Goddess Art & Women of Mythology: The Art of Howard David Johnson

Admission Free Mythical Art Gallery

Realistic Paintings and Photo Realistic Drawings of legendary beautiful women and goddesses of Classical, (Greek & Roman) Celtic, Norse, and Asian Myths and Legends. A celebration of women of myth and legend by Contemporary American Illustrator Howard David Johnson. 

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info@howarddavidjohnson.com

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       On his existing works license offers start at only $99.00. Oil Paintings, Colored pencils, Pastels, Mixed media, and Digital art can also be commissioned for select projects. For A lesson in Math, Design, and Art Theory, The Johnson Galleries, more about how the artist works and essays by the artist on "Realistic art yesterday and today" and "digital art and it's relation to art history" keep scrolling down...

...for his collected essays in low bandwidth CLICK HERE

 England,   Canada,   Scotland,   Wales,   Ireland,  Germany,   France,   Greece,  Cyprus,   Turkey,  Italy,   Belgium,   Denmark,   Yugoslavia,  Macedonia,  Croatia,  The Czech Republic,   Bosnia,   Herzegovina,   Slovakia,    Slovenia,  Luxembourg,   Latvia,   Estonia,   Hungary,    Bulgaria,   Lithuania,   Poland,   Austria,   Romania,    Spain,    Russia,    Ukraine,   Kazakhstan,   Moldova,   Malta,   Iceland,   Finland,   Norway,   Netherlands,   Switzerland,   Sweden,   Portugal,   Israel,   Egypt,   Saudi Arabia,   The United Arab Emirates,   Qatar,   Yemen,   Iraq,   Iran,   Jordan,   Syria,   Lebanon,   Morocco,   The Republic of Congo,    Angola,   Ghana,   The Ivory Coast,  Zambia,   Zimbabwe,   Nigeria,   Namibia,   Uganda,   South Africa,   Mauritius,   Japan,   South Korea,   China,   Macau,    Taiwan,   Nuie,   New Zealand,   Australia,   The Philippines,   Palau,   Cocos Island,    

  The Kingdom of Tonga,   Singapore,   Thailand,  Viet Nam,    Malaysia,   Brunei Darussalem,    India,   Sri Lanka,   Myanmar,   Pakistan,    Indonesia,    Chile,   Argentina,   Uruguay,   Brazil,   Peru,   Venezuela,   The Dominican Republic,    Guatemala,   Costa Rica,   Colombia,   Trinidad   and  Tobago,   Panama,    Ecuador,   Belize,   Cuba,   Puerto Rico,   Mexico,    and my home,   The United States of America...  

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Blodeuwedd & Gwydion from Welsh Mythology

     The various galleries linked to by the icons above show many examples of His Realistic Art, and are grouped by theme rather than media. There are also sample illustrations from his  upcoming books on Celtic Myth and Legend and World Myth & Legend. Since boyhood he has passionately copied the old masters. To create his work, he usually starts with a thematic concept  followed by a rough realistic pencil sketch, then followed by his photography, often traveling to find suitable scenes and locations and then working in his Photography studio with live models from his sketches. He then assembles a variety of elements which are realistic and original. As a boy he dedicated his life to art in 1960. From 1965- 1999 he used xeroxes and tracings to make his preliminary photo montages. This is patterned after  the manner used by Maxfield Parrish and other 19th century notables. Beginning with a tracing, he then draws or paints from these complex original Computer Photo Montages. Many of these are on display on this web and slated for future completion in a variety of realistic traditional art media. As this happens, the finished work is substituted in the exhibit. 

     Since 1972 when he began his career as a scientific illustrator for the University of Texas he has earned his living illustrating all kinds of books, magazines, CD covers, and all sorts of games, greeting cards, calendars, portraits, murals and the like with his contemporary realistic art... HDJ's Realistic Art has appeared in every major bookstore chain and fantasy gaming shop in The United States and has been used in educational texts and magazines all over the world. This site features realistic paintings & pictures for the twenty-first Century including some oil paintings, as well as lots of other exciting media such as colored pencil drawings, pastel paintings, acrylic paintings, gouache paintings, watercolor paintings, and pencil drawings, and also featuring studio,  field, & aerial photography,  digital painting and photo-montage and all these media mixed in an assortment of experimental combinations...Working in a wide variety of media to create his realistic art he offers his customers a host of payment and product options. He delivers the rights to these custom made copyright free illustrations and old fashioned customer service when he does work-for-hire. He loves to paint custom oil paintings and accepts commissions with down payments starting at one thousand dollars. On his existing works his low cost license offers start at only 100 dollars.

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All  paintings, pictures, & text  (c) 1993- 2008 Howard David Johnson All rights reserved

Thank You for Visiting the Women of Mythology art page...

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"THE MORE THINGS CHANGE, THE MORE THEY STAY THE SAME..."

(A Brief essay dealing with attitudes toward Traditional Realistic Paintings, Pastels, Colored Pencils and Art Numérique )

     Snobbism in the arts is nothing new. Some people will tell you that oils are the only valid medium for realistic paintings. That Colored Pencil, Digital, and other Realistic Painting and Drawing Media are not valid  for "real" art. Young artists, Don't let them bother you. Their forerunners used to condemn Pastels before they gained acceptance and called them "crayons" when Johann Alexander Thiele (1685-1752) invented them.  Mercilessly disrespectful  art critics of the time could not stop the Experimentalists no matter how viciously they attacked and derided them. "Crayon-painting" as it was called in England was practiced early on by persecuted pioneers in Switzerland and many other nations. What a debt we owe to these master artists who refused to knuckle under to the pressure of those short-sighted critics during those historic and experimental times. It took until 1870 with the founding of the "Societe` Des Pastellistes" in France that respect came  at last to these heroic & immortal visual artists.

        In England the liberation of the Pastellists from slight regard and undeserved disrespect came with the first exhibition of "The Pastel Society" at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1880. Pastel Painters like Mary Cassat and others from America and other nations forever silenced  the snobs with their masterworks and gained recognition at long last for Thiele's invention as a valid art medium. I am persuaded that history will repeat itself.  Like Pastels, I believe these wonderful new colored pencils and even Digital Realistic Art Media will one day receive the recognition they deserve as powerful mediums of artistic expression just as pastel paintings did. What is your definition of art? Have you thought about it?

Mine is: "anything that makes you feel or think."

     Consider dancing... it can be a little skip in the step or rise to the level of the incomparable Russian Ballet. Did you know that just the materials alone for a single oil painting cost up to a thousand dollars these days? Even paying the artist less than minimum wage no one but the super rich can afford them anymore. Something's got to give. Realistic paintings in oil have been highly prized for centuries and the appeal and following of realistic art is undiminished to this day. Oil paintings featuring Abstract Art and Realistic Art are generally the most treasured form of all the visual art media and with good reason. But snobbish art critics  favoring abstract art have declared  that realistic paintings, or illustrations are not art for a century. With so many representationalist  paintings by so many immortal master artists hanging in the Louvre, the Hermitage, and the British Museum and others I think the disrespect for realistic illustrators that dominated the 20th century is academically ridiculous as well as vain and intolerant, insisting theirs is the only valid opinion. What is your definition of Art? I believe almost any form of human expression can be raised to the level of "high art" especially  visual art and Realistic illustration...

       By my own definition of art, which is: "anything that makes you feel or think" most abstract paintings are not "real art" to me personally, because abstract paintings usually neither make me feel or think,  usually focusing obsessively on technique and avoiding any coherent content. I usually draw a complete blank mentally and emotionally when I look at them. In 1979 the Houston Metropolitan Museum of Art displayed a triptych of 3 giant   paintings they paid fifty thousand dollars for-  three blank white canvasses entitled "untitled". Then there was "The incredible new artistic Genius" with an I.Q. of 62 ...Congo the chimpanzee with his gala New York art exhibition...an elaborate prank played on the Snobbish American Art critics about a generation ago by research scientists in the field of primatology. Imagine how upset they were when he created one of his "ingenious masterpieces" right before their eyes.

( My Source for this is the Time Life Science Library volume entitled "The Primates". )

      Art education has been almost completely removed from American Schools as a result of generations of this kind of  fabulous nonsense contributing to America's cultural illiteracy crisis. Now, the works of Leonardo Da Vinci, Michaelangelo, and other notables are being removed from school libraries.  After generations of this, most American college graduates today cannot name even one living visual artist, abstract or realistic.

There is no way that mandating more math, requiring more reading, or scheduling more science will replace what we have lost as a culture.    

What is your definition of Art?

~HDJ

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     None of these people earning their living creating realistic art could compete with the speed and low cost of photographic portraiture.  Determined to survive, great realistic artists like Pablo Picasso ingeniously turned inward and began to explore things that could not be photographed in a new school of art, abstract expressionism. The day of the fine art superstars had arrived. It was now largely just a hobby to abstract and realistic artists alike. Illustration, because of advances in printing technology enabled an elite few to earn a living with their realistic art. These illustrators working in realistic art media  were condemned and ridiculed in much the same way Europe's great symphonic composers were condemned for working in motion pictures after fleeing the nazis during World War Two. The rift between realistic and abstract art grew wider and wider. The universities and key media usually sided with the abstract camp and derided anyone working in any realistic art media declaring boldly that realistic art was not "real" art.

Photography, Drawing, and Painting combined-Art Numérica