Art Links
F r i e n d s
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David Marshak
A good friend of mine from art college, Dave is a landscape painter, usually living in Toronto when he's not up north or out of the country painting on location. His work is both from the Collingwood area as well as remote locations in Canada and around the world.
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Matthew Wearn
I've had the pleasure of working with Matt and seeing his visual genius at work first-hand. Visit his site suibaku.com for a showcase of his photography and design work. See it for the art, see it for the design, see it for the site itself. It's all good!
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Colin Moock
Colin runs the immensely popular and useful web/Flash resource site moock.org but is also an accomplished painter in his own right. Check out the paintings and more in his art section.
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Alan Hunt
Alan is another friend from the Ontario College of Art, who has worked steadily producing comics for several years now. He was recently noted on Scott McCloud's links page.
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Elzbieta Krawecka
Elzbieta has lived in a number of exotic places around the world and still does a lot of travelling. Her work elegantly depicts some of the many fascinating things and places she's seen.
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Dominik Modlinski
Dominik is also an OCA graduate who does a lot of travelling and painting, mostly in the northern parts of Canada. Many, many dramatic landscapes can be seen at his site.
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M o r e A r t i s t s
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Tom Thomson Gallery and The McMichael Gallery
The Canadian painter Tom Thomson, as well as his Group of Seven compatriots are well presented in these cleanly-designed, low-bandwidth sites. If you haven't yet been exposed to Canada's crown jewels of painting, now's the time. This is work that was done at a time when Canadian winters were harsh, and you could hardly tell the lumberjacks from the artists. When Canadian landscape was finally represented honestly -- in all its beauty and severity -- on canvas in oils.
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Alberto Breccia
Alberto Breccia is a relatively obscure comic artist in North America, however he is well respected in his native Argentina and in Europe. Have a look at this page for a pictorial overview of his career which spanned the years from 1941 up until his death in 1993. Note that his experiments with style predate those of people like Frank Miller, Bill Sienkiewicz, Dave McKean, etc. by decades.
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Hieronymus Bosch
Recently deceased author Damon Knight's excellent study of the inscrutable 15th century Dutch artist and his works.
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Rick Griffin
This site has a large collection of Rick Griffin's work. Even if you've never heard of Rick Griffin, you've probably seen some of his famous Grateful Dead posters or perhaps the original Rolling Stone magazine masthead. And if you haven't seen those, you've undoubtedly felt his stylistic presence around you. His impact on popular art is immense, ranging from 60's rock posters, surf and comics counterculture to urban graffiti in the 1980's. The modern world of art would not look the same without our beloved Rick Griffin's contributions.
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Syd Mead
You've almost certainly seen his work, even if you don't know it. Labelled a "visual futurist", Mead envisions possible futures with humankind harnessing technology to serve its needs and desires. His artwork has defined the look of many science fiction movies including Tron, Blade Runner, Star Trek I and 2010.
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Bruce McCall
Bruce McCall is a Canadian expatriate who made a name for himself after moving to the U.S. His bizarre/outrageous/funny illustrations regularly made the covers of such magazines as The New Yorker, and National Lampoon. If Syd Mead imagines our future, then perhaps McCall satirizes it.
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Jeffrey Jones
Jeffrey Jones' fantasy art might at first remind one of the work of artists like Frank Frank Frazetta and Boris Vallejo, however he branches out into other genres, bringing his incredible draftsmanship to them. From the dream-like ambiguity of the single-page, black & white Idyl comics to impressionist landscapes to figures reminiscent of Egon Schiele, Jones shows he is a master illustrator.
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Scott McCloud
Scott McCloud started out in the print medium, and after releasing the much lauded Understanding Comics, become something of a spokesperson for 'sequential art'. He struggles, as do all comic artists, to grapple with both the new possibilities and problems of online comics. His own links page has an exceptional collection of web comic/sequential artists.
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"Delta Thrives"
Must be seen to be believed. A bit reminiscent of Heavy Metal comics but combined with a canny sense of web design that brings it to a whole new level. This is possibly the single-most gorgeous web page I've ever seen(!) Check out the rest of Patrick Farley's site for more of his work.
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"A Painting a Day"
Duane Keiser's ambitious "painting a day" project has produced enviably fantastic results. Duane really brings his minimalist subject matter to life, not just with his incredible painting skills, but with an inquisitive eye that expresses not only the physical representation of the subject matter, but also its nature.
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Steve Skinner
Steve Skinner's work appeals to me, since we both seem to be drawn towards urban landscapes. I've never really managed to get the hang of watercolours but Steve makes them work the way they were meant to, and maybe in ways they weren't. His subject matter ranges from decaying concrete to shiny, modern architectural structures, and his wide compositions and striking designs have a very cinematic feel to them.
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Richard Powers
Distinctive, surreal sci-fi book cover artist from the 50s and 60s. Another collection can be found here.
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Chris Langstroth
I stumbled across Chris' work one day at the 2004 outdoor art show on Bloor street. He does some amazing things with paint, using oversized palette-knife techniques.
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O t h e r A r t & R e l a t e d S i t e s
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DeviantArt.com
An endless flow of new, original art can be seen here, with fresh contributions from its community appearing every minute. (I have an account there. A basic account is free.) Users can submit their own work, as well as rate and comment on other submissions. Despite the volumes of unpolished work and a disproportionate amount of anime and goth, there is definitely new talent to be found here, in those genres and others. It's an especially good showcase for very young artists.
Since I first stumbled into DeviantArt in 2001, the site has grown and grown. At the time of this writing, there are now over 10,000,000 submissions. Established artists, professional animators, working comic and manga artists are all contributing. You can see a preview of an upcoming Marvel cover, followed by an amazingly talented 16 year old Malaysian kid's digitally-drawn anime fan art, followed by a traditional oil-on-canvas landscape painter. Tutorials are published as art pieces. There are forums for a variety of art and site-related discussions, where artists from around the world can get to know each other. There's even a print service that subscribers can use to sell reproductions of their work to their fans, and helps to support DeviantArt financially. It's a fascinating site that I think has the potential to turn the art world upside-down.
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Drawn
An art site aggrigator/blog. Lots of illustrative 2D art featured. Check this site regularly for links to new, quality art and artists. Short writeups and comments.
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The Artchive
This is a great resource. A broad collection of high-quality reproductions of famous works of art, accompanied by brief descriptions.
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WordsAndPictures.org
This is a Comic and sequential art portal with some nice featured content, including a showcase of one of my favourite comics Elektra Assassin, by Frank Miller & Bill Seinkewicz.
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BugPowder.com
A large British comics resource for small comics artists. One of this site's most interesting features is a history of old comics.
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Frank Miller's 300
One of the very best graphic novels to come out in years, written and drawn by my favourite comic storyteller. This interview with Miller provides some great insight into the making of 300 and some historical background for the story.
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Russian Prison Tattoos
A site that documents the practice of tattooing in Russian prisons. Black and white photos with descriptions of the tattoos and what they mean.
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Hubble Heritage Project
This is a great archive of high resolution space photography taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.
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