Eyecon Graphics & Illustration

My Favourite Things	The Illustrated London News Inside Knowledge. On the right is one of the many big spreadout pages of this magazine. Artist G H Davis was extremely skilful in rendering ship detail and sea waves in a painterly style. He made painting look easy and fun.
	Famous Paintings This big book contains many great paintings in excellent printing quality. A lot of them are lesser known, like this one The Meeting by Marie Bashkirtseff. There are thousands of beautiful paintings of the Victorian period that many of us have seldom or never seen.
	Claus Bergen His paintings appeared on an early issue of Life magazine. I was fascinated by his technique of sacrifying the entire ship image in order to bring the viewers to maximum closeness to the scene.
	Stamps I love those beautiful miniature engraved images. Such precision drawing technique makes even mundane subjects look dignified and worth attention.
	Revell model boxart artists John Steel (ships) and Jack Leynnwood (airplanes). Despite numerous imitations, their boxart paintings are still unsurpassed to this day.
	Comics Lone Ranger, Batman,Tazan, etc. These comic books taught me line drawing basics and picture composition. Comic artists are very skilful in using shadow and dark areas to show objects’ form and their spatial relationship.
	London Underground map Harry Beck produced this simple, ingenious and informative map in 1933. It has become a symbol to remind me that the primary goal of design is to be functional. There is also a challenge to see if the designer can solve a problem with creative ideas.
	Illustrative Tourist Guides HC Berann painted many feast-for-the-eyes maps for the travellers. His maps are far more interesting than photographs or satelites images. I still have this map I got when I travelled to Switzerland in 1976. See the complete catalogue of HC Berann’s panorama maps in www.berann.com
	Vintage Poster Art Travel poster artists of the early 20th century are always very imaginative with their picture compositions. I like collecting postcards, posters, labels and books with illustrations of that era. This Pan American Flying Clipper poster by Frank Mackintosh is one of my favourites. Note the exaggerated size of the floatplane, it is so naively effective!
	John Singer Sargent Ambergris Smoke, oil on canvas, 54” x 36”, 1880. John Singer Sargent is my favourite painter. His oil and watercolour paintings always put me under a spell. He championed in all areas; brush technique, composition, colour, mood, lighting effect, subject matter, output of work, consistence of quality, and his instinct of picking up people’s personality in his portrait paintings. His choice of using detail and roughness is unpredictable but always effective. This makes his paintings more fascinating than many others.
	I have skipped my other favourites like Al Hirshfeld (the great caricaturist), the National Geographic Magazines and some comtemporary artists for fearing I don’t know when to stop writing. Anyway thank you for reading this page. Back to top

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