I got a very nice email a few weeks ago from Don Gray of Daily Art West, and after seeing his most recent painting I decided to feature a few of his works in today's article. "Work Gloves" was the first painting to catch my eye - the texture is great, of course, but that bold, red trim is simply fantastic.
Today's artwork is by Jim Flanagan from Phoenix, Arizona. Deliberately painted to be colorful, vivid, and just Fauvian in general, I think Jim's paintings are a real visual treat. After all, taking colors to the extreme is one way for an artist to exert total control over his or her artwork. That's pretty cool, don't you think?
This week's featured artist is Jeff Cohen, a graphic designer turned fine art painter who uses oil and encaustic on wood. As you can see from the paintings below, Cohen's paintings are all made up of many smaller painted squares. This adds subtle geometric patterns and an element of randomness to his work.
Today I'd like you to meet Jeff Lyons, cartoonist oil painter. Jeff creates fine art oil paintings that are a little different from what I normally review on EmptyEasel - but his "girlfriends" series in particular is fantastic. (Hover your mouse to see the title of each piece.)
Zehava Power is an artist who currently lives in Nova Scotia, Canada. Her paintings are a chronicle of sorts, showing glimpses of the community and culture that is unique to her home. Her subjects tend to be completely engrossed in their work or play, which makes for beautifully compelling scenes. . .
This week's featured artist is James Neil Hollingsworth, an oil painter whose work is beautifully dramatic and realistic. Hollingsworth has several different themes that he likes to revisit, but his paintings of pool balls are consistently my favorite because of their bold colors and extreme visual impact.
Ready for some color? Carol Marine is another Daily Painter whose work I just can't get enough of. Most of her artwork features apples, plums, cherries, and other fruit, simply arranged with dishes and pottery—but it's her use of color that makes her paintings really pop. . .
Rebecca Finch is a talented New Jersey painter and photographer whose oil paintings seem to be a visual extension of her own inner goodness. In a world where art is so often dark, shocking, and even obscene, Rebecca’s paintings take on new meaning—they champion the cause of simple beauty, warmth, and kindness.
Lucian Freud was born in 1922, and is now 85 years old. He's Britain's most famous figurative painter, and possibly its oldest, best known for his raw and unforgiving paintings of nudes.
Zhaoming Wu is an incredibly talented Chinese oil painter whose painting style ranges from soft to hard-edged. What I really love about his work, however, is all of the cold blues, purples, greens, and yellows that he puts into the shadow areas of his portraits. Read more. . .
Megan Lightell is a landscape painter from Tennessee whose work I came across just a few weeks ago. Megan's paintings are fairly large, so it's difficult to really do them justice here. In fact, this painting entitled Long Memory is five feet wide in real life.
Born in China, Jove Wang was educated at the finest art institutes in the country. His paintings are rich and thick, skillfully painted with bold color and a masterful application of paint. In the painting below he's prominently used two brilliant primaries, blue and red, but balanced them with liberal fields of white and a wall of neutral browns.