary comics artist and illustrator P. Craig Russell.

There is a particularly good resource of Clarke’s work on 50 Watts with excellently prepared images of his work, including his black and white Poe illustrations and a selection of detail crops from them, along with the text decorations and color plates.

There is also a wider selection of Clarke’s work, though with smaller images, on Grandma’s Graphics

[Obliquely via io9, (skip the FastCo Design link, it’s poorly presented)]

[Note: some of the images (particularly the Poe color plates) should be considered NSFW and not suitable for children.]

Artist Derek Penix came from a family in which his mother and grandfather both painted, and took it up himself after high school.

He says his admiration for painters like Nicolai Fechin, John Singer Sargent and the French Impressionists has been superseded as his primary influence by his studies with contemporary painter Quang Ho.

Penix has a crisp, painterly approach with a deft play of light and shadow. I particularly enjoy his paintings of outdoor market stalls and the play of sunlight on brightly colored wooden boats.

Gold is an extraordinarily malleable material. When hammered into very thin sheets, a kind of foil called “gold leaf”, a very small amount can cover a relatively large area, and it can be applied to surfaces for decorative effect.

Gold leaf has been applied to art objects and decorative surfaces through much of recorded history. The most common application familiar to contemporary artists is in the gilding of picture frames.

New York based artist Brad Kunkle, who has a background applying metal leaf as a decorative artist when he was younger, incorporates gold and silver leaf directly into his oil paintings, utilizing the material both for its symbolic and physical and visual properties.

Kunkle uses a very controlled, almost monochromatic palette in his paintings, the subjects of which are women, either in landscapes or amid elements of nature that are often in flux or in motion and in defiance of gravity or other natural laws.

Kunkle uses his metallic elements, pushed forward by the grisaille-like palette, to emphasize these magical or metaphysical suggestions, giving his images a kind of implied magic, perhaps coming full circle to one of the characteristics that has been ascribed to precious metals, and gold in particular, throughout their historic use in art related to religion and ritual.

Kunkle’s work in currently on display in a solo show, The Women in the Fields of Gold, at the Arcadia Fine Arts gallery (Soho) in New York that runs until May 5. 2012.

Unfortunately, the Arcadia gallery’s website (though much improved over its previous versions) has navigation within a Flash file, and I can’t give you direct links. From the home page, choose: Exhibitions: Soho for a view of works in the show (while it’s current), and select the artist’s name from the main list on the home page to view his work as represented by the gallery at other times.

There is a Step by Step process series on Underpaintings.