The Art of Michael J. Malzone

Archive for June, 2009

About ten years ago I came across a hardcover version of Andrew Loomis’ Creative Illustration. It remains today as one of my favorite in my art library of books. Although Norman Rockwell held the spotlight as America’’s most revered illustrator in the 40’s & 50’s, Andrew Loomis kept  quite busy producing magazine covers, billboards, calendars, and just about any print product imaginable.
Although Loomis was a successful and prolific commercial illustrator, it was his educational books that have had the biggest impact. These books are priceless in terms of the valuable information and instruction in drawing and painting, and thanks to the internet they are literally priceless, or without price! There are quite a few sites that have PDF files of his books free of charge. The site owners claim the books are public domain, so while they’re still available I highly recommend you dowload them ASAP. You can find them at: http://www.alexhays.com/loomis/   There is a nice bio of Andrew Loomis at: http://www.bpib.com/illustrat/loomis.htm 
Some of the titles available:
Fun with a pencil
Figure Drawing for all it’s worth
Drawing the head and hands
Successful Drawing
Creative Illustration
The eye of the painter

An Andrew Loomis cover from June 1935

Saturday Evening Post,1935

Below is a photo of my palette of colors that I use outdoors. An artist can easily paint the shore with as little as *three pigments but I like using this prismatic based palette. The prismatic palette is one developed by Frank Vincent Dumond and was widely taught at the Art Students League. Dumond’s students such as Frank Reilly, Paul Strisik, and Arthur Maynard made this palette  the foundation of their teaching the prism in nature. Maynard founded the Ridgewood Art Institute in Ridgewood, NJ where the tradition of the prismatic palette continues to be taught. I’ve modified this palette by: adding Yellow ochre and Burnt Sienna. I also two oranges, one that heads toward yellow and one more toward red. I also use a Algiers blue by Robert doak as a replacement for Manganese blue. Doak’s blue is an excellent paint with great tinting strength and much less expensive than Manganese due to it’s scarcity.

* The three pigments that can be used are: Ultramarine blue, Alizarin crimson, and cad yellow light, along with Tit. white and ivory black. I will post a chart and elaborate on this in the next post.

An outdoor palette

Check out this Free Color palette generator at: http://bighugelabs.com/colors.php   Just upload a photo and the software generates a series of color swatches from your photo. This is a great way to isolate colors so the paint enthusiast can see how close the values lie in a particular composition.

Color palette generator

I recently participated in an art exhibit in Bay Head, NJ. I went down the previous week and did some plein air sketches at the beach and at Twilight Lake. I wanted to do a moonlight or nocturne scene so I basically just sketched in the profile of the trees and did the rest of the painting in studio. Framed in a custom painted dark blue rustic frame this painting is for sale. For price e-mail at: mikemalzone@gmail.com 

Twilight Lake by moonlight, 8 x 10 oil on linen

I’ve been working on some new seascapes recently and thought I’d post them here for your viewing. Most of them are for sale and the prices are quite reasonable, frame included. For price and availability you can contact me at: mikemalzone@gmail.com or call me at 973-720-0001

11" x 14" oil on linen, framed

It doesn’t get much better than painting outdoors, or (en plein air). One of the few sensations to top it is when you sell your painting wet right off the easel! In a recent trip to colonial Williamsburg while painting off the main road, I had the good fortune to find a buyer for my painting in progress. The client agreed to let me finish it up in my studio in which I would ship it to her in Pa. upon completion. The reason being that after almost two hours into the painting the picket fence was now in complete shadow as the rest of the painting done earlier was painted in direct light at about 10 am. In hindsight I would’ve eliminated the fence as it doesn’t add much to the composition visually.  (16″ x 20″ oil on linen)

Colonial Williamsburg

3-dimensional copier

 

 

 

 

 

 

(from the New York Times-What makes a work of art “great”? A seven-part tale of the Nazi-era Vermeer forgeries of Han van Meegeren. )

 

 Imagine that you could build a 3-dimensional copier. And could copy “The Girl with the Pearl Earring” atom by atom, molecule by molecule, such that there would be no way to distinguish between the two. Would I then have the same painting? The answer is: NO. The two paintings have a different provenance, and that provenance is crucial to understanding what makes a work of art what it is. One painting has a provenance going back to Vermeer, the other has a provenance going back to the 3-dimensional copier.
Furthermore, if the painting was not painted by Vermeer, if it doesn’t have that causal connection with the hand of Vermeer, then it doesn’t matter what it looks like. Vermeer could have produced a truly atrocious painting, but if it is he who painted it, then it is a Vermeer, regardless of what it looks like. Van Meegeren was aware of this. All you have to do is point to the forgery and say, “It’s a Vermeer,” then perhaps point to a signature, and the viewer does the rest of the work. Now for the surprise. There is no need to build a 3-dimensional copier – even if it were possible. Han van Meegeren has conducted the experiment for us in a much more clever fashion. There is NO difference between “The Supper at Emmaus,” before and after it was identified as a modern forgery, and yet it was seen in different ways. Only our beliefs about it have changed.  Click to read article