Margarita is a beautifully designed, drawn and realized animated short (about 12 minutes long) from Hampa Studio.

Another example of small independent studios doing high level work, this award winning story follows the adventures of a young princess (lived in the imagination of our actual protagonist, a young girl being read the story by her mother), who sets out to find an evening star that has captured her fancy.

The film is based on a poem by Rubén Dario, and the adaptation works to evoke the poetic images wordlessly, with only sound effects and music to accompany the images.

The animators chose to take the approach of traditional hand-drawn animation, with wonderful backgrounds, delightful character design and fluid, elegant animated motion.

There is a Making Of feature that is actually a bit longer than the film itself, in which the creators discuss the conception of the project as well as their process in bringing it to fruition.

There is also a trailer that was released prior to the final film. In addition to the page on the Hampa Studio site, there is a site for Margarita, that has an English version, as well as a blog.

[Via Animation Blog]

Southwest Art is a print magazine devoted to American Western art, with a focus on contemporary artists. The magazine is a division of F+W Media, and is related to sister publications that include The Artist’s Magazine, Watercolor Artist and The Pastel Journal.

They post a number of full articles from the magazine on their website, along with related images, currently including several from their November 2010 issue. These feature artists like Clyde Aspevig, Rock Newcomb, Mark Haworth, Raj Chaudhuri (who I featured previously here) and Daniel Keys (who I featured here).

There is a blog and lists of other articles (accessed from the drop-down menu in the red navigation bar), that also frequently features entire articles and images.

The magazine holds competitions, one called 21 Under 31, focusing on young, emerging artists under 31 (featured in their September 2010 issue and linked on the website here), and another called 21 Over 31, focusing on artists from 31 to 64 years of age (featured in the November 2010 issue and arranged as a linked list here).

Though the focus is on a a particular region of the U.S. that is often considered to have its own approach and range of subjects, the artists and work featured would be of interest to anyone who enjoys contemporary landscape, still life and figurative art.

(Images above: Daniel Keys, Clyde Aspevig, Rock Newcomb, Raj Chaudhuri, Mark Haworth)

As I described in my post about him from 2008, Benoît Mandelbrot was not an artist, but a mathematician.

His work, however, has enabled others, from dedicated computer artists to dabblers, to create the multitude of stunning images we know as ‘fractals”. In the process, he deepened our understanding of nature and the concept of infinity.

Benoît Mandelbrot died this morning at the age of 86.

There is a bio on Wikipedia, from which the images above were taken. They are part of a set of images in which each is a magnified crop from the last (I’ve skipped some in the sequence above).

For more, see my previous post on Benoit Mandelbrot, in which I give a better overview of Mandelbrot and his contribution, a brief explanation of fractals and links to images and other resources.

[Via Kottke]

Bill Mayer’s wonderfully energetic and delightfully loopy illustrations are flashes of pure visual hyperbole.

His intensely colorful and beautifully rendered animals, monsters and freaked-out people just about jump off the screen, eyes a-goggle and huge toothy grins as wide as their heads (if they have heads).

Mayer has a website with examples of his work in several categories, as well as extensive Flickr galleries, a presence on Drawger, a section on Behance Network, and a portfolio on the site of The Weber Group, his artist representatives.

You’ll have to go to the latter two for information about the artist and his clients, as his own site doesn’t have a bio or information page.

Mayer works in a variety of media and combinations of media, gouache, oil, airbrush, scratchboard, digital and I’m not sure what else.

He works for a variety of clients, including he United States Post Office, Coca Cola, DreamWorks, Blue Sky Studios, Cartoon Network, GameStop, Hasbro, Levi’s for Women, Jose Cuervo, Time Magazine, IBM, Delta Airlines, RJR Nabisco, Yupo Paper and Stueben Glass.

Mayer cites influences as diverse as Jack Davis, Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, Monet, Picasso and Boterro in the formation of his style. He studied at the Ringling School of Art in Florida, and is currently based in Decatur, Georgia.

Mayer is a friend and collaborator of Goñi Montes, who I recently profiled.

Art in Flanders is an animation that serves as the introductory page for the Lukas image bank of digital reproductions of Flemish art.

The image bank itself can be searched and browsed by theme, timeline, or style. The image previews are zoomable, though within a frustratingly small window.

The animation, however, is larger. In it the creators (for whom I couldn’t find credits) have taken a number of wonderful Flemish paintings and, with considerable computer artistry, separated parts of them into planes, filling out areas where one plane was in front of another.

The result is an animated view of the works, and wonderfully handled transitions between them, that I cannot adequately describe, or show with the static screenshots above.

You simply have to see the animation to appreciate its visual charm.

Beautifully done.

UK based illustrator Laura Barnard specializes in cityscapes and architectural subjects, “the more complicated they are the better”.

She works in both traditional and digital media, mixing them at times. Her fine line approach works well in her portrayal of complex jumbles of buildings, latticed with detail and texture.

She has an informal line, allowing her freedom in her portrayal of buildings at odd angles with one another, and license in her use of perspective, as well as lending the work a feeling of informality that softens the hard geometry.

In addition to the textures created with hatching and line, she often mixes in passages of tone or color, sometimes restricting them to certain parts of the drawing.

Her website has a gallery of her work, a blog-like news section and a shop in which she sells posters and prints.

You can also find her work on the Behance Network, Flickr and in this post on Neatorama, which is where I encountered her drawings.

Freelance illustrator Goñi Montes works his fine line and color fill approach in a number of ways, creating a variety of emotional feeling and visual style.

Montes often makes use of a restrained color palette, limiting the range and value of his major colors, and offsetting them with dark but saturated colors in certain areas. He sometimes uses those dark but deeply saturated colors as his primary palette.

His subjects often seem to express surprise or alarm, adding to the edge of tension set up by the color range and subtle shifts in value.

Montes was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico and studied at the University of Poerto Rica at Mayagüez, later moving to Atalanta, Georgia and continuing his studies at the Savannah College of Art and Design. He now lives in nearby Decatur, Georgia and teaches classes at SCAD in addition to his freelance work.

His clients include The Washington Post, The Village Voice, Draft FCB, Puerto Rico Sea Grant, and Oz Magazine.

In addition to the portfolio on his website, you can find his work on Tor.com, Behance Network and Richard Solomon Artists Representative, where you will also find a description of his process.

For an artist so prolific, from whom over 850 paintings and 1,200 drawings have survived, it’s stunning to realize that Vincent van Gogh’s active career spanned only a single decade, from his decision to pursue art at age 27 in 1880, to his untimely death in 1890.

During that time he produced over 30 self portraits. While not as extensive as Rembrandt’s production of almost 90 self portraits over his much longer career, Van Gogh’s self portraits form a similar kind of autobiography, showing the artist over time in different conditions and states of mind, as well as at different stages of his artistic development.

Van Gogh’s self portraits show his relentless pursuit of his art — practicing, working, striving to improve. It has been suggested that self portraiture is somehow more egotistical than other kinds of painting, but I think for many artists, and Van Gogh in particular, self portraiture was a practical measure, the mirror providing a readily available model when paying a model wasn’t an option.

I’ve tried to find several sources for his self portraits, and list them below. The listing on vggallery.com is reasobnably complete and is in chronological order, but you will find better reproductions among the other sources. Van Gogh Gallery also has a fairly complete listing, with larger images, though without a thumbnail gallery for selecting.

Wikipedia has a nice selection, easy to navigate; but for the most reliable reproductions, see the smaller set from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, some of which are zoomable.

In the course of his paintings from the mirror, Van Gogh has created some of his most striking and memorable works. A number of his portraits are less familiar, and infrequently reproduced, but equally revealing and fascinating.

Those who have been reading Lines and Colors over time may have noticed that despite the deliberate crossing of genres, and the mixture of different aspects of visual art, there is a common thread of art that takes its basic structure from the traditions of representational art,

You may also know that I have often expressed anger at the Modernist art establishment. Not so much at Modernism itself, I have a certain fondness for pre-war European Modernism, and I can simply ignore other Modernist art that I find visually uninteresting, but at the the art establishment, an artistic elite that arose out of post-war American Modernism, and for decades has controlled the museums, galleries, critical press and almost all forms of artistic power in deciding what is of value in contemporary art.

This new art establishment, after the better part of a century in power, still likes to pretend that they are “rebelling” against the restraints of the 19th Century art establishment; and in so doing has waged a deliberate and caustic campaign to denigrate realism and the traditional artistic values that have been the basis for Western representational art for centuries.

I encountered this cultural bias when I was a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in the 1970’s, and was informed by those in the know that traditional realism was dead as far as the powers that be were concerned; and that museums, high-end galleries and critics would never take you seriously unless you were doing non-representational “conceptual” work based on a theory or an “ism” — and something “new” at that. To pursue traditional realism was to be consigned to the cultural backwaters of a no longer valid branch of art.

Populist forces have pushed back in recent years, and representational art has experienced a resurgence, but the forces that place non-representational theory-based Modernism at the pinnacle of artistic achievement, and relegate traditional artistic values as merely the path to that great achievement, and see them as the choking restraints that Modernism has freed us from in the pursuit of artistic “truth”, still hold sway in the corridors of artistic power and commerce.

Contemporary realist painter Scott Burdick has taken on this situation, looking within its story for a common thread that separates Modernism from traditional art, and set out his thoughts in The Banishment of Beauty, a one hour lecture and slide presentation that he gave at the American Artist magazine’s “Weekend with the Masters” event in Laguna Beach.

The slideshow and lecture has been made into a series of 4 videos that can be seen on YouTube. You can also read a transcript of the lecture on Burdick’s site.

While I may disagree with him on certain points, I think Burdick, like Tom Wolfe in his essay, The Painted Word, has pretty much hit on the essential reality of the modern art world.

Burdick has illustrated the presentation with examples of his own work and the work of other contemporary representational painters, as well as examples from great painters from the late 19th Century, contrasting them with examples of 20th Century and contemporary Modernism.

You can access all of the lecture parts here, though you may want to view them individually outside of the bright blue interface: The Banishment of Beauty, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

You may also want to visit Burdick’s website and view his own work, which is exceptional. Burdick has long been on my list as the subject of a future post.

Whether you agree with his contention or not, the presentation is worth following, and you might at least find his arguments a jumping off point for thought and discussion.

[Via MetaFilter]

[Addendum: This post has, as I had hoped, sparked a lively discussion in the comments section. Scott Burdick has been kind enough to write a lengthy comment, answering some criticisms and adding depth to points covered in the video presentation. It's actually much more relevant and interesting than my original post. See the comments here.]

The Golden Age of Illustration, roughly from the last quarter of the 19th Century to the early decades of the 20th, is most often associated with artists from the U.S. and Europe; but terrific illustrators were also working on the other side of the Earth, in Australia and New Zealand.

BibliOdyssey, that ever fascinating and vastly deep cornucopia of visual wonders and curiosities, has an article highlighting some of them, Antipodean Fantasy: Random Australiana (”antipodean” referring to the position of Australia and New Zealand as roughly opposite the British Isles on the globe).

Be sure to click on the images in the post, as BibliOdyssey author peacay has kindly provided us with nice large versions of the images on his Flickr pages.

If you haven’t visited BibliOdyssey, take some time to look around, and be prepared for a major time-sink. For general description, see my previous posts on BibliOdyssey and BibliOdyssey (the book).

You can also get lost on peacay’s Flickr pages, but the blog itself is much more conducive to browsing and discovery (try some of the image links in the lower right column, under the list of Resource Sites).

(Images above: Margaret Clark, Ethel Jackson Morris, Ida Rentoul Outhwaite, May Gibbs)