Saul Leiter (1923-2013)

"In order to build a career and to be successful, one has to be determined. One has to be ambitious. I much prefer to drink coffee, listen to music and to paint when I feel like it."

- Saul Leiter (1923-2013)

The pulp fiction of Francesco Francavilla

There are two things you need to know about Italian comic book artist, Francesco Francavilla: Firstly, he produces some of the best pulp and retro-styled pictures you're ever likely to come across and, secondly, he has created possibly the most perfect minimalist posters for the hit TV show, Breaking Bad; the latter project purely as a hobby.

In 2009 he created The Black Beetle, a comic series he originally made for his Pulp Sunday blog, which has since been picked up by Dark Horse Comics, gaining him much critical acclaim. And he has also produced a long line of fantastic covers for many publications (including Dark Shadows, The Spider, Hellboy, Sherlock Homes and The Shadow to name but a few), earning him an Eisner award in 2012.

 

 

 

 

 

Beautiful decay: the work of artist and designer, Evan Hecox.

It was a few years ago when I first heard of Evan Hecox.  I can't remember exactly how I came to find his work but it instantly grabbed my attention. The simplified, design-like style hit the same chord that illustration does with me. The paintings are almost cinematic in their composition. And it's this mix of recording the factual, physical decay of a city street while simultaneously reducing it to it's essential visible components, and turning it into a beautiful image, that I love so much.

He begins with careful observations of a setting and then progresses into concentrated, detailed drawings worked over a prepared, aesthetically textured ground. As a result the drawing floats on top of the surface, which remains visible through the drawing, creating a space between them that is at once tied to, and distanced from the image.

His more recent work has started to move towards abstraction with design coming to the fore. Presenting work with bold abstracted lettering combined with the urban landscapes of his previous work, often drawn over newspaper.

Evan Hecox lives and works in Colarado, USA.

Contemporary abstract art by Eric Blum

Born in Fresno, California in 1956, Eric Blum studied at UCLA and St Martin's in London.

Working with the difficult medium of encaustic he creates multiple layers of resin, watercolour and silk, applied gradually, often at one layer a day. The result is a distorted image: ambiguous forms with an almost infinite depth giving a sense of a fleeting, unfocused, light or movement hitting your peripheral view.

He currently lives and works in New York City.

Françoise Gilot: Artist

Françoise Gilot (b.1921) is well known for being the lover and muse of Pablo Picasso from 1944 to 1953, and the mother of his children, Claude and Paloma. However, fewer people realise that she is also an artist in her own right.

The work below shows her development from cubism through to her own style of abstract painting, a visually cleaner and brighter collection of work when compared to Picasso. Currently living in New York City and Paris, she continues to exhibit her work internationally, having exhibited at the Gagosian Gallery as recently as May 2012.

Egon Schiele

The National Gallery currently has a major exhibition examining the central role portraiture played in early twentieth century Vienna, and due to the fact that I blatantly won't be able to get down to see it, as I have kids, I thought I'd post a few of my favourite Egon Schiele drawings.

It's Schiele's clean line work that has always drawn me to his work rather than subject matter or overall emotional impact. And it's something that is pretty clearly visible in my own work. His lines hold an incredible amount of intensity and nervous energy which give an enormous expressive energy to his drawings.

I find it quite humbling to think that Schiele created this incredible body of work before his death in 1918 as a result of the Spanish flu pandemic, at the age of twenty-eight... a couple of years younger than I am now.

The exhibition, Facing The Modern: The Portrait In Vienna 1900, will be on display until 12th January 2014.

Willem de Kooning

"I make pictures and someone comes in and calls it art."

Willem de Kooning