Sunday, June 15, 2014

Edward Robert Hughes - Touched by the gods



Night


Edward Robert Hughes  (5 November 1851 – 23 April 1914) 
*Scorpio Scorpio Scorpio Pisces Leo*




 Day




 Hughes was an English painter who worked in a style influenced by Pre-Raphaelitism and Aestheticism.






 Twilight Fantasy






   Hughes was the nephew of Arthur Hughes and studio assistant to William Holman Hunt. He often used watercolour/gouache.  He experimented with ambitious techniques and was a perfectionist.

  




The Princess out of School






His works can be seen in public collections including Bradford Museums and Galleries, Cambridge & County Folk Museum, Maidstone Museum, Bruce Castle Museum, Kensington & Chelsea Local Studies, Birmingham Art Gallery, the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, the Harris Museum & Art Gallery, Preston, and the National Trust for Scotland.





Valkyries Vigil






Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery will stage an exhibition, Pre-Raphaelite Twilight: The Art of Edward Robert Hughes
in autumn 2015.
 (O god I want to go! I've been to the Birmigham Museum and seen their permanent Pre-Raphaelite installation, mainly there because Sir Edward Burne-Jones was a Birmingham resident, as were members of Black Sabbath)




Heart of Snow




-wikipedia

Monday, June 9, 2014

Margaret Tarrant - Faerie Queen

 


Margaret Tarrant, artist and illustrator, (Leo Virgo Scorpio Cap)
was born on 19 August 1888 in South London.









Encouraged by her father, the artist Percy Tarrant, she excelled at drawing and painting from an early age  and, after discussion with her father, became a full-time artist and illustrator.











In 1920 she began working regularly for the Medici Society, a long and fruitful association. 







During the 1920s she illustrated a highly successful series of fairy books for the company. 













  She was well known for her love of animals and for her formidable cat companion. 










  Many of her paintings were bordered with leaves and flowers characteristic of the Arts and Crafts movement and the Art Nouveau style which she much admired. 











 Her true love lay in painting wild flowers of which she had an extensive knowledge.











  Margaret Tarrant's illustrations date from the 1920's, reflecting the enchanting and magical world of fairies, flowers and young children.  














Indeed, her world of fairies and flowers have been delighting generations of children and adults ever since the first illustrations appeared in the "Fairies and Flowers" series of books, specially commissioned by Medici in the early 1920's.







-http://www.medici.co.uk/

Arthur Hughes of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

Arthur Hughes (27 January 1832 – 22 December 1915), 
was an English painter and illustrator associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood



 Ophelia




He studied at the Royal Academy Schools where he befriended the the young artists of the newly formed Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood: J.E. Millais, Danta Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt. 






Old neighbor gone bye bye


 
He was deeply influenced by their ideas and approach to black and white illustration.
Hughes's illustrations convey a sense of magic and a lyrical quality.

 

 






Forrest Reid wrote of Hughes's mind 'hovering perpetually on the border line between sleeping and waking, vision and reality: when the dream world overlaps the real world then the adventure begins.' 





Gleaning


-The Golden Age of Children's Book Illustration

Saturday, June 7, 2014

The Brothers Dalziel







 George Edward, John and Thomas Dalziel (collectively 1816-1906) were the leading wood engravers of the Victorian period. 






Their facility for engraving their client-artists' drawings was much more elaborate than anything attempted in this medium before. 







When not engraving the work of other artists they did some illustrations of their own.






 In their eighties, George and Edward collaborated on a volume entitled The Brother Dalziel (1901), a record of their distinguished career which had proved so invaluable which had proved so invaluable to the leading book illustrators of the 19th century.












Thursday, June 5, 2014

Jamie Wyeth: Of those spectacuar Wyeths

Cancer Libra Leo Virgo
Son of Andrew Wyeth, and the grandson of N.C. Wyeth, all three are famous American artists, known for their distinctive illustrations. 






"Everybody in my family paints - excluding possibly the dogs," says Jamie Wyeth




 

 

James Browning Wyeth was born on July 6, 1946, in Wilmington, Delaware, Pennsylvania, where he grew up and still lives part of each year. 


 





 With pencils, brushes, and paints always at hand, the boy found it natural to use them to express his impression of a book he'd read or a movie he'd seen. He left public school after the sixth grade to be tutored at home so he could devote more time to art. 









Having acquired most of his own schooling from private tutors, his father didn't consider a formal education necessary for an artist. After taking English and history lessons in the morning, Jamie Wyeth would go to his aunt Carolyn's studio, where for the first year he was assigned to drawing spheres and cubes. Although bored by such disciplinary exercises, he understood their value. 










At age 12, Jamie studied with his aunt Carolyn Wyeth, a well-known artist in her own right, and the resident at that time of the N. C. Wyeth House and Studio, filled with the art work and props of his grandfather. In the morning he studied English and history at his home, and in the afternoon joined other students at the studio, learning fundamentals of drawing and composition.










 He stated later, "She was very restrictive. It wasn’t interesting, but it was important." Through his aunt, Jamie developed an interest in working with oil, a medium he enjoyed at a sensory level: the look, smell and feel of it. 










Carolyn and Howard Pyle were his greatest early influences in developing his technique in working with oil paint. In working with watercolor, Jamie looked to his father. While Jamie's work in watercolor was similar to his father's, his colors were more vivid.














As a boy Jamie was exposed to art in many ways: the works of his talented family members, art books, attendance at exhibitions, meeting collectors and becoming acquainted with art historians.
For at least three years in the early 1960s, when Wyeth would have been in his middle to late teens, Wyeth painted with his father. 



 






Of their close relationship, Wyeth had said: "Quite simply, Andrew Wyeth is my closest friend-and the painter whose work I most admire. The father/son relationship goes out the window when we talk about one another's work. We are completely frank-as we have nothing to gain by being nice. At age 19 [about 1965] he traveled to New York City, to better study the artistic resources of the city and to learn human anatomy by visiting the city morgue.









 


 Indifferent to sports and games and undistracted by the social activities that would have claimed his attention in school, Jamie Wyeth spent at least eight hours a day studying, sketching, and painting. His natural talent developed under the guidance of his father, who in his own youth had the benefit of N. C. Wyeth's instruction and encouragement. His father, he recalls, didn't actually give him lessons, but rather let him work and then offered constructive criticism. 










 

By the time he was 18, Wyeth's paintings hung in the permanent collections of the Wilmington Society of Art in Wilmington, Delaware, and in the William A. Farnsworth Library and Art Museum in Rockland, Maine - as well as in several private collections.










 

Like his father, Jamie Wyeth is able to evoke the character of a person without actually including them in a painting. 

-wiki & jamiewyeth.com
  

Monday, June 2, 2014

Richard Doyle and John Tenniel








Richard Doyle (Virgo 1824-1833) was one of the most popular
 Victorian illustrators of faerie stories.






 As a boy he was captivated by the 'St George and the Dragon' theme and became regarded as the supreme master of dragon illustrations, giants, pixies, witches and nature spirits. 






He loved collecting obscure foreign folk legends, especially those featuring strange and supernatural creatures.







He had no art training but always possessed an extraordinary power of fanciful and imaginative drawing.







His boyhood fascination with faerie stories
 stayed with him all his life. 








Richard Doyle's masterpiece was undoubtedly 
 In Fairyland, a series of Pictures from the Elf World
with a poem by William Allingham,   
and published in time for Christmas 1869 (dated 1870).








 Doyle was given a completely free hand. 







The folio was richly bound in green cloth, and has been described as one of the finest examples of Victorian book production.







*******






John Tenniel (Pisces 1820-1914)







This famous Victorian artist is remembered today
 as the illustrator of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871). 







The books have been illustrated countless times but for many people the original drawings by Tenniel have never been surpassed. His images epitomise the characters in the books. Tenniel successfully captured the author’s intended vision.



  







 He was a skilful artist from an early age, and later studied at the Royal Academy Schools, but became dissatisfied with the teaching there, and decided to follow a more independent line.  




 
  
 He declared that he never used models, or nature for the figure, or drapery, or anything else, but had a wonderful memory of observation for anything he saw.

 
-The Golden Age of Children's Book Illustration & wakeling.demon.co.uk-