So proud to say It's official - New Disney Fine Art Series!

I am really happy to announce that I am now an officially licensed Disney Fine Artist! 

 
 Below are the first three! Some of you may remember that I did the Beauty And The Beast painting way back in November of last year which is when all of this began. 

 To Visit the Disney Fine Art site:  http://www.disneyfineart.com/clintonhobart

 "Tell Us A Story" 12 x 15 Oil on Linen

While at the Disney Festival Of The Masters last year, a Disney Artist named Stephen Fishwick walked by and noticed the Beauty and the Beast Painting. He asked me if I was a licensed Disney Artist? I said "no", and he said "You should be". He put me in touch with the right people and here we are!
I can't thank Stephen enough!! 

 "Time For Tea" 13 x 26 Oil on Linen

All of these are painted from life, from actual objects sitting in front of me. The items are also either actual size or close to actual size.

"Things From Wonderland" 22 x 26 Oil on Linen

Some of you may have noticed I have been slowing down on the blog posts recently. It was just that I was very busy working on the above projects. I will be posting process shots and various other topics really soon!!

Large Wave Painting - On The Easel

Whenever I plan on doing a large wave painting, I always do a small study first. To the left is a 6 x 12 that I did in about two hours.

For the larger painting I stretched an 18 x 32 canvas. I did a drawing on this one first because of the complexity of the shapes.

 

I like to go for walks on the beach in the morning. It's a great way to start the day, and I think it's important to look at and observe the ocean before I start painting it. Here is a picture of me hard at work - I love my job









Below  is a shot of it as of last night. It has a long way to go!

 

Two New Minnies - A Baseball and A Wave

I have so many things I want to post about but I just don't have time right now...When I say "I'm busy", I really mean it! I managed to get these two little ones done while I am working on the big project.
Both are 6 x 8 Oil on Panel

New Long Tropical Still-Life 12 x 40 Finished

This is the hardest painting I make. Usually, they include seventeen or eighteen objects all of which will rot in only a few days. I wake up really early, go to the market, go back to the studio, and set it up and paint as fast as I can usually late into the evening...sometime early morning. When working on one of these I have already started painting at eight am and painted until two in the morning. That is a long day! - and why I paint one every five years lately.

This one is heading out to Scottsdale Fine Art in AZ!
It is a 12 x 40, Oil on Wood.

Bill Peet Has A Website!

For those of you that have never heard of Bill Peet he started out at Disney and then became a very successful children's book author and illustrator. My introduction to him was in art school, when one of my instructors recommended his autobiography, which he wrote in children's book form. It is a fantastic book, a short read, and I think a must for anyone who loves the field.
  I just found out that he also has a website. I'm not sure how long it has been up, but I just stumbled on it so I thought I might share it. It is loaded with great information including pages on story writing and even some caricatures of other Disney greats:

http://www.billpeet.net

To the right is the cover of his autobiography, and below a link to it on Amazon for anyone interested

Amazon.com - Bill Peet, An Autobiography

Bill Peet - January 29, 1915 – May 11, 2002), He joined Disney in 1937 and worked on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs the same year. After that came: Pinocchio (1940), Fantasia (1940, The Pastoral Symphony), Dumbo (1941), The Three Caballeros (1944), Song of the South (1946), So Dear to My Heart (1948), Cinderella (1950), Alice in Wonderland (1951), Peter Pan (1953), Sleeping Beauty (1959), 101 Dalmatians (1961), and The Sword in the Stone (1963). 

"During his 27 year career at Walt Disney studios, Bill Peet rose from inbetweener, to sketch artist to Disney's chief storyman. Bill Peet was the only storyman in the history of Disney studios who did all the story boards for an entire animated feature film, and he did it for two of them: The Sword in the Stone and One Hundred and One Dalmatians." - From his website

All before becoming a great writer and illustrator of many children's books including:

The Ant and the Elephant, Bill Peet: An Autobiography, Buford the Little Bighorn, The Caboose Who Got Loose, Cowardly Clyde, Encore for Eleanor, Farewell to Shady Glade, Kermit the Hermit, The Whingdingdilly, The Wump World. Visit his website for the rest of the list!

JRR Tolkien's Translation of Beowulf To Be Published

According to The Guardian:

"Almost 90 years after JRR Tolkien translated the 11th-century poem Beowulf, The Lord of the Rings author's version of the epic story is to be published for the first time in an edition which his son Christopher Tolkien says sees his father "enter[ing] into the imagined past" of the heroes."


I never thought I would be excited to read it again...It was painful the first time, but this sounds pretty good to me. Thanks Sandra for sending the link!

 Link to the original article: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/mar/19/jrr-tolkien-beowulf-translation-published 

If You Post A Blog Post Because You Saw The Post On Someone Else's Blog, Should They Get Credit?

A few posts down I posted something on Vermeer. I saw the post on James Gurney's Blog, so I mentioned that in the post. I am, and maybe some of you are too, noticing that a post pops up on a blog, and then a few days later a similar post shows up on another blog, and than another etc. It may sound silly but I think the first person to think of it, should get a little credit. I am, and always have been really big on giving credit when due. Creating a blog post is NOT easy, swiping a post idea from someone else still might not be easy, especially if you change it and make it your own, but I still think a nod to the inspiration might not be a bad idea. When newspapers run a story based on another story they read, they are supposed to give credit - why shouldn't bloggers? I think most of it is innocent sharing, however I suspect that there are one or two bloggers out there, reading less popular blogs, looking for ideas to post on more popular blogs, and take credit for the ideas.

I'm still up in the air on this one, so I was wondering what everyone else (ie both of you reading this) thought? If I post a blog here because I read something on another blog, does anyone care if I mention where the idea came from?

The 100 Greatest Books Of All Time and How Batman led to War And Peace

Batman by Jim Lee

I frequently say that there is more to life that just painting, and reading has always been a close second, well, eating is up there also, and travel, and old movies...

I started reading because of Comic Books. I was maybe eleven or twelve when I bought my first comic book. To some people it might be surprising that Batman can lead to War And Peace and Moby Dick, but it did. Well actually Batman led to a few Dean Koontz novels first, then it led to The Hobbit, which led to Crime And Punishment - which is painful after a lifetime of comic books. When I was accepted into SVA I was living in NJ and I had to take the bus to school every day. It was an hour going in, and an hour coming back out. Two hours a day of sitting on a bus doing nothing. One of my teachers drew in a sketchbook on the train and suggested that. I couldn't do it. I decided to read, but I figured that if I was going to be reading two hours a day for four years, I might at least make it interesting. I decided to read what I thought were the 100 greatest books of all time. The list was based on what I had heard, some collections, teachers advice, etc. I'm not saying that these ARE the 100 greatest books of all time, in fact after having read some of them, a couple should come off. I don't see why In Cold Blood is on there and Descartes, may deserve to be on there - I'll never know because I can't get through it. I'd like to add that this list was written in roughly 1994, way before I had internet access so I couldn't just Google "The 100 Greatest Books Of All Time" the way we can now.

I had read the Crime And Punishment comic book years before and so it' seemed like a good place to start. I can thank comic books for introducing me to mythology, Shakespeare, history and a great many other things.

The list is not really in order of my favorites, that would take too much time, and why they are not numbered. My favorite on this list however is David Copperfield, despite the occasional "Your favorite book is on a magician?" comment...Yes it is I say.


Well here it is, the books I have not read yet are in red.

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
Candide by Voltaire
Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
Tom Saywer by Mark Twain
Swann's Way by Marcel Proust
The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon

Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy

The Stranger by Albert Camus
The Metamorphosis  Franz Kafka
No Exit Jean-Paul Sartre
The World as Will and Idea by Arthur Schopenhauer
The Aenid by Virgil
The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
Pragmatism by William James
On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
Discourse on Method by Rene Descartes
Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Vasari's Lives of the Artists by Giorgio Vasari
Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
The Call of the Wild by Jack London
Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Paradise Lost by John Milton
The Three Mustketeers by Alexandre Dumas
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
King Arthur & Excalibur Stories/ Le Morte d'Arthur by Thomas Malory
Stranger In A Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
Walden by Henry David Thoreau
Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
Oedipus And Antigone by Sophocles
The Odyssey by Homer
The Iliad by Homer
Ulysses by James Joyce
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
Complete Works  by William Shakespeare
Metmorphises by Ovid
Beowulf
The Faerie Queene  by Edmund Spenser
Bosewell’s Life Of Johnson (The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.  by James Boswell)
Of Mice And Men  by John Steinbeck
The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
The King James Bible
The Epic of Gilgamesh
1001 Nights
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Short Stories by Edgar Allen Poe
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
Through The Looking Glass And Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Louis Carroll
War Of The Worlds by H. G. Wells
The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
1984 by George Orwell
Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri 
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
Emma by Jane Austin
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

I put Shakespeare on the list as the "Collected Works" even though I think Hamlet, Macbeth,  Othello, and King Lear all should be on there separately. Henry Miller is on there because the book was raved about as the greatest thing on the planet before I read it. Miller is a poor mans Hemingway. The book is a vulgar version of "The Sun Also Rises" and doesn't come close to it's equal. In my opinion, it doesn't belong on this list.
If I were to update this list today I would add:

Mythology by Edith Hamilton, The Story Of Philosophy by Will Durant,

and  Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt. Stephen Crane's poetry is shockingly good, and I prefer his short stories to The Red Badge Of Courage. Of everything I have read of Crane's, it is my least favorite...I love The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams and it gets special mention, but I'm not sure I can put it on the list with those above...not yet anyway.

I'm still working on this list even though I move away from it from time to time. I am in the middle of "The Story Of Civilization" Volume V by Will Durant and I plan to finish the series. I am also on Dicken's Old Curiosity Shop. I was actually surprised to realize I have not read either "The Count Of Monte Christo or Three Musketeers" No excuse for that and one of those is definitely next.


The idea for this post came from a FB conversation with a friend - Thanks John!

On The Easel - Early Process Shots

I haven't painted a 12 x 40 since 2009. They are the hardest paintings I make. They have to be painted as fast as I can in order to get to everything that is lined up before it rots and changes color.
For the first three days I wind up getting up at around eight am and painting until one or two in the morning...I'll add to this post as things progress.

An Update To The Vermeer Post

A friend of mine on Facebook shared this in response to my below post on Vermeer. I thought I'd share it here as well.