The Art of Michael J. Malzone

Archive for October, 2008

c.1856
Oil on board 11 1/4 x 17 inches
Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Madrid, Spain

Last week members of the Wayne Art Assocaition spent a day at American landscape painter Frederic Church’s home, Olana, just at the foot of the Catskills in New York. It was a picture perfect day and I was pleasantly surprise to see the foliage still hanging around late in October.
Church, whose name is synonomous with the Hudson River school of painting built his mansion Olana between 1870 and 1891. Inspired by his travels in Persia, Church was responsible for most of the architectural and decor of the house. Though his majestic paintings have secured his place in American art as one of the greatest landscape painters, in my opinion

Olana might be his greatest contribution and most inspired creation. The one thing that puzzled me is his studio space while elegant and spacious, did not take advantage of the North light that entered the room unfiltered. For all the unique and innovative thought put into the house design, the studio light which is such an integral part of the working artists environment seemed like an afterthought. Not a complaint, just an observation. Thanks to generosity and master photographic skills of WAA member Jerry Allison, here are some pics from that wonderful day.
(Pics to come)

There is an excellent article on Frederic Church at Artrenewal.org
Click here http://www.artrenewal.org/asp/database/art.asp?aid=673

You can read more about Olana at it’s website:
http://www.Olana.org

This is a wonderful book that has been a staple at my school for the past two years:

What does the world’s oldest art say about us?

A frieze of horses and rhinos near the Chauvet cave’s Megaloceros Gallery, where artists may have gathered to make charcoal for drawing. Chauvet contains the earliest known paintings, from at least thirty-two thousand years ago.
Click here to read this intriguing article

Historical records show flake white has been a favorite of painters for its flexibility and permanence since the advent of oil painting. Portrait painters in particular enjoy the warmer hue as opposed to titanium that tends to be cooler in nature.
Natural Pigments, a suppier of paints, pigments, and other professional art supplies manufactures lead white through a method called the Dutch process, or (stack process).
For artists lead white is becoming increasingly more difficult to find and companies like Natural Pigments are making limited quantities.

To see a modern day method of the Dutch process at the Natural Pigments website, Click here;
http://www.naturalpigments.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=4;t=000027;p=1

Glenn Strange as the Monster in “Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein”

When I was a kid it was simple, I loved Mad magazine and for my brother it was Famous Monsters. In fact it was FM, Eerie and Vampirella. The obvious seller for each of these magazines was their compelling artwork. I will always be in awe of the caricatures of Jack Davis for Mad and Frank Frazetta’s Vampirella covers will always be etched in my memory, but it was the Famous Monsters covers and the art of Basil Gogos that kept me up at night.
(from Wiki) Basil Gogos’ Famous Monsters cover art featured most of the classic horror characters such as The Phantom of the Opera, Frankenstein’s monster, Dracula, The Wolf Man, The Mummy, King Kong, Godzilla and The Creature from the Black Lagoon and popular horror actors like Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Vincent Price, Lon Chaney, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. Gogos often captured his subjects in an array of vivid colors using a technique in which the artist imagined the character bathed in colors from multiple light sources. He enjoyed painting monsters more than most of his more conventional assignments because of the freedom he was given and because of the challenge of painting such unusual characters which he endeavoured to portray as both frightening and sympathetic.

The Creature from the Black Lagoon

The legendary Dracula

You can read more about Basil Gogos at wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basil_Gogos

Any fan of 1960’s Monster Mania or just quality painting/illustration should not pass up on this soon to be classic: Famous Monster Movie Art of Basil Gogos

This past Saturday over 100 cartoon lovers turned out for our Creators Workshop 7th annual halloween cartooning workshop here in Wayne, NJ. We had a lot of fun drawing October classics like Dracula, Frankenstein, the Mummy and everyone’s favorite, Charlie Brown and the gang.
Special thanks to Lorraine, Karen, Nicole B., Nicole L., Dave, Chelsea, Katina, Shane, and parents who helped to make this such a great event.

This past September I incorporated the Charles Bargue Drawing course into our drawing curriculum. I’m pleased to report the results were incredible. The Bargue Drawing Course is a complete reprint of the famous, late nineteenth century drawing course. It contains almost two hundred reproductions of master drawings and paintings for copying by students.
I am pleased to present a drawing by my student Dan Cerullo. His first time with formal instruction, Dan’s been studying with us since July. With aspirations to attend school for architecture, the Bargue course provides him with valuable portfolio pieces to present to the top-notch art schools out there.
Don’t misunderstand, this is far from a magic formula for drawing. The success in this drawing method lies in the fact that Dan is a disciplined student and puts a lot of time in making the drawing work. No magic formula, just a lot of hard work. My guess is Dan will have a lot of schools to pick from!

View of the Hudson from Olana, home of American painter, Frederic Church

Frederic Church’s studio

Started today’s painting by sketching in with a wash of raw umber & ultramarine. I tone my canvases to an approx. 30% gray. The easel is set up preferably in shadow since the bright light is too harsh to paint in, although the shade was about twenty degrees colder today then the sunlight!

Plein air painting done from back of Church’s home. !6″ x 20″ oil on cotton canvas

For more information about Frederic Church or Olana visit:
www.Olana.org

Fall colors are a beautiful thing to behold but quite different to capture on canvas. One of the many tricky things is the trees become more sparse each day which means backgrounds peak through. I started this sketch using cad orange to map out the foreground tree even though the leaves themselves weren’t that radiant.

I also try to mass in large values like skies and large patches of grass. They help to establish the key of the painting, the trick is not to keep the chroma or the brightness of the color under control. It’s easy to want to blast a tree with pure yellow or orange but the goal is to keep the painting credible every step along the way.

As you can see blue skies were moving in and the whole mood of the scene was changing.

Unfortunately I was out of time as I had to get back to the studio for afternoon classes but I gathered quite a bit of information for a 1 & 1/2 hour painting. Although there were pretty of geese available, I’m tempted to put some sheep or cows on that bridge.

Before there was Norman Rockwell, there was JC Leyendecker.
I just recieved this new book on the art and life of one of America’s most prolific illustrators and highly recommend it.

Click here to see more JC Leyendecker pics online:
http://www.americanartarchives.com/leyendecker,jc.htm

In the introduction of Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, “Blink”, he begins with an account designed to illustrate the way our instantaneous reactions to people, objects, and problems are often the most accurate responses. His story relates the details surrounding the acquisition of a particular type of statue called a kouros by the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Though there are very few intact examples of this type of statue in existence, the museum was offered a nearly perfect specimen by a dealer in 1983.
As is standard, the museum initiated an investigation into the metal work statue, seeking to validate its authenticity. Preliminary scientific analysis of the piece seemed to corroborate its ancient origins, and the sheaf of documentation the dealer provided to the museum offered a convincing account of its ownership throughout most of the twentieth century. Convinced, the museum closed the deal and began preparations to display the piece. However, in the interim, an array of experts who examined the statue reported mixed feelings about it, ranging from confusion to revulsion.
The accumulation of a large number of these negative intuitive responses to the statue finally prompted the museum to re-open the investigation. Eventually, it was determined that the ownership documents were forged, and the scientific evidence dating the piece had been misinterpreted. The intuitive responses — which Gladwell terms the “blink” — proved to be correct.
The investigation into the documents was somewhat vague and this created an underlying question as to the authenticity of the research that was done. Ultimately, later in the book, it was deemed to be very poor. As a result, this led to problems.
Read more at wikisummaries