Unfinished Tademas

Sir Lawrence Alma Tadema is known for highly finished paintings of Roman life. But during his development stages, he could be pretty loose and improvisational.


(Click to enlarge.) There are a few unfinished paintings that suggest he switched gears part way through the painting and introduced new figures with a brush. They’re drawn in quickly with a thin sable brush to establish an outline. The face of the lower woman is roughly blocked in with  simple planes. The skin tones of the farthest figure has been filled in with a semi-opaque scumble. The middle figure has been refined another step forward.


This unfinished painting shows what a painting might look like in the midst of rethinking and reworking. This time he’s drawing outlines in a light opaque medium (I’m not sure what it is--chalk? white oil?). He seems to be trying to place one or more male faces on the right.

The modulation of tones and edges in the main face has been taken farther along.

Ideally major changes should be done over sections where the paint has been scraped down to the priming, to avoid pentimenti from showing up later.


LINKS
Wikipedia on Tadema
Alma Tadema Complete Works on the web
Pentimento on Wikipedia
BOOKS
Lawrence Alma-Tadema
Alma-Tadema: The painter of the Victorian vision of the ancient world
Previously: Tadema's Antony and Cleopatra

Answers for Eric

Eric “SuperVillain” Millen runs a blog called “My Favorite Artists,” where he asks 10 questions of people like Drew Struzan, Jean-Baptiste Monge, Thomas Kuebler, Vincent Dutrait and Scott Gustafson.



He invited me to take the witness stand.

1. Who is your favorite artist?
Well, besides everyone on your blog, Eric, (Man, you've got good taste!), I have lots of favorites from the past, and they change from week to week. This week I would say Adolph von Menzel, the self-taught German realist. But if Mr. Menzel saw me admiring his drawings, he would shake his head and say, “Don’t look at my art. Look at Nature. That’s where you’ll find your answers.”

2. Do you offer workshops for artists?
Don’t you remember? You’ve been enrolled in two of them! Each time it’s a different topic: designing a Pan figure, dinosaurs in street scenes, painting in colored light, inventing “tool people.” The next one is a lecture/demo on composition at LAAFA in October.

3. What do you like to listen to while you work?
I listen to almost every kind of music. But I keep coming back to Bach, Mozart, and Brahms. They have depths beyond depths. If only art could go where music goes.

4. What medium and tools do you use to create your art?
Oils and watercolors for painting. Sculpey for maquettes. Water-soluble colored pencils for sketching. Dip pens for lettering. I’m moving boldly forward into the nineteenth century. But I love my computer, too, for writing, graphic design, and video editing.

5. During an average week how many hours a day / week do you work on creating art?
There’s no average. I tend to do five years’ worth of paintings in the space of two years, and then fool around with other things for the next three years until the next book blooms in my head.


6. Are you working your dream job?
Yes, but remember, dreams are made tangible by means of drudgery. For one hour of flight, there are 999 hours spent in the hangar, tinkering with the engine and the ailerons.

7. Do you feel it’s important for others to pursue their dream jobs?
I can’t worry about what choices others should make, especially regarding dreams, which are inherently dangerous. But a life without illusions may be more dangerous in the long run. 


8. Where can people see your work (online, conventions or exhibits)?
The best place to start online is my blog. My other websites, JamesGurney.com and Dinotopia.com are due for updating, which I hope to do in September. I'll be attending the Baby Tattooville artist collectors' event in October, but I'm afraid that's sold out. Exhibit-wise, there are currently two of my paintings in a museum in Maine. And in 2012 there will be two big Dinotopia retrospective exhibitions, one in the Wisconsin and one in New England.

9. Was there a certain moment that you knew you wanted to be an artist?
When I was thirteen, I woke up to the idea that art could be a job as well as a hobby. That happened when people began to pay me for my calligraphy and my pen drawings. Since then the challenge has been, as Robert Frost once said, “to unite my avocation and my vocation as my two eyes make one in sight."

10. Is there anything else you would like to add or say to other artists?
You, Mr. Millen, are the only person who ever asked me for my used brushes, which you replaced with new brushes. For the generosity of that trade, I salute you! And my one question for you is: what did you do with all those old brushes?

Eric Millen's "My Favorite Artists"

Book Exhibit in Maine

An exhibition of children’s book illustration has opened at the University of New England’s gallery in Portland, Maine, curated by its director, Anne Zill, at left.

The show includes original works by Dr. Seuss, Maurice Sendak, Jules Feiffer, Jerry Pinkney, Eric Carle, Barry Moser, and Trina Schart Hyman.


 I’m honored to have two Dinotopia paintings in the show, “Windmill Village” and “Gold Dome.” The exhibition is on view through Oct. 30 .

"Children's Book Illustrators" official show site. http://www.une.edu/artgallery/childrensbook.cfm

Thanks to A.Y. Kamila of the Portland Press Herald blog for the photo.

Painting Underwater

Is it possible to do a painting underwater?


In this photograph, noted fish painter Stanley Meltzoff (1917-2006) appears to be “plein-water” painting on the sea floor. He is using an easel, a palette, a brush, and scuba gear.

But the artist explained that it was a hoax. “Having often been asked how I paint a fish underwater,” he said, “I decided to photograph the process for an exhibition catalogue, and I included the obvious impossibilities in the photo to make it unbelievable." (Below: a studio painting by Meltzoff)


“The figure standing before the easel has no mask and so is unable to see underwater, but people take it seriously and ask what sort of paints I use and how I get the fish to pose.” (quoted from Meltzoff & Rivkin, 2010)

Earlier artists such as Chris E. Olsen, left, (1880-1965) actually painted underwater, preparing for the ocean backdrops in American Museum of Natural History (Thanks, Adrien and AMNH).

 Zarh Pritchard (1866-1956) was probably the first to paint underwater. In 1904, Pritchard went to Tahiti, where he swam underwater, holding his breath while making sketches first using using crayons on paper that had been taped to glass and then oiled. He then acquired the only diving suit in Tahiti and produced the first genuine undersea paintings. (Burgess, 1994, pp. 123-124)


“For his underwater work Pritchard used lambskin soaked with oil and brushes thoroughly soaked in oil. Wearing a diver's helmet, serviced by a tank from a boat on the surface, he sank to the seafloor with a coral or stone weight, selected the view that he wanted, had his canvas and materials lowered to him from the boat above, and painted for about half an hour....He preferred the depth of about 30 feet, where he found the light clear and at its best. In calm waters off Tahiti he could actually leave his easel on the seafloor and go back the next day to finish his picture. Most of his underwater work was used as sketches for later completed pictures.” (Shor, 2010)

Zahr wrote about the world where he most loved to paint: "It is a dream world in which everything is enveloped in soft sheen. On reaching bottom, it is as if one were temporarily resting on a dissolving fragment of some far planet. Nowhere does substance appear beyond the middle distance and material forms insensibly vanish into the veils of surrounding color" (Burgess, 1994, p. 158).

Many of his paintings were brought back to San Francisco where they were destroyed in the 1906 earthquake.

I would like to thank the following sources:
Rivkin, Mike, and Meltzoff, Stanley: “Stanley Meltzoff, Picture Maker, 2010”
Shor, Elizabeth. “Zahr H. Pritchard: A Biography" manuscript in the Scripps Institute
Burgess, Thomas. 1994. Take Me Under the Sea: "The Man Who Painted Under the Sea" (pages 93-160), The Ocean Archives, Salem, Oregon.

Meltzoff on Wikipedia
Meltzoff painting from Frazer Fine Art 
Windows on Nature: The Great Habitat Dioramas of the American Museum of Natural History
Previously: Color Underwater

Artist Daily Writeup

Many thanks to Courtney Jordan of Artist Daily for the kind review of Color and Light. 



Artist Daily
Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter at Amazon

The DeltaWing at LeMans

A new car design called the Delta Wing will race at LeMans in 2012.


The ultralight concept car has an unusual narrow front end, unlike the rectangular layout of most race cars.

The team behind it includes designer Ben Bowlby and builder Dan Gurney, who won The 24 Hours of LeMans with A.J. Foyt in 1967.



In this video, Dan says, “I think I do have a lot of curiosity.”

I never met my grandfather, another Dan Gurney, who was also a mechanical engineer. Grandpa Dan was the race driver’s uncle, and the namesake of two other Dans in the family (my son and my brother).


Grandpa Dan (the guy in the dark trunks at right) died before I was born, so I can only imagine what he was like. I’ve heard he had the same kind of curiosity, an interest in the unknown or in new discoveries, a quality of being easily amused. I like to believe that it’s a family trait. It certainly was a quality my Dad (the kid standing on the beach) had. He was an engineer too, and he was always taking things apart and enthusing about how to make a better machine. His interests ran more to wind-powered and human-powered machines.

LINKS
Dan Gurney's All American Racers
24 Hours of LeMans on Wikipedia
More at Racer.com
Watch the video on YouTube
Books: Dan Gurney: The Ultimate Racer
Dan Gurneys Eagle Racing Cars
Previously: Alex Gurney, race driver
Goldsworthy Gurney's Steam Carriages

Cubicle Caricatures

Animators love to caricature each other. Working next to each other day in and day out, they know each others’ foibles and mannerisms.
 

Bulletin boards at almost every animation studio are decorated with them. Cubicles at DreamWorks are adorned with caricatures drawn by colleagues. When I worked in animation, it was a mark of pride to have your caricature done, and we would trade sketches of each other. Above is a batch of caricatures from Blue Sky Studios currently on show at the Norman Rockwell Museum.


I did a few doodles of my own while I was listening to a panel discussion by Blue Sky’s animation group called the “Lost Boys.” They’re a group that gets together during breaks for rounds of Mario Kart and trips out to Dunkin Donuts for coffee. They include Nick Bruno, Scott Carroll, Jeff Gabor, and Peter Paquette. Pete just finished up at Blue Sky and they threw him a great goodbye party.

Pete struck me as a good-natured sad sack, kind of like Eeyore—if Eeyore were a frog instead of a donkey. And he’s a genius animator--just check out this blog post, where he talks about how Muppet performances can be seen in terms of a CG character with limited rigging points.

Pete Paquette's blog (with other caricatures of him).
Book: The Art of Robots