Mary Nimmo Moran's Etchings

Mary Nimmo Moran (1842-1899) traveled all over Europe on sketching trips with her husband Thomas Moran.

"Haunted House," etching by Mary Nimmo Moran

But she decided to stay home on one of his extended jaunts to the west. Before he left he coated some copper plates and told her the basics of etching.

She developed her skill at the art mostly without the influence of teachers, which gave her an original approach. Nearly every plate was drawn in the wild directly on the plate. "When Mr. Moran returned from the West, the result of his wife's initial efforts with the needle were a surprise to him."

"They were so original, so pronounced in their characteristics, so unlike anything he himself had done or had seen, that he scarcely knew whether to praise or condemn. Four of these first plates, however, were submitted to the New York Etching Club, and were promptly accepted for exhibition."



"They were warmly praised by the critics, and the unknown artist was elected a member of the club."



"For twenty years, from her first hazardous beginnings to her death in September, 1899, Mrs. Moran was loyal to her first ideals and true to her own strong individuality."

Painting by Mary Nimmo Moran

"Never for a moment did she allow fads or fashion to warp her judgment, or cause her to wander from the path on which she started when she undertook unaided to develop her art."
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Brush and Pencil Magazine, April, 1901, page 10
Mary Nimmo Moran on Wikipedia

Cincinnati Exhibit with Gurney Paintings

There are three of my paintings currently on display in Cincinnati at an exhibition called "In the Audubon Tradition." They're available for purchase, and the information is here.

Animation with Encaustic Painting

Bulgarian artist Theodore Ushev has developed an encaustic painting technique for his animated film "The Physics of Sorrow."

In an interview for Cartoon Brew, he says: "The first ever time capsules were the Egyptians tombs. And they had these beautiful, realistic portraits on the cover of their sarcophagus, created with encaustic painting. Made of melted beeswax and color pigments, they stayed absolutely intact for 20 centuries. So I thought this would be the perfect technique to employ for my film. But I had to not only learn to paint an image or a portrait using this technique, but also invent a way to make it move."
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The Physics of Sorrow: The Technique (Making-of) from NFB/marketing on Vimeo.
Via: Cartoon Brew
Wikipedia on Encaustic painting

Street Artist Documents New Yorkers in Mega Mural

Chronicles of New York City at the Brooklyn Museum, care of Gothamist

This weekend the Brooklyn museum opens an exhibition called JR Chronicles. The centerpiece of the exhibit is a gigantic montage of photos of New Yorkers.

The photos were taken by a French-born street artist / photographer who invited people to come into his rolling box-truck studio and pose against a green screen, and he later composited them together into narrative groups. He also captured audio as they told a snippet of their personal stories, and some of those audio clips can be played interactively at the exhibition.


Here he talks about how he has worked out his his economic model to maintain his creative integrity, and how he fails sometimes. (Link to YouTube)
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via Gothamist

Painting at Dublin's Dead Zoo

I visit the "Dead Zoo" (also known as the National Museum of Ireland, Natural History) to paint the skeleton of a hippo in watercolor and gouache. (Link to video YouTube).

How Turner Painted in Watercolor

Sketchbook pages by J.M.W. Turner

John Ruskin said this about J.M.W. Turner's method of painting in watercolor:

"The large early [watercolor]-drawings of Turner were sponged without friction, or were finished piece by piece on white paper; as he advanced he laid the chief masses first in broad tints, never effacing anything, but working the details over these broad tints. While still wet, he brought out the soft lights with the point of a brush, the brighter ones with the end of a stick; often, too, driving the wet colour in a darker line to the edge of the light, in order to represent the outlines of hills."

J. M. W. Turner, "Red Rigi," 12 x 18 in. 1847, National Gallery Victoria

 "His touches were all clear, firm, unalterable, one over the other: friction he used only now and then, to represent the grit of stone or the fretted pile of moss; the finer lights he often left from the first, even the minutest light, working round and up to them, not taking them out as weaker men would have done".

Quote by John Ruskin, c. 1850's; as cited in The Life of J. M. W. Turner R.A. , Walter Thornbury - A new Edition, Revised
More about Turner's watercolor technique on Handprint website

Merrion Square

At Merrion Square, it's fun to imagine Oscar Wilde and W.B. Yeats walking these paths. What would they think of all the new construction going on in Dublin?

I'm using watercolor with a little bit of gouache and chalk at the end.

WIRED Covers Color Constancy

Wired's Robbie Gonzalez visits neuroscientist David Eagleman to explore the perception of color constancy, which they demonstrate by building a large model of my diagram from Color and Light. (Direct link to YouTube) Nice work, you guys!

Viennese Sign Painters

A Viennese sign painter explains how he created his handmade signs. Lately he's been working on his small museum, which shares lettering samples with the next generation.
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When Better Letters met Josef Samuel: Vienna's Last Signpainter

Phil Tippett Documentary Trailer

Here's a trailer (Link to YouTube) for a new documentary on stop motion animator Phil Tippett, who animated the Tauntauns and the Imperial walkers for Star Wars.


Since the CGI revolution, he has been working on personal projects such as Mad God (Link to YouTube) that extend the possibilities of stop motion in visualizing strange dreams. and equally strange and suggestive CGI / practical hybrids such as Mutant Land.