Jan’s Place

Pompeii, by Robert Harris

A charming book that tells the last days of Pompeii through the eyes of a Roman engineer who oversees the aqueduct delivering water to resort towns in the shadow of Vesuvius. When earthquakes shake the hills and the stately aqueduct collapses, he works frantically to repair the damage and to understand what is happening. A famous letter of Pliny the Younger, the only eyewitness account of the eruption of Vesuvius, lays the groundwork for the story, crowned by a convincing and harrowing account of people caught in inescapable disaster. The young engineer and Pliny the Elder (the famed naturalist who died in the eruption) are the core of the story, both well drawn and likable. A minor mystery and details of the immense infrastructure of the aqueducts round out this enjoyable book.

Domesday Book, Connie Willis

A young academic researcher travels back in time to England in the Middle Ages and realizes with dawning horror that a mistake has delivered her to its first outbreak of plague. Her story in the past is a sweeping tale of death — the death of Kali, merciless and unsatiable, strewing bloated corpses across the land until all motion stops in a bloody tableau. But one small figure, protected by modern antibiotics, moves in the frozen landscape and the tableau dissolves into sorrow and despair. Unfortunately, the story in the future is laughable, with Willis showing an inability to understand science, academia, or the kind of world that might create time travel. Still, a book with a strong emotional heart.

Passage, by Connie Willis

Willis seems to be interested in death. In a modern hospital, research into near-death experiences leads to a drug that can simulate an NDE, and a young scientist tries to walk the edge of death with a notebook. The awed tales of tunnels and lost relatives haloed in light begin to reveal a strange undercurrent of fear, but this is not a horror story. Dr. Lander hopes to help the living with knowledge of death, and her story is surprisingly moving. When she finally passes through a light-filled door in her near-death journeys, she finds herself in a majestic and doomed world. In the last hours of a disaster, over and over, people signal desparately for help. When phones don’t work, they try radio. When radio doesn’t work, they try flares. Is that what our minds do when we are dying? Another book with a shoddy view of science and too much confusion in its convictions, but a haunting view of death nevertheless.

Iron Sunrise, by Charles Stross

Accelerando was too twitchy and disjointed for me, but this book has a much smoother narrative. Pluses: a fast-paced adventure story of galactic assassins, mind-controlled religious fanatics and the undercover agents that fight them. Minuses: a child in peril (almost always a cheap trick) and too many mindless lapses of intelligence in the cream of galactic security agents. I shouldn’t be able to read a book about super-agents and say, “You dummies! Even I wouldn’t have done that!”

Museums

Contemporary and Digital
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Beinart collection of Surrealist Art
Museum of Digital Art - some very good.
The Museum of Modern Art, NYC
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

United States
National Gallery of Art - great online exhibits including Cezanne in Provence
Art Institute of Chicago’s Art Explorer
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Guggenheim
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Albright-Knox Art Gallery
The Frick Collection, NYC
Cleveland Museum of Art
Hirschorn Museum, Washington
Detroit Institute of Arts
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
The Getty, Los Angeles
Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh
Cincinnati Art Museum

International
Tate Gallery, London
National Gallery, London
The Royal Collection, England
The Hermitage, St. Petersburg
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna
The Louvre
MauritsHaus, Netherlands
National Galleries of Scotland
Prado Museum, Madrid
Staedel Museum, Frankfurt
Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki
German National Museum, Berlin
Glasgow Museums, Scotland
Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art, Japan

** Sites especially worth looking at within their categories

General art sites showing works of artists

World Artist Directory - Works by eclectic group of international artists, good and bad
A list of artist Webrings - Webrings are spotty, but sometimes good
Ask Art - Info about thousands of American Artists
**Art Renewal - Home of Bouguereau enthusiasts and a huge collection of historical realist paintings - most in the best resolution you’ll find on the internet

Painters of interest - still life

Xiao Xie - paints stacks of library books and newspapers. Can be seen at a number of galleries includingMetivier Gallery.
TR Colletta at camptongallery.com - Stylized still lives of old machinery, scientific equipment, toys.
Daniel Adel - paintings of cloth in motion
Michael Chapman - odd still lives of sorts with a 30s feel
Michael Grimaldi - occasional still lives of antique equipment mixed in with some nice portraiture
Steven Skollar - still lives of antique toys
Daniel Sprick - manages to give a new feel to traditional table-top still life — no small feat

Painters of interest - landscape/cityscape

Francis Livingston - Edward Hopper meets Diebenkorn

Painters of interest - portraiture

Odd Nerdrum - some odd portraits with a lot of character
Victory Wang - he makes skin out of more colors than I believed possible
Helene Knoop - a few unusual portraits are mixed in with a general Bougoureau (?) genre
Ray Caesar - this 3d artist makes macabre Lolitas on LSD. Disturbing, sometimes funny.

Painters of interest - abstract

Gregory Deane - vivid and beautifully textured

Illustration and Cartooning

Illustration and Cartooning blog
Another Illustration blog
Zoological art - an amazing collection of antique posters
Collection of antique Vogue Magazine covers
Flickr - gallery of mid-century illustration
Tales of Future Past - Scans of 30s and 40s sci fi magazine covers

Galleries - mostly figurative since I’ve been doing portraits and looking for help

Mesarts - a large group of artists, including Pat’s friend in Oakland
Wendt Gallery - includes Scott Burdick
Daylight Fine Arts - prints of Jeffrey Larson
Gandy Gallery - classic portrait artists like Sargent
Tirage Art - some figurative work and landscapes
Ann Long Fine Art - realists, scroll down to see images
Eleanor Ettinger - realists
Arcadia Fine Arts - includes Daniel Adel, painter of paper
Florence Academy of Arts - list of links to galleries
Forum Gallery - Modern figurative
Saatchi Gallery - a European physical and online gallery with a wide range of artists

Art Tutorials of interest

** Daniel Smith’s tutorial archives - their catalogs have had well illustrated and professional tutorials for years. Many are gathered here. The first place to look for advice.
**Scott Burdick’s demonstrations - Burdick is a great portrait artist and his website has several demonstrations.
**Vigee Lebrun’s advice on portraiture - The main part of this website is opinionated and full of formulaic ideas about art, but scroll down and you’ll find an excerpt about portrait painting from Vigee Lebrun (17th-18th century portraitist). Very interesting advice from a different time and approach. It had never occurred to me to pay such close attention to foreheads.
Links to art tutorials including Scott Burdick
Vermeer’s Palette
A group of art tutorials including an interesting one about using Scanners and Computers in Art
William Whitaker’s website - an accomplished traditional realist includes some tutorials including one of the few good ones about grisaille
Links to art tutorials and info about a realist atelier
**About.com’s painting info site - with some old master’s info and other eclectic stuff, including a Page of links to portrait sites
Alexei Antonov’s website - an egomaniac realist, but has a lesson on grisaille of a rose. Grisaille info is hard to find.
Nancy Doyle - several art tutorials, some of which are mostly advertising, but a decent one on art materials
**Art Q&A site - a large site with good info under Painting and Paints, emphasis on technical info
Foundations in Grisaille - Colored pencil demo of an intricate grisaille teapot
An artist’s color theory
Oil painting techniques - Portraits and other subjects
**Wet Canvas - huge website of art forums, including Color Theory and Luminous Skin and Limited Pallette and Studio photography lighting techniques
Figure drawing tutorials
History of Painting Techniques - includes old master techniques - shadows, flesh tones.
Indirect painting info
Indirect Painting technique - Example is rocks under water
Art Show - Links to a number of painting, pastel, drawing, digital tutorials including some Daniel Smith
Photographing your artwork
Real Color Wheel - a huge, rambling website including medium yellowing, complementary pigment lists, and a rather obscure main menu

Portait artist websites - these are mainly commercial portrait painters who pose people, and I find their work too stiff or pretty usually, but I linked these for something of interest.

**Masters of Portrait art - the biggies - Kinstler, Greene, Sanden, Knox, Sherr, Silverman
**Portrait commission group in London - of all these sites, this includes the most experimental portrait artists (mixed in with traditional)
**Stroke of Genius - largest collection of American portrait artists I’ve found
Andreeva Gallery portrait artists - New Mexico
John Singer Sargent online
Russell Fecchion - Tucson artist
**Scott Burdick and Susan Lyon - Very fine realist painters, a generous website with tutorials
Ann Kullberg - colored pencil
Daniel Greene - one of the biggie, New York Subway paintings
Simone Bingemer - a stylized super-realist, pastels and drawing. Her drawing is somewhat like mine, though more prettified I think
Steven Mickle - Pastel only, largely children. Photographic style
Robert Hartshorn Not a style I like, but some interesting lighting
Bart Lindstrom - one of the big names
Linda Vise - somewhat stylized. I don’t like her that much, but I like painting white too.
Vincent Chiaramonte - I like the old veteran, the rest are too posed.
Chris Saper - Phoenix artist, writer. Tends to be overheated but facile
Marvin Mattelson - there’s something austere about him that I like sometimes.
Ronald Sherr - see the pencil and pastel heads and very realistic portraits with abstract backgrounds
John Ennis - I only like a few.
Sergei Ostroverhy - very stylized super realist
Tony Ryder - Santa Fe classical realist, teacher
John Howard Sanden - author of portrait book, one of the biggies
Jan DolanStylized, good light
Gwenneth Barth - some good pastels
Morgan Weistling - Bougoureau follower to the max, has some demos
Cristina Troufa - unusual, stark portraits

Works of specific artists, non-portrait

Diego Rivera murals
Banksy - a stencil graffiti artist
Anamorphous street artist
More anamorphous street art

Pencil portrait sites

There are very few good ones I’ve found. Some of the artists above do pencil well.

Pencil Drawing Web Ring - lots of sites, sometimes fun to hunt through, but many bad ones.

Some other favorites, art or not

**Boingboing - a great site for curiosities of all kinds. Almost a new gem a day. Many of my oddest links were found here, including:
**The Museum of Regrettable Food and many other oddities of the 30s through 60s, including a collection of photos. Very funny commentary makes this the mate of the Museum of Bad Art. Go to Home page to see other subjects including The Institute of Official Cheer
**Museum of Bad Art - what can you say? This site might be considered mean-spirited, but it’s pretty funny.
Thrilling Wonder Blogspot - Large collection of interesting photos and graphics
World Best Websites - Links to a lot of good art museum sites as well as pick of the web designs. Lots of quality digital art sites
**The Demotivator Posters - antidote for work madness
Before and after logos - I like a lot of the Befores.The Afters are generally more corporate and polished - not always the best thing.
Proceeding of the Athanasius Kirtcher Society - has to be one of the weirdest sites I’ve found on boingboing, with an emphasis on antique instrumentation and oddities
**The Great Spaghetti Monster - I’m sure I spotted it myself in a tree
A really cool optical illusion
Dozens of panoramas including the Himalayas
Plime arts - always has some good links
**Dictionary.com’s word of the day archive - an indefagitable apologia for fungible but ineffable words. Don’t be a flaneur! Study words!

Art stores online

FramingSupplies.com - best prices on cut mats I’ve found - full line of Crescent mats, acid-free are $1.52 each for 16×20 if bought 4 each with minimum of $100. Frames are Designer Mouldings, a few Nielsen, and Framing Supply brand. I have had some trouble with orders - wrong frame profile or length, but they replaced it quickly. You still can’t beat their prices but be sure to order early and check the order carefully if you have a deadline.
Jerry’s Artarama - now has a Tempe store so you pay tax and shipping. shipping is pretty high, but prices are low.
Dick Blick - Not as cheap as Jerry’s, but has some different things. Now has M. Graham paints, but not as good prices as Art Purveyors
Art Purveyors - Full line of M. Graham (usually 50 percent off) and Silver brushes. Flat rate shipping is reasonable.
Digital Art Supplies - haven’t tried them, but recommended in a news
group.
Inkjetart.com - Great source of inks and papers and a lot of good info. Very prompt shipping.
Red River papers - Looks like average pricing on inks, and some good papers.