Tag: drawing

Peter Diamond

The Illustrations of Peter Diamond

Peter Diamond is a Canadian illustrator based in Vienna, Austria. born in Oxford, England, He received his BFA in Fine Arts at NSCAD University located in Halifax, Nova Scotia. In addition to his freelance work, Diamond teaches drawing at Illuskills and works with the international illustration community through the European Illustrators Forum. He is represented internationally by The Loud Cloud.

Peter Diamond’s work owes much of its character to the album covers and self-published comics that were his special focus in art school and the early years after graduation, as well as the punk gig posters of his teenage years.

Robert Buratti

Robert Buratti, “The Hierophant”, Date Unknown, Ink and Pen on Paper, 15.7 x 11.8 Inches

This work is part of the Arcana Series by Robert Buratti and was inspired by “The Hierophant” card of the Thoth tarot deck. Buratti’s work is chiefly concerned with the role of the spiritual within contemporary art, and the talismanic and transformational power of the image. Influenced by the approach and experimentation of artists such as James Gleeson, Andre Breton, Aleister Crowley, Paul Gauguin and Pablo Picasso, Buratti’s work seeks a balance between the seen and unseen, the technical and the intuitive.

Calendar: August 16

A Year: Day to Day Men: 16th of August

Builder of Dams

August 16, 1892, was the birthdate of Canadian-American cartoonist, Harold Foster.

Harold Foster, as a youth, captained a sloop through the Atlantic, and learned to hunt and fish in the wilds surrounding Halifax from his stepfather, cultivating a love for nature that is readily apparent in his art. He left school at an early age. Foster’s career as a professional artist began when he was about eighteen, producing catalog art for the Hudson Bay Company, but before and after that he made his living in the Canadian wilderness as a fur trapper, hunting guide, and gold prospector.

Foster studied at the Chicago Art Institute and other schools and eventually landed a job at an advertising firm that allowed him to move his wife and two sons to the city. But when the Great Depression hit, work slowed to a crawl. Despite his reservations about entering the field of comic strips, when Foster  was given the chance to adapt Edgar Rice Burroughs’s “Tarzan of the Apes”, he took it.

Debuting in 1929, the “Tarzan of the Apes” daily heralded a new age for comic strips. A fine artist to his bones, Foster introduced dynamic action, perfect anatomy and fluid body movement to the comics page. Through his hands, the titular character was imbued with a balance of nobility and visceral barbarity, and Hal Foster’s dramatically-lit chiaroscuro panels, accurate nature drawing, and raucous action ensured that “Tarzan of the Apes” was a hit.

Hal Foster produced hundreds of pages, and continuing to adapt his illustrative approach to cartooning, but he grew tired of the material. If he was going to continue working in a medium he didn’t care for, at minimum he wanted creative control over his output. So Foster began working on a story set in Arthurian England that he intended to span decades. After months of research and planning, he pitched his new story to United Features Syndicate, distributor of “Tarzan”, and they turned him down. He made the same pitch to William Randolph Hearst and was offered an unprecedented portion of ownership.

“Prince Valiant”, debuted in 1937 and quickly became the gold standard of the Sunday cartoons. The story begins with Val as the five-year-old son of a deposed king and follows him to manhood, through battles with ancient monsters and beasts, knighthood with King Arthur in Camelot, fatherhood, and adventures all across myth, history, and the globe. It is epic, swashbuckling, painterly, ornate, endlessly clever, and brilliantly plotted story, and without the intrusion of word balloons to muck up the panels. Every frame of Prince Valiant is like a story unto itself: beautifully designed, and rendered with a precision. In the golden age of the newspaper strip it was considered by many to be the pinnacle of achievement in the medium.

Claude Buck

 

Claude Buck, “Self Portrait”, 1917, Charcoal and Crayon on Paper Mounted on Paper-Board Sheet, 20 x 12.7 cm, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Claude Buck started to paint when he was very young; at the age of eight he applied to be a copyist at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The museum rejected him because of his age, but Buck kept asking and three years later was finally granted permission to copy the old master paintings. Buck was the youngest artist ever to study at the National Academy of Design, where he spent eight years creating works inspired by romantic literature.

In 1917, Claude Buck founded the ‘Introspectives’, a group of four painters who created surreal images and believed that the ‘poetry’ of a picture meant more than the imitation or even the representation of nature. Later in his career, however, Buck completely rejected these strange, dreamlike themes and joined the Society for Sanity in Art, which celebrated straightforward, representational painting. He was also a leading member of the avant-garde Symbolism artist movement in Chicago.

Claude Buck was known for his fantastic, sometimes disturbing images with allegorical and literary themes drawn from writings of Edgar Allen Poe, operas by Richard Wagner, classical mythology and New Testament writings from the Bible. Some of his early paintings had Luminist movement elements achieved with light-toned paints worked with transparent glazes.

Leon Joseph-Florentine Bonnat

Leon Joseph-Florentine Bonnat, “Study for Jacob Wrestling with the Angel”, 1876, Pencil and Black Chalk on Paper, 14 x 20 Inches, Dahesh Museum of Art, New York

This is either a highly finished study for, or a variant after, a painting that Bonnat exhibited at the Salon in 1876, current location unknown. With its emphasis on tensed musculature and the interaction of anatomical forms, this work illustrates perfectly how integral the numerous life drawings of nude male models were to an artist’s formation of fully realized narrative compositions.

As an artist and a teacher, Bonnat was adamant in the fundamental importance of skillful drawing. In a letter translated and published in The American Magazine of Art in 1916, Bonnat declared: “Drawing and form: from those foundations we never stray; we cannot, we ought not to, because they are the conditions absolutely requisite to eternal beauty; and from antique art to contemporary, in passing through all the great epochs…it is by form and drawing alone that the world has been enriched with so many masterpieces.”

Joyce Pensato

The Work of Nat.Brut Artist Joyce Pensato

Brooklyn born artist, Joyce Pensato’s skill for accumulation has become central to her identity and, consequently, her approach to art-making. Mess, dirt, and detritus – these are the properties that are ingrained in the artist’s work. To Pensato, pop culture, it transpires, equates to troublesome histories indicated by soiled physical appearances.

Her large-scale enamel paintings and charcoal drawings mimic the mess of her studio. The faces of her comic-book characters appear through a vigorous blast of layered drips and scratches, mainly in black, white and silver. Her brushstrokes are fierce and unending, often giving the impression of having been sprayed on at great speed.​

Emilio Greco

Emilio Greco, Title Unknown, Date Unknown, Ink Drawing Detail, The Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, London

Strongly influenced by Etruscan, Greek and Roman art, Emilio Greco is best known for his powerful portrait busts and sensual nudes, often characterised by perfectly rounded heads. However, while such subjects dominate his collected works, Greco also received important religious commissions during his career. One of the artist’s first major works was his 1953 “Monument to Pinocchio”, the base of which differed markedly from Greco’s subsequent figurative style in its abstract, spiralling forms.

Having been awarded prizes at both the 1952 Rome Quadriennale and the 1956 Venice Biennale, Greco began to work on a set of monumental bronze doors for Orvieto Cathedral in 1962. He was initially unenthusiastic about the commission as the proposed themes left him uninspired, but his attitude altered dramatically once the subject matter was changed.

“When, finally, the Corporal Works of Mercy – those capital commands of human behaviour – were suggested to me, I accepted immediately because I felt strongly that this theme was congenial to my beliefs. It is an eternal theme, perpetually occurring, not only an historical one; a human theme, not only one connected with the Church.”- Emilio Greco

Completed in 1964, Greco’s doors reveal debts to Renaissance masters such as Donatello in their subtle bas-relief modelling. However, they also exhibit more modern tendencies, as in the two lateral doors depicting angels in flight set against a geometric-abstract background. The following year, Greco was commissioned to create a monument to John XXIII for St Peter’s in Rome, representing the Pope visiting the city’s Regina Coeli prison.

Greco’s drawing style is extremely sculptural in its evocation of volume, and its concern with defining the spaces and relationships between forms. Conversely, the surfaces of Greco’s sculptural heads are often scored with lines recalling the cross-hatching characteristic of his vigorous yet elegant ink drawings.

Class Comics: Lawsuit and T-Boy

Class Comics, “The Adventures of Lawsuit and T-Boy”, Issue No. 1

Class Comics is a publisher which issues several series of gay erotic comic books of high quality art, captivating characters, and exciting stories. Owned and operated by Canadian illustrator Patrick Fillion and writer Robert Fraser, Class Comics has been publishing their erotic comic books since 2000. In addition to the publishing of their own titles, the company has expanded their comic and art book collections to the French and German audiences through the European publishers Bruno Gmunder and H&O Editions.

Its titles include: Guardians of the Cube, Satisfaction Guaranteed, Camili-Cat, Naked Justice, Rapture, Deimos, Porky, “Rainbow Country” and The Pornomicon. Artists published by the company include French Logan and Max, and Spanish Ismael Alvarez.

Class Comics’ website is located at: https://www.classcomics.com

 

George Bellows

George Bellows, “The Knock Out”, 1907, Ink and Pastel on Paper, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

In 1907 George Bellows, a member of the Ashcan School of Art,  produced the first of several paintings of prizefighters in action in the ring; these expressed violent action with power and seeming spontaneity. He was fascinated with the spectacle of the great city: its buildings, crowds, types, and rivers. Though he was denounced by conservative critics as one of the “apostles of ugliness,” his technical brilliance made him more acceptable than any of the other painters of similar impulse.

Eric Itschert

Eric Itschert, “Nude Boy Swimming”, 2017, Drawing and Watercolor on Arches Paper

Eric Itschert was born in 1954 in Overijse, Belgium. While still in secondary school, Eric followed oil painting classes with the painter Georges Lambillotte. He studied at St Serge in Paris in the summer of 1973, Itschert obtained his certificate of architecture in 1978 at the Ecole Supérieure d’Architecture Saint-Luc in Brussels.  He continued his painting studies with Bernard Frinking in 1986 and 1987;  and during his time spent on Paros in the Cyclades in 1989, where he developed his technique of tempera painting.

Dennis Campay

Dennis Campay, “Bull”, 2018, Ink on Paper, Private Collection

“Drawing holds a central place in my work. I have spoken of its role and uses both as its own and as a key part of my paintings and sculptures but most surely in my creative process. I have explored and investigated through drawing a language of marks that communicates different narratives which creates feelings, memories of environments and elements of things that we encounter in everyday life. My images represent a period of time-a glimpse into the ongoing evolution of a body of work. This creates a kaleidoscope of stories allowing the work to grow with the viewer through the lens of the experience of life.”  -Dennis Campay

Karl Sterrer

 

Karl Sterrer, (Anatomical Study of Male Figure), Date Unknown

Karl Sterrer, the son of sculptor Carl Sterrer, studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, under Painter Alois Delug and Painter Christian Griepenkerl. He became adept at both portraits and landscapes, winning the Prix de Rome in 1908. This was followed by more awards, including the 1919 Reichel Prize.

Karl Sterre was one of the first Austrian artists to explore the genre of German Expressionism, reducing his landscape compositions to their basic essentials, using drypointing’s dark, deep lines. He traveled through Germany and Austria until 1921 when he accepted the position of Professor of Gine Arts at the Academy in Vienna.

Sterrer’s prints and paintings can be found at the Austrian Academy in Vienna, the Dresden Gallery Collection, and at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh.