R.Crumb or Robt. Crumb or Robert Crumb. My first exposure to his stuff was the Cheap Thrills album art for a great Janis Joplin record which my Mom owned. I had never seen art like that when I was 12 years old. I forgot about him but his work kept popping up throughout my life, even on blotter acid. The dude is just incredibly prolific and his style is all his own. Just look up robert crumb
John Nava’s Tapestry design’s for the L.A. cathedral was a wake up call for me as to what a 2-D artist could bring to a large scale architectural project. The cash cow for such projects usually going to 3-D art or overpriced Blue chip 2-d stock that was more a decoration as part of an investment portfolio than a serious part of the architectural design process.
Here’s the story on the tapestries.
The whole cathedral is a unique and beautiful monument but that’s another story.
I was living in L.A. when Mark Ryden came galloping out of the subconscious and burst onto the scene with the Meat Show at the Mendenhall Gallery in Pasadena. He was all over the place after that. Spontanious combustion. Pure americana.
His website here.
Medical Illustration has been around a long time and for different reasons. Leonardo was doing it before photography just to record how things worked. I remember leafing through an anatomy book in grade school and was impressed by studies printed on clear acetate showing successive layers of human systems, derma, skeletal, circulatory etc. med Illustration is still used today to map out “or storyboard” a procedure as in the case of this beautiful rendering of internal info of co-joined twins for Mayo Clinic by Michael King. There is a lot more info at the Assn. of Medical Illustrators including info on training, certification and careers. Hey maybe this is a new direction for me.
A nice contrast of flat costume and dimensional flesh in Nouveau style sexy. This is a Stanley Lau Character “Pepper”.
His handle on deviantART is Artgerm. Very talented and apparently busy illustrator and concept designer from Singapore.
John Singer Sargent in his day at the beginning of the 20th Century was the man.
Here is a nice list of his works with images and chronology.
This particular work is so strange to me it looks like she is going north and south at the same time.
I was doing some research On Burne Hogarth for the Illustration class and found out all this. I never owned his anatomy books but I have used them for sculpture reference because of the way he masses muscle form very cleanly, regardless of lighting direction, so it seems. His book Dynamic Anatomy is linked through Amazon and I would recommend it to art students interested in a serious study of human form.
What I also found out was that after his successful run in comics as the illustrator for Tarzan, he was instrumental in founding the School of Visual Arts in NYC with Silas Rhodes in 1947. SVA was set up as a trade school for returning veterans after WWII who were interested in entering the Advertising industry as artists and was budgeted largely by the G I Bill.
Just as the school was beginning, it ran into trouble that threatened its existence. In 1956 Mr. Rhodes and Mr. Hogarth were called before a Senate investigations subcommittee and asked whether they were members of the Communist Party. The committee was trying to determine whether Communist influence had tainted vocational schools that were supported largely by federal money.
Steve Huston’s painting “Heave” and a detail from “Working Man”. I met Steve when I was in L.A. through Bill Stout at his Sunday life drawing studio in Pasadena around 1995. Steve was teaching figure drawing at Art Center and according to his bio was just beginning his serious work on fine art. I remember seeing some of his early work with the boxers but it was mostly hardcore drawing and not nearly as delicious as it is now with his color palette. His FB page has a lot of great info on process for the student and uninitiated. His work makes me want to eat paint.
If you looked up the word macabre in the dictionary they should have an illustration by Edward Gorey next to it. You will recognize his work immediately. I don’t know much about him and first saw his work as a kid, in an animated intro for Masterpiece Theatre TV show “Mystery“. Since then I realize how prolific this guy really is, over 100 books, a zillion drawings, very distinctive in style and subject. Influenced tons of younger Goth style illustrators. A couple of links, images and bio.
artthatdoesntsuck 