Natural Grace in Landscape and Human Figure

Rediscovery of Glenn Dean

I am indebted to Matthew D. Innis because his blog (http://underpaintings.blogspot.com/) helped me realize that the humongous electronic art world could provide for not only a handy museum of all the masterpieces of art, classic and contemporary, but also for urgent information I needed to teach myself how to paint. In his recent post, he introduced Glenn Dean. I came across Dean's artworks online before and felt they were good but, maybe because I was rushing through and didn't stop to ponder on them, I didn't see the most valuable qualities of his works. Today I did some research and found there is a lot for me to learn from him. I could tell how the spiritual element of 19th Century American landscape classics have influenced his principle in landscape painting. In his own words, he tries to "honor The Creator" in his landscape painting. Even though we don't have rugged mountains, big sky, or vast desert in Florida as he depicts in his paintings of New Mexico, I believe Florida is beautiful in its own way and it is up to us to find the spiritual element or, to my mind, the human sensitive resonance in response to natural beauty. Dean's small-size on-the-location sketches have especially inspired my interpretation of painting Florida. I posted some of his paintings here including his portrait made by Jeremy Lipking, another contemporary artist whom I admire.

Discovery of Sergey Marshinnekov

Yesterday one of my artist friends in China introduced to me by E-mail a contemporary Russian artist Sergey Marshinnekov's figure paintings. I had not heard of him before. His works are stunning. Like in Glenn Dean's landscape paintings, I think Marshinnekov has also discovered the natural grace in figure painting. He is obviously a master in expressing the gracefulness and softness of femininity side by side with the softness of fabrics. His figure paintings are different from Jeremy Lipking's, Jacob Colins's or Zhaomin Wu's. They seem to have a touch of Pino. I have them copied here for you to see.