world in my pocket: 20th century illustration

by Armand Cabrera

Redmond

Oil Paintings are more than just good drawing and good color and design. Often the way the paint is applied can be just as important. Once you learn the basics of representational picture making in oils it is important that your work take advantage of all the properties of the paint.

Carlson

One way of achieving this is the use of paint quality and handling. Imprimatura, scumbling, impasto and glazing all add an extra dimension of interest to traditional work when applied with intelligence and forethought.

Wyeth

Walk into any museum and look at a representational painting from the impressionist painters or golden age illustrators and you will see the use of all dimensions and properties of the paint at play. Nowhere was this more apparent than at the Howard Pyle show at the Delaware and the concurrent N.C. Wyeth show at the Brandywine Museum. Huge areas of the total canvas rendered with nothing more than a dark imprimatura. Lights loaded with impasto, color glazed and scumbled over other colors instead of blended. In some places the raw weave of the canvas showing through all to great effect.

Pyle

It’s the same for the impressionists here and abroad at the turn of the 20th century. These artists knew their materials and let the unique properties of each artists chosen medium exert itself in the image. It is this philosophy of fidelity to the paint itself that give these works so much power and beauty.

It is an important lesson to be learned, that a thing has an inherent beauty and purpose. As an artist we must be sensitive enough to recognize those qualities and use them in service of our ideas so that it complements the work and raises it beyond the commonplace.

Monet

By Armand Cabrera

Walter Hunt Everett was born on August 20 1880. He spent his childhood on a farm in Haddonfield, New Jersey. In his teens he attended The Pennsylvania School of Industrial Art. Sometime later he attended the Drexel Institute and studied under Howard Pyle.

He began getting professional work in his early twenties. Everett worked for The Saturday Evening Post, Scribner’s Monthly, Women’s Home Companion, McCall’s, Collier’s,Ladies Home Journal, and illustrated a number of books. He provided color frontispieces for the eighteen volume set of The Works of Louise Muhlbach.

Everett also taught briefly at the Spring Garden Institute and The School of Industrial Art from 1911 to 1915 but quit when he felt teaching was too confining.

Everett’s early work shows the influence of Pyle and other successful illustrators of the day like E.A. Abbey. The designs while strong are simple and the color is subdued.

As he matured his work became more personal. He developed an intricate sense of design and color and he incorporated more figures in his work. His later work becomes more focused on flat planes of painted color and even more sophisticated designs. His brushwork is bold and free but never sloppy or haphazard.

Although he was in demand as an illustrator through the 1920’s and early 1930’s, his temperamental nature and perfectionism caused him to miss deadlines. In a fit one day he burned most of his life’s work and very few originals survive. He was married briefly but his wife left him when he continually failed to pay bills and rent on time. He ended up moving in with a brother in Pennsylvania sometime in the 1930’s and spent the end of his life painting for the pure joy it gave him. Walter Hunt Everett died in 1946 at the age of 66.