Lesley Smitheringale Fine Art

Featured Artist: Anne-Julie Aubry

I’ve totally fallen for this talented French aritst’s work, not to mention her stunningly, gorgeous website.

l to r: “The Glorious Sadness” and “Dreaming of Bees”

l to r: “The Raven & the Girl” & “The Fall”

I like to say that my world is divided in two parts. I have that “cotton candy” side where I like to use soft or bright colors on cute themes. This part of me is the older one, I began my illustration studies with things intented for children. And I have this other side, a darker one, when I need to expose my adult mind and its sad depths. My inspiration comes from my childhood, from fairytales, from music and movies or Nature and dreams, but it also comes from my everyday life.

Unifying various techniques, from the pencil illustration to the collage, the painting, the digital, I’m trying to give multiple sensations, details and shades that are partly catched from my spontaneous creativity. My works are born - as it always should be - from the inspiration, the enjoyment, the will to create.

To me, this artist conveys emotions and the relationship with natures’ creatures in such a tender, beautiful and almost childlike, whimsical way to perfection. This extremely talented, young female French artist captures the essence of the “unwritten” bond animals have with humans. I simply adore this artist’s work and her website captures all of this as well - just stunning and a rare gem.

Anne-Julie Aubry’s website and blog

Featured Artist - Dou

These are really different and beautiful. Dou was born in 1983 in Moscow and has won awards for his photography.

Dou’s Website

Featured Artist - Eric Wilson

I stumbled across this amazingly talented British artist who happens to be exhibiting his work on the same site as myself. I am a bit in awe of Eric’s work and having done pastels myself, he is in another league. See for yourself.

Eric Wilson has established himself as one of Britain’s leading wildlife artists, a multi-award winner whose paintings are now widely collected throughout the world. His artistic ability was evident from his earliest schooldays; “Eric has an artistic talent way beyond his years” wrote his art teacher in 1967. As a child of Scottish parentage, Eric would spend his formative years roaming the highland mountains of Scotland where his lifelong love of wild places was born. It was natural and inevitable that Eric would combine his talent with his love of wildlife and become a wildlife artist. Accuracy & attention to detail are hallmarks of Eric’s work, his adventurous research trips take him to some of the remotest wilderness areas on the planet.

Some of Eric Wilson’s artworks which are available to purchase on his website.

l to r: “Greeting the First Snows of Winter”, oil on canvas & “Gorilla - Zaire”, pastel

l to r: “European Eagle Owl”, oil on board & “Male Polar Bear at Sundown”, pastel

Eric Wilson’s Website

Eric Wilson’s Blog where he has some step-by-step tutorials which are well worth a look.

Featured Artist - Nicholas Di Genova

Nicholas Di Genova was born in Toronto in 1981 and works like a portraitist documenting the post-human future. He draws and paints horrific, yet innocent machine/animal carcass hybrids, building a protective community. Each character has its own unique and detailed story, as though from a yet unwritten comic book. In the over-arching story, the machines have taken to incorporating animal parts in the monster vehicles they build. It’s the old carcass-as-infrastructure routine.Di Genova’s characters often appear first in ink on paper. Making post-human robotic anthropomorphism look so hopeful and, well, human, is a feat in itself. Di Genova draws life into all his creatures through meticulous detail. Animal hides rot and scar with myriad dots and patches, carefully rendered in greys and greens against pink and blue backdrops.by Kevin Temple from nowtoronto magazine

Nicholas Di Genova spends over 12 hours a day in his studio, working with abstract ideas and ambitions that makes for inverted normality found in art galleries across North America.

l to r: “Chicken Hounds”, “Greater Turkey-Hydra” & “Upright Shepherd Waddler”

Nicholas tells Jordan Chalifoux from format magazine

I’m from a pretty small town and when I was there, there wasn’t really much to do. There was an arcade and comic book store. So, I really got into comics when I was a kid and read comics for eight years and I started drawing my own comics. I started making up all these creatures, I was always much more into the monster comics and super hero comics and then when I moved to Toronto I started to get into street art and use that imagery on the street.

For a lot of my work, my technique is pretty straightforward, ink and watercolour on paper. I use a lot of source materials in my work, so my studio is totally covered in layers of books. For the mylar paintings (the stuff with colour), the technique is very similar to that of traditional animators: ink on one side of the mylar, animation paint on the other. I use a dipping pen for all of my ink work, which somewhat explains the areasof drips; sometimes those damn things just explode and really f… stuff up.

from art & design magazine

Nicholas Di Genova’s website

Nicholas Di Genova’s blog

Person Nicholas Di Genova

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Australian Art Gallery purchases Hockney’s Work

I am a big fan of David Hockney and it’s terrific to see that his work is being appreciated in Australia.

“A Closer Winter Tunnel” David Hockney (England b. 1937) 2006, oil on six canvas panels - each 91.5 x 122cm, overall 190.5 x 381 cm.

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA.-Today the Art Gallery of New South Wales announced the purchase of David Hockney’s “A closer winter tunnel”, 2006. The painting consisting of six canvas panels is now on public display at the Gallery.

This significant work complements the Gallery’s British 20th century collection, which up to now did not include the work of one of the most outstanding British artists of the 20th century, David Hockney.

The Gallery is indebted to three sources of support for the purchase of this work: Geoff and Vicki Ainsworth, the family of Florence and Bill Crosby and the Gallery’s Foundation.

Two years ago Hockney returned to his native East Yorkshire and undertook a series of dramatic, highly charged works with his now characteristic strong colours.

Hockney is indisputably one of the most original and versatile artists of the 20th century and these new East Yorkshire paintings, so full of life and veracity, have brought fresh recognition of this rich and vivacious imagination.

These works are something of a revelation and have made a tremendous impact wherever they have been displayed – currently five are on show in Tate Britain, London said Edmund Capon, Director, Art Gallery of New South Wales.

The work was painted out in the landscape. Over a period of months Hockney would leave early in the morning, with a pick-up truck loaded with easels, canvases and paints, to work on these often immense compositions. Such direct and candid treatment may be compared with earlier 20th century painters, like the Fauves (Vlaminck, Dufy, Derain already represented in the Gallery collection) and to the earlier English landscape artists (Gore, Spencer and Hitchens again represented in the Gallery).

This article appears in a terrific online Art Newspaper called Artdaily

http://www.artdaily.org/section/news/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=21746

Featured Artist - Andre Martins de Barros

“The artist’s ultimate aim is to lead us in his world of dreams and fantasy and in so doing offers us the opportunity to be surrounded by and confront our own philosophical thoughts and beliefs inspired by travels through the subconscious.”

The Librarian                                               Cavalcade 

Deviant Art Gallery at: http://amartinsdebarros.deviantart.com/gallery/

Website at: http://www.martinsdebarros.com/