Readers and writers blog

If you’re a first-time visitor to the weblog lines and colors, take it only a day or a few days at a time. Because it can be a sensory overload.

The site, rich with illustrations, mostly of representational art from classic works of Michelangelo and Rembrandt to online Flash animation, drew our attention not because of the beautiful pictures but because of the writing of the site’s creator, Philadelphia artist and animator Charley Parker.

Consider Parker’s description in his Nov. 2, 2006, post about the work of contemporary artist and illustrator Francis Livingston:

I wouldn’t put Livingston’s work in the Impressionist mold, though. Instead of small strokes of color optically blended to make larger shapes, he uses big bold blocks of color, chips and chunks of color (perhaps troweled in with a palette knife in places) to define his forms.

In fact, he seems to luxuriate in the physical presence of the paint, using wonderful fat strokes of buttery oil paint, laid on with three-dimensional thickness, stroke-defining edges raised above the surface of the canvas. The effect is one of energetic abandon to the luxury of color, and a feeling of the rich sensuality of paint, looking as if it was just squeezed from the tube.

Or of 17th century Dutch master Jan Vermeer in a Nov. 9, 2005, post:

In my development as an artist, it’s taken me a long time to get over being intimidated by the great masters. Over the years, I’ve caught Raphael and Michelangelo making mistakes in proportion, Prud’hon cheating to fit a figure on a sheet of paper, even Rembrandt missing the mark. I eventually realized that the masters may have been great, but they were still only human.

I’m not so sure about Vermeer . . .

Just remember that, as amazing as they can look in reproductions, you haven’t seen a Vermeer until you stand in front of the real thing.

In more than two years of blogging, Parker — who must be a workaholic, considering that he posts nearly every day in addition to producing his webcomic Argon Zark (the character in the illustration above) and teaching at the Delaware College of Art and Design — has covered a wide territory of art that he maps out as . . .

. . . drawing, sketching, painting, comics, cartoons, webcomics, illustration, digital art, concept art, gallery art, artist tools and techniques, motion graphics, animation, sci-fi and fantasy illustration, paleo art, storyboards, matte painting, 3d graphics and anything else I find visually interesting.

If it has lines and/or colors, it’s fair game.

Among his most recent posts, Parker has written about contemporary Polish fantasy artist Jacek Yerka, mid-15th century Italian painter Cosmé Tura, the Pre-Raphaelite school of 19th century England, French comics artist Claire Wendling and the “storytelling secrets of comics, manga and graphic novels.”

And imagine my surprise to find a kindred spirit in someone probably a generation younger than me — one whose boyhood eyes were widened to a whole new world by Mad comics. Not the magazine, but the comics of the early 1950s. Parker discovered Mad in a paperback reprint. I, on the other hand, had my mind expanded — or, in the words of parents and other adults at the time, twisted — by the originals, the 23-edition series written by Harvey Kurtzman and drawn by Wally Wood, Will Elder and Jack Davis.

Those artists were incredible. Just take a look at Wood’s work in Parker’s post of Dec. 26, 2005. In fact, it’s that satire of Flash Gordon, which Mad presented as ‘Flesh Garden,’ that inspired Parker to name his online comic hero Argon Zark.

Parker has returned that inspiration to the rest of us in lines and colors, the latest addition to our blogroll of well-written sites.

– Sid Leavitt