I saw Tears for Joy in the Garden of Giants because it was a Daily Deviation here on Deviant Art on January 18, 2009. It immediately stood out from the many fantasy paintings because it didn’t focus on scantily clad women (though they’re there, sort of), nor did it have a horrible monster, nor vicious violence. On his web site, Zancan explains what he was going for this way:
In the immense diversity of emotions one can feel, I choose to extract a striking and rare one and turn it to spectacle. This emotion is a joy so immense that it makes cry tears; smiling and weeping at the same time, the widest range of behaviors concentrated in one single emotion.
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Mort Künstler is best known these days for his Civil War prints and paintings. He’s had a long career as an illustrator, however. Illustration magazine devoted its 24th issue to him, where I found this gouache and oil painting for a movie poster of The Hindenburg. The original is 28 3/8 inches by 24 3/4 inches. Here’s what it looked like in context.
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I ended up last week by saying I’d do a Maxfield Parrish piece this time, but I lied horribly. The Parrish piece I’d picked is Daybreak, one of his most popular and well known. It’s based on the principles of Dynamic Symmetry. I need some more time to work through that, so I’ll do it three weeks from now. Instead, I’m going to do Dance by Alphonse Mucha. It’s part of a series of four panneaux based on the muses (some of them, anyway). Aside from Dance, there are (from left to right) Poetry, Music, and Painting. This Art Nouveau style may have come before the term “pinup,” but hey, these are pinups.
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While I’m not that familiar with the comic overall, I do know that the main character, Catherine Allingham, is a detective with only a few months to live. This cover doesn’t illustrate a specific scene but instead sets a tone and a mood. Its purpose is to catch the eye (stand out from the other covers) and give us a hint of the kind of story we might find inside the pages.
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