As we journey past the quarter mark of the alphabet some of you may have noticed a slight itching in the back of your eyes. Maybe you’ve felt hunger pains, not in your belly, but at the midpoint of your head. That’s where your visual cortex is found and that hunger signals the beginning stages of art addiction. Other symptoms include: a compulsive need to discover all the names of teachers and friends of a particular well known artist, exploding bookcases due to the weight of too many art books, a deep knowledge of auction houses and their scheduled public viewings. Lastly, hives.
Don’t worry, the addiction is relatively benign and plenty of support groups exist. Just remember, it’s a scavenger hunt which has no list and never ends.
Xiangyuan Jie
Strong chunky brushwork is a prime feature of both Jie’s Plein Air and film work. From the backgrounds of Brother Bear to his environmental concept work for Ice Age, his mastery of light and color is truly jaw dropping.
Sophie Jodoin
Sophie is a fine artist who works primarily in black and white. Her austere figurative subjects often bleed into organic textural abstraction.
Jaime Jones
One of a large group of concept artists who’ve taken the ideas of Alla Prima painting into the digital realm. Jaime Jones is pretty close to being the Photoshop Sargent.
Jeff Jones
An icon of fantasy illustration Jeff has had a long career spanning book covers, comics, and private commissions. In the 70s she was part of The Studio, a collaborative art space shared with other luminaries of Fantasy illustration: Michael Kaluta, Bernie Wrightson, and Barry Windsor Smith. Jeff’s paintings reveal a mastery of composition and restraint and have served as an influence to countless artists the world over.
Joaquin Sorolla
In an effort to thin the herd of S’s, we offer Joaquin, an incredible Alla Prima painter whose virtuoso paint strokes and brilliant color came from his focus on painting outdoors regardless of the size of the canvas. Renowned for his speed on such giant canvases, his students reported that he “painted as a pig eats.”
C O L O P H O N
Nicolas Jenson was one of the great early printers and typographers. He worked in Venice in the mid-late 15th century and is sometimes credited with designing the first serifed roman typeface. The faces used in the header—San Marco by Karlgeorg Hoefer, and Centaur by Bruce Rogers, are based on his work.
We are Kurt Huggins and Zelda Devon. We live in a pocket-sized apartment in Brooklyn where we collect neat, weird things. Our home is abundant with books, old furniture, mismatching tea cups, and a cat named Cipher. We both illustrate stuff for money so we can continue to invent stories, buy shoelaces, watch puppet shows, and eat sandwiches.
