David Curtis is one of the leading plein-air painters, working in both watercolor and oil in the United Kingdom. He tackles complex scenes with admirable fluency and accuracy, and is one of the contemporary masters of contre-jour lighting.

For both dedicated fans and people new to his work, his newest book, Painting on Location: Secrets to Plein Air Painting, is an excellent presentation of his working methods, with many large reproductions of paintings that don't appear in previous books on Curtis's work.

His subject matter includes primarily coastal views, city scenes, and rural landscapes—no portraits or still lifes.


Curtis typically works fairly small in oil. Most of his paintings are around 8x10 or up to 12x16 inches. In his book he discusses how speed and confidence are affected by the scale of the work, and by other challenges such as limited time and changing light.

I just finished reading Jim Henson: The Biography. The book tells the story of Henson's lasting influence as creator and performer of the Muppets.

Biographer Brian Jay Jones interviewed the Henson family and his creative colleagues, and carefully went through the archives to create a very carefully researched and readable account of his short life (he died in 1990 of a lung infection at age 53.) Henson's kind, generous, restless, and inventive spirit, as well as some of his human foibles, come shining through the book.

Now with so many of Henson's shows available on YouTube, you can enhance the experience of reading the book by watching videos of everything from his hilarious early TV commercials for Wilkins Coffee, the gig with Rowlf on the Jimmy Dean Show, his documentary on the art and history of puppetry, the Muppet Show pitch, and clips of the big-screen Muppet movies and the '80s fantasy films "Dark Crystal" and "Labryrinth."

Book on Amazon: Jim Henson: The Biography
Wikipedia about Jim Henson (1936-1990)
Thanks to blog reader ROTM for recommending it.

The new book Anders Zorn: Sweden's Master Painter is a career survey catalog published to accompany the exhibition that's now in San Francisco.


I hesitated to buy it (upper left) because I already have other Zorn books, but I'm glad I did. It's got faithful reproductions, well-written essays, and quite a few images that haven't been published before.

The text is by four authors, all Zorn experts, including a biographical essay by Johan Cederlund, director of the Zorn Collections in Zorn's hometown of Mora, Sweden. They discuss his experiences in America, his nudes, his portraits, and his place in Swedish culture. There's not much coverage of his technical methods or specific insights from an artist's point of view, unfortunately.


I was glad to see many of Zorn's watercolors included. Zorn painted exclusively in watercolor early in his career, and switched mostly to oil later on. Zorn picked the most difficult subjects for his watercolors, such as boatmen in open water, or portraits of children from life.


In Zorn's etchings, figures emerge from an atmosphere of slashing parallel strokes. The etchings were my first introduction to his work when I saw an exhibition of them back in about 1977. The etchings are well represented both in the exhibition and the catalog, with a chapter by James Ganz "Etching in the City of Light: Anders Zorn Among the Post-Impressionists."

The book is hardbound, 9x12 inches, 224 pages, with many large reproductions, something many art book publishers neglect to offer.
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RESOURCES:
Book: Anders Zorn: Sweden's Master Painter
Exhibition: at the Legion of Honor Museum in San Francisco until Feb 2, and will then travel to the National Academy in New York, opening at the end of February, 2014.

Until now, I had to rack my brain to think of what instructional book to recommend for a student who wants to learn perspective.

No longer. Scott Robertson's new book, "How to Draw: drawing and sketching objects and environments from your imagination" lays out all the principles and practices of drawing objects in perspective from your imagination.

The emphasis is on how to draw things in perspective with traditional tools, but the principles apply to digital artists, too. The book begins with basic drawing materials and techniques, and then defines underlying concepts like cone of vision, viewing position, horizon line, and vanishing points, concepts that are often skipped over in other books. The book then goes on to explain exactly how to draw a form with compound curves—such as a car or an airplane—either from observation or imagination.

The book, by Robertson's own publishing company Design Studio Press, is large (9x11 inches), thick (208 pages), and printed on good paper. The book also has innovative video content of the book that can be sourced by a URL inside and on an Android app that is still waiting on iOS approval.

Scott is both a master teacher and a concept artist who has designed vehicles for many feature films. He has been working on this book for most of his professional career, and it benefits greatly from his experience as artist, teacher, and publisher.
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How to Draw: drawing and sketching objects and environments from your imagination
Other book recommendations in my "Survival Guide for Art Students"

The scope of the book is ambitious, too. It not only includes the French Salon tradition, but also samples of Victorian painting, works from the American Hudson River School, and some pieces from Eastern Europe.

The introduction discusses the causes of the recent revival of interest in Salon painting and compares the spectacle of many 19th century epic history paintings to the popular appetite for extravagant Hollywood movies.

Carl Theodor von Piloty - Seni at the Dead Body of Wallenstein

The 230 color reproductions include masterpieces not only by acknowledged masters such as Bouguereau, Gerome, Waterhouse, Leighton, but also by many other deserving but lesser-known painters, such as Morelli, Cormon, and Makart. The size of the reproductions ranges from generous double page spreads to small images the size of postcards or even business cards, but on balance, compared to many other recent books, the pictures are ample in scale. There's so much more detail in a good printed reproduction than most internet images.

Pterosaurs dominated the skies during the time of the dinosaurs. They were remarkably diverse creatures, from the size of a sparrow to giants as tall as a giraffe, and were by far the largest creatures ever to fly.

One of the tallest subgroups, known as the azhdarchids, stood as tall as giraffes.

Yet surprisingly, the scientific story of pterosaur anatomy, ecology, and extinction has not been told as thoroughly as has that of the dinosaurs.

A new book called Pterosaurs: Natural History, Evolution, Anatomy helps to fill the gap. It is published by Princeton University Press, the same publisher that produced The Unfeathered Bird by Katrina van Grouw.

Mr. Witton is the ideal person to write such a book. He combines his deep knowledge of the subject as a paleontologist at the University of Portsmouth (U.K.) with his skills as an artist, and he has a flair for informal but accurate writing. His 292-page book is the most comprehensive and authoritative book to come along since Peter Wellnhofer's classic Illustrated Encyclopedia of Pterosaurs back in 1991.


The book contains about 200 illustrations, mostly in color. Typically Witton portrays each type in a side-view flying position at the bottom of the flap cylce. In most cases the color restoration is accompanied by a line drawing of the reconstructed skeleton in the same pose. There are also many fossil photographs, maps, diagrams, and full-environment restorations.

Witton's book covers general topics first, such as what we know and don't know about the skeletons, soft tissues, coloration, aerodynamics and behaviors. He then covers more than 130 species group by group, including many recently discovered and beautifully preserved specimens. The back of the book has a very thorough list of references and an index for deeper reading.
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Find out more:
Amazon: Mark Witton's new book Pterosaurs: Natural History, Evolution, Anatomy
Facebook page for the book
Princeton University Press webpage
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During the flowering of plein-air painting in the late 19th and early 20th century, some of the most impressive artists came from Spain.



Joaquín Sorolla is perhaps the best known in the USA, but there were other brilliant painters who deserve to be better known, such as by Raimundo and Ricardo de Madrazo, Mariano Fortuny, and Martín Rico (1833-1908).


A big exhibition of Martin Rico's landscapes is currently on exhibit at the Meadows Museum in Dallas, Texas. With the help of the Prado museum, they have produced an excellent catalog, which fills a huge gap in scholarship on the artist.

Much of the training in contemporary academic ateliers focuses on understanding and interpreting what you see in front of you. At the moment, there's a growing interest in supplementing those skills with the training of memory and imagination.


To fill that gap, academic painting instructor and painter Darren Rousar has written a much-needed new book called Memory Drawing: Perceptual Training and Recall.

On his website MemoryDrawing.com, Rousar says: "All drawing and painting from life is at some point done from memory, even if that memory is only seconds old. An artist’s ability to recall something previously seen is all the more important when their subject is no longer in view. Da Vinci, Corot, Degas, Whistler, and Inness wrote about it. In fact, Inness claimed that many of his best landscape paintings were done from memory."

Mr. Rousar's book approaches the subject from a variety of angles, starting with the history of how it has been taught in the past, including the notable contributions of Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran. The focus then turns to the science of memory and perception. Then the book analyzes the process involved in seeing and remembering.

The slim and inexpensive 140-page softcover book includes many black and white illustrations with specific exercises involving line, shape, and value. The book ends with valuable appendices by Père Lecoq and Harold Speed, and a glossary. The book is thoughtfully and clearly written, and will benefit both teachers and students interested in improving their powers of memory.
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Resources
Book: Memory Drawing: Perceptual Training and Recall by Darren Rousar
Free digital book of the French classic "The Training of Memory in Art and the Education of the Artist" by Père Lecoq
Website: Memory Drawing
Previously on GurneyJourney:
Memory Game with Maps
Drawing from Memory
Remembering a Face

Book: John Singer Sargent: Watercolors
The show is currently at the Brooklyn museum through July 28, then goes to Boston's Museum of Fine Arts October 13, 2013 - January 20, 2014.