The museum exhibition "
At the Edge: Art of the Fantastic" opens tomorrow at the Allentown Art Museum in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
The paintings and sculpture encompass the worlds of mythology, fairy tales, dreams, monsters, fantasy, science fiction, adventure, surrealism, and the bizarre.
Organized by Patrick and Jeannie Wilshire, founders of
IlluxCon, the show includes over 200 works of from 145 artists, roughly 45 of them predating 1940. It's unlikely that a larger or more comprehensive museum show of this kind will ever be assembled in our lifetimes.
There will be a preview party Saturday evening (
public invited, tickets still available), and the museum opens for free on Sunday. I have two Dinotopia paintings in the show, and I'll be attending both days. The show will be on view through September 9.
Right: "Beauty and the Beast" by
Thomas BlackshearAt the Edge: Art of the FantasticMuddy Colors Post with more information
Focus on Nature, an international exhibition of natural science illustration, opened at the New York State Museum in Albany last Saturday. The show includes 93 images by 72 artists from around the world, this year including Germany and Thailand.
This acrylic painting, by Tara Dalton, shows the elusive California giant salamander, which can grow up to twelve inches long, and will bark when startled.
Other art includes scientifically researched paintings of insects, plants, birds, mammals, dinosaurs, and marine reptiles. I have two oil paintings in the exhibition,
Mud Trap and
Elasmosaurus.
The show, which happens every two years, will be on view through December 31 of this year. There will be an artist event on August 24, and a gallery tour by its curator, Patricia Kernan, today, May 1, at 12:00 noon.
You can
download the whole catalog as a PDF here.
Yesterday I traveled to the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts to watch how a master paints an oil portrait. The three-hour event was offered in connection with the exhibition: “Everett Raymond Kinstler: Pulps to Portraits.”Although I had a seat up front, I couldn’t see much of the canvas, so instead I sketched Mr. Kinstler from the back. Wearing his blue smock, he held his big wooden palette, with the easel and model directly beyond him.
When he signed the sketch later, he wrote, with characteristic humor and modesty, “Jim: You’ve captured my best angle.”
As he proceeded to lay in the light and shadow shapes on the blue-gray toned canvas, he regaled the audience with hilarious stories about his encounters with famous subjects such as Katherine Hepburn, Theodore Geisel, and Eric Sloane.
Mr. Kinstler’s model, Lila Berle, posed under a high spotlight set for a three-quarter “Rembrandt short” scheme with a second light flooding the ceiling to provide a fill light for the model and a working light for the artist. Mr. Kinstler, a student of Frank Vincent Dumond, and a close friend of James Montgomery Flagg, emphasized the importance of finding the distinctive characteristics of the model, rather than flattering her according to some ideal type.
He explained that he was only really showing how he started a portrait, and didn’t try to finish it in such a short time. Instead, he took a few photos and will finish it up in the studio.
As he turned to speak to the audience, I did my best to sketch him with my watercolor pencils, sitting just a few feet from him.
Mr. Kinstler is 86 years old and has been painting professionally for nearly 70 years. He has painted seven presidents
John Henry Hill (1839-1922) painted this oil study near Nyack, New York during July of 1863. It occupied him “nearly every afternoon in the month while our civil war was going on.”
Painting an extended field study like this means working in light conditions that change drastically by the hour. This is especially true in a woodland setting, where the light and shadow projected down through the trees sweeps rapidly across the scene.
The detail shows a section of the work about six inches square. Such extensive studies were common among the so-called "American Pre-Raphaelites." These painters followed the landscape theorist John Ruskin, who advocated: “Go to Nature in all singleness of heart, and walk with her laboriously and trustingly, having no other thought but how best to penetrate her meaning, rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing."
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A lot of school groups and families have been visiting the
Dinotopia exhibition at the Woodson Art Museum in Wisconsin, as reported by Rob Duns of WAOW News.
(Video link in case the player doesn't work
)
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Teachers have brought out model ships and dinosaurs to explain Arthur Denison's voyage to the lost island in the 19th century.
There's a book with a binding covered with the dinosaur footprint alphabet, bronze corner pieces, and bits of ferns sticking out from the bottom. Is it really Arthur Denison's journal?
I was about 10 years old when my family took me to the DeYoung art museum in San Francisco. With five kids, my family didn't go to art museums very often, so it was quite a novelty for me. Luckily, there was an exhibit going on of Norman Rockwell's paintings. I was only tall enough to see the
The Howard Pyle exhibition at the Delaware Art Museum opened on Friday night in Wilmington to celebrate the artwork of the great American illustrator.
I was excited not only to see the paintings, but also to meet many of the direct descendants of Mr. Pyle. Here I am posing (in a suit from the period) with Howard Pyle Brokaw (far left), Ted Crichton, and Howard Pyle (grandson).
Delaware Online reporter Gary Soulsman and Betsy Price covered the Friday night preview event, and did a little interview with me:
"What I admire most is Pyle's ability to conjure imaginary worlds in such a convincing way, both in his writing and in his art work," said Gurney, who works in fantasy and in historical painting for National Geographic. "Pyle has always been the standard in American illustration for well-researched and well-imagined re-creations of historical scenes."
In Gurney's view, Pyle is an important figure because he bridged the world of art in salons and the world of art used in reproduction. It was through illustration that he reached large numbers of people.
Designers of the "Pirates of the Caribbean" movie series have said Pyle's work was the model for Capt. Jack Sparrow and others.
"It was his reach in publishing that made him a household name," said Gurney, pointing out that Pyle worked in different styles and scales.
He was also a gifted teacher, urging his students to identify with figures they were painting and to bring strong emotion into a scene.
His teaching left his mark on painters, such as N.C. Wyeth. Pyle taught classes at Drexel Institute of Arts and Sciences in Philadelphia, at his own school in Wilmington and during the summer in Chadds Ford, Pa.
"If this was all he did, he would still be heralded as a great American artist," Gurney said. "He was interested in capturing a mood and transporting you through a picture into another world. He wanted his students to live the paintings."
At the nearby
Brandywine River Museum through November 17, there are two associated exhibitions spotlighting Howard Pyle as a Teacher and N.C. Wyeth's Treasure Island Illustrations. Here a group of artists (me, Lester Yocum,
Jean-Baptiste Monge, and
Armand Cabrera) do the "pirate walk" next to the original endpaper art for Treasure Island.
LINKS
"Howard Pyle: American Master Rediscoverd" ExhibitionRead the
Good news for those of you who ordered a copy of the 20th Anniversary Edition of Dinotopia. They all shipped out yesterday. The books are all signed with little drawings of dinosaurs in each one (Yes, Emily, you got your "Rainbowasaurus.")
Here's the view from the clerk at our local post office yesterday afternoon.
And for those who ordered the n
ew Howard Pyle book, some of them have shipped already, and the rest will ship out this coming Monday. Those books are so popular that our supply ran out, so we're going directly to the source (The Delaware Art Museum) this week to get some more.
If you live in the Mid-Atlantic states, please come to one of my upcoming lectures:
LINKS
New 20th Anniversary Edition of DinotopiaNew Howard Pyle: American Master Rediscovered See the YouTube video about how we mail off books
A week from now, the Delaware Art Museum in Wilmington will premiere the exhibition “Howard Pyle: American Master Rediscovered.”
In honor of the centennial of Mr. Pyle’s death in 1911, the museum will present the most ambitious exhibition of legendary illustrator’s work in many decades.
A lavish book has just been published, the first major book on Pyle since 1965. I wrote the opening chapter “Pyle as a Picturemaker” which explores in detail Mr. Pyle's working methods, including his approach to preliminary sketches, principles of composition, and use of models. Other essays examine his teaching, his students, his influence on Norman Rockwell, his interest in Swedenborgianism, and his development of the pirate archetype.
We just received our copies at our website store.
On the opening day, November 12, at 11:00 am (free with museum admission), I’ll present a lecture called “Composition: Pyle’s Way with Pictures.” In this visual presentation for both all audiences, I’ll focus on Pyle’s unique approach to the design of pictures, and how it relates to compositional thinking then and now. The lecture will be followed by a book signing.
I hope to meet you there if you can make it. There should be quite a few professional artists and illustrators in attendance, as well as art students, collectors, and fans of Golden Age illustration. The nearby Brandywine River Museum will have a related show on Pyle’s Teaching and N.C.Wyeth’s Treasure Island illustrations (through November 17).
The Pyle exhibit at the Delaware museum closes March 4. Next summer it continues at the Norman Rockwell Museum.
James Gurney lecture on November 12 in Wilmington
Exhibition information
Order the book
The Vassar College's Frances Lehman Loeb Art Museum in Poughkeepsie, New York is currently presenting "
A Pioneering Collection: Master Drawings from the Crocker Art Museum."The exhibition shows fifty-seven rarely seen drawings dating from the late 15th through the 19th centuries. Artists include Vittore Carpaccio, Albrecht Dürer, Fra Bartolommeo, Federico Barocci, Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony Van Dyck, François Boucher, Rembrandt van Rijn, Jean-Honoré Fragonard and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres.
The collection comes from the Crocker Art Museum in California. A scholarly catalog illustrates and explains the works.
Vassar College's art museum is in Poughkeepsie, New York. The exhibit will be up through December 11.
Exhibition checklist
Last Saturday, the Riverside Art Museum opened an exhibit called “Baby Tattooville on Parade.”
The show presents a strange, fun sort of art that has variously worn the labels “Pop Surrealism” or “Lowbrow Art.”
Growing out of the underground comics, street art, hot rod culture and pop art in California as early as the 1960s, it spans a wide range of subjects, from sad-eyed Victorian girls to spoofs on 1950s moderne Americana (KRK Ryden, above), to ghoulish visions of zombies.
Many of the artists have cool monikers like “Buff Monster (above),” “Shag,” “KMDZ,” “Bob Dob” and “Lola.” A lot of them have unusual haircuts and tattoo stylings. Hmmm...Don’t know about the tattoos--and my hair options are limited, but maybe there’s still time to switch my name to “Smokescreen,” or “Jim Dim.”
Paleo-artist, book illustrator and movie designer William Stout and I got the same dress memo: skeleton t-shirt and black jacket.
Organizer Bob Self used my painting “Marketplace of Ideas,” as a symbol of the bizarre bazaar that he has brought together.
The movement is associated with the internet phenomena SketchTheatre, Deviant Art, Juxtapoz magazine, and Molly Crabapple’s Dr. Sketchy events -- all of whom were represented at the opening.
LINKS
Watch the Baby Tattooville Sketch Jam in time lapse video
Riverside Art Museum: "Baby Tattooville on Parade"
Exhibit continues through November 8 in Riverside, California.
Thanks to curator Kathryn Poindexter and the City of Riverside for your support of the anti-mundane.
When the Norton Museum of Art had its Dinotopia exhibition last year, local schools invited their students to work together to create their own utopias. These expressions of collective dreaming were exhibited in the museum near my own paintings and models.
The students of the Gaines Park Elementary School created an island called “Ever Dream Land.” The name was a reaction to the limits implied by the name “Never Never Land” of Peter Pan. Ever Dream Land is inhabited by a marvelous menagerie of humans, animals and plants, which they shaped out of clay.
They drew a map and invented up their own set of alphabetic symbols. They pictured themselves floating up on balloons over ice cream mountains and candy rivers, with soft round homes made of discarded packing foam.
Michael Anderson of Yale’s Peabody Museum has published a new online chapter about the diorama background painting methods of James Perry Wilson.
According to Mr. Anderson:
“Wilson developed a rigorous method for painting skies in his large scale dioramas that had its roots in his plein air paintings. While painting outdoors, he would carefully blend progressive tints of his three main colors, the horizon, mid-sky, and upper sky, into a graduated, light-filled sky color.
“In a typical diorama, Wilson carefully planned the sky colors and usually painted with thirteen bands of color. These colors were pre-mixed to the determined quantity so there would be no color matching midway through the painting of the sky.”
In Wilson’s own words:
“A typical fair-weather sky, especially at high altitudes, graduates smoothly and evenly from a deep blue (cobalt or ultramarine) overhead, to a clear and much lighter blue, usually a turquoise hue, at perhaps one quarter of the distance from the horizon to the zenith. Below this level the tone usually lightens still more, but the blue color is modified by ground haze.
"The hue may be somewhat greenish, in very clear weather, or purplish, on hazy days, especially at low altitude. These three tones—upper part of the sky, clear turquoise band and horizon color—may be considered as the key colors for the entire sky. If they are carefully prepared, all the intermediate tones may be obtained automatically by mixing these. This will insure a smooth, even gradation. The process of repeated subdivision naturally results in 13 bands, as the following diagram will indicate."
Libyan desert diorama (top) is in the
American Museum of Natural History in New York.
Read the new chapter of
Michael Anderson's biography of James Perry Wilson
I spent the day with Albrecht Dürer’s monsters yesterday.
An exhibition at Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts presents about 75 prints from the museum’s collection of more than 300 woodcuts, engravings, and etchings by Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), the supreme master of northern Renaissance printmaking.
The emphasis is on monsters, witches, hybrid animals and marauding soldiers. An introduction to a room themed with images of the suffering of Christ and the horrors of war says:
“Just as the media of the twenty-first century—whether films, video games, or comic books—reflect the pervasiveness of violence in our culture, Dürer’s images mirrored his own society’s fascination with human torment..”
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The Strange World of Albrecht Dürer will continue through March 13.Visitor's Information for the Clark Art Institute in Massachusetts, USA Exhibit is free.
Advanced pterosaur pilots, or “skybax riders” as they are called in Dinotopia, learn the sport of air jousting.
The armor is a lightweight version of horse jousting armor from the Middle Ages in Europe, where the rider can only see through a narrow slit in his sallet, or helmet. The protection for the eyes of the skybax makes him blind during the approach. A dismounted skybax rider must parachute to the ground.
The final oil painting was published in Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara (2007), but it was based on a quick marker sketch that I did much earlier.
Beginning January 20, the original painting will appear along with more than 40 of my other paintings, in the exhibition: Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara, The Paintings of James Gurney, at the The Alden B. Dow Museum of Science and Art in Midland, Michigan. The show is the same as the one recently in Lucca, Italy.
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The Alden B. Dow Museum of Science and Art/ Midland Center for the Arts
Web article about the exhibit, which includes “Bigger than T. Rex: Giant Killer Dinosaurs of Argentina.”
Journey to Chandara at the Dinotopia Store.
Journey to Chandara on Amazon.
On view through December 31 in the Center Gallery of the Bennington Museum in Vermont is an exhibit of eight paintings from the North Bennington
Plein Air Quick Draw Competition, including "Powers Market" and "1938 Buick."
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Museum press release North Bennington Plein Air Compeition Previously on GJ:
Powers Market, and
Quick Draw painting of 1938 Buick
Journey into the World of Gurney: from Chandara to Ancient Egypt.
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Lucca, Italy at the Palazzo Ducale
Lucca Comics & Games, October 16, 2010 through November 1, 2010
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A few days ago, a truck came and took away two big crates of artwork bound for Italy. The artwork will be featured in an exhibition of approximately 40 of my paintings.
The show begins with
Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara, showing both the private and public lives of humans and dinosaurs, and exploring the intersection of utopia, geography, history, science, and fantasy.
Visitors will also be treated to few paintings from
Dinotopia: The World Beneath which have never before been exhibited. The exhibit concludes with additional original oil paintings from the world of science fiction and fantasy paperback covers, as well as historical paintings for
National Geographic (Voyage of Jason, above, will be included).
For any further information:
Lucca Comics and Games 2010Also includes image from previous post:
Kushite King
Note: Event tonight in New York City (see end of post)
“A portentous stillness hangs over America; the affluence that we thought
would last forever has been replaced with apprehension, angst and anxiety,” says Traci Fieldsted, curator of the exhibition.
The show is called “Hard Times: An Artists’ View” (at the Salmagundi Club in New York through August 20). The subjects are homeless people, manual laborers, and street vendors.
Warren Chang’s “Fall Tilling” shows field workers toiling with hoes. A woman sits on the ground, while a man talks on his cellphone.
The fourteen artists in the group show include such veteran realists as Harvey Dinnerstein, Burton Silverman, and Max Ginsberg. According to a caption, they “weathered the drought imposed by the modern abstract art establishment.”
Max Ginsberg’s “Snapple” shows a hot dog stand with tattered umbrellas. The sign in the store behind says “CLOSING OUT INVENTORY: EVERYTHING MUST GO.”
The paintings steer clear of overt narrative, sentimental pity, or political diatribe. Unfortunately, some images look like professional models impersonating down-and-outers. And some rely a bit too heavily on photographs.
The most convincing is a street scene with African-American young people painted by Garin Baker. Mr. Baker knows the neighborhood well, because he has worked for years on the street, developed a mural program with underprivileged artists in Newburgh, NY.
Marvin Franklin (1952-2007) painted authoritative watercolors of subway riders. Franklin taught at the Art Students League, working night shifts as a track cleaner on the subway, where he was killed in a freak train accident.
The show presents a brave direction to young realist painters, something meaningful to express with their skills. It stand squarely in the nineteenth-century realist tradition of Bastien-Lepage, Kramskoi (above: "Portrait of a Peasant"), and Dagnan-Bouveret, as well as the better-known Courbe
Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight gives the “thumbs down” to academic painter Jean-Leon Gérôme (1824-1904), who is featured in a large exhibition currently at the Getty Museum.
Knight dismisses Gérôme as a “populist painter” who “didn’t have a clue,” and who indulged in “sword-and-sandal melodramas.” He argues that he failed the Prix de Rome competition through lack of drawing ability, later selling out to commercial considerations.
According to Knight, “every artist we revere today was on the other side” of Gérôme and that he failed because he “disengaged with art’s possibilities” by limiting his artwork to mere illusionism.
Although Gérôme’s artwork is not above criticism, Mr. Knight’s assessment is regrettably narrow and unfair.
The documentary evidence from writers of Gérôme’s own day paints a more sympathetic and nuanced portrait of the man and his art.
Gérôme was genuinely respected by critics his day, and by his students, even many who pursued an impressionist approach to painting. He was admired not just for his ability as an artist, but for the breadth of his artistic vision.
Consider the following:
“Gérôme remains at sixty years of age the same as he was at thirty-six: as youthful, vigorous, active, and wiry; full of life and sympathetic. An agreeable, gay talker, pensive notwithstanding his good humor, respectful of his art, frank and loyal, adored by his pupils, he is the professor who teaches the young those rare and neglected virtues: simplicity, study, and labor. In a word he is a noble example of what a master-painter of the nineteenth century may be: an artistic soul with a soldier’s temperament, a heart of gold in an iron body.”
--French critic Jules Claretie, quoted in Nancy Douglas Bowditch, George de Forest Brush: Recollections of a Joyous Painter.
“I cannot but esteem him as one of the masters and most distinguished men of his age.”
--J. Alden Weir, “Open Letters.”
“As a teacher he is very dignified and apparently cold, but really most kind and soft-hearted, giving his foreign pupils every attention. In his teaching he avoids anything like recipes for painting; he constantly points out truths of nature and teaches that art can be attained only through increased perception and not by processes. But he pleads constantly with his pupils to understand that although absolute fidelity to nature must be ever in mind, yet if they do not at last make imitation serve expression, they will end as they b
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The original is currently on view at the 
We had a Mucha "print"/litho and jewelery display here at the University of West Florida sponsored by the Japanese language department. They claimed that Mucha is revered in Japan, but that he took his ideas from the Hokusai wood cuts and prints...
Love Mucha!! I went several times to see an exhibit of his work that was in Memphis years ago. Amazing!!!!
1870 Census lists an Adolph Mucha with his wife, Mary, and daughters, Mary and Lizzie living in Floyd Co., Iowa. I believe this to be part of my family tree. Would appreciate any information on the Mucha's living in Iowa. According to the census, Mary was born in New York in 1866, and Lizzie was born in Illinois in 1869. I believe daughter Mary married Julius Gottlieb Klenk in New York about 1884.