In progress work/19th century realism

It's been a long, tiresome, but great and productive day.  I worked for about 7-8 hours today doing an underpainting and getting a good start on another painting.  Here they are:

The first one is clearly a figure painting that will have something of a "Birth of Venus" theme to it I think.  At this point it's kind of an improvisation.  Anyway, the second is more focused.  It's an underpainting for something fun that I'm calling "Time Out."  The little girl looks kind of scary right now, as my underpaintings typically do.  But I sure hope it turns out much more adorable.  It was pretty hard just getting the underpainting drawn, and I'm really really hoping it turns out well.  I'm probably just going to have to take my time on it, which I'm terrible at.

Lately I've been checking out some work by a lot of different 19th century realists.  I'm still focusing on landscape painting (while also doing these figurative works still), and some of the best landscape painting I've ever seen has been done by some really awesome 19th century painters.  Particularly, a few that I've been looking closely at are George Inness, Emilio Sanchez-Perrier, and Ivan Shiskin.  In addition, there are the great landscape painters that I already love like Frederic Church, Corot, and Pissarro.  But the fun thing particularly about Ivan Shishkin is that he is one of a few painters that is opening my eyes to a number of Russian realists of the 19th century.  When it comes to this generation of artists, I've found out that the Russians are insane with awesomeness.  In addition to Shishkin, there's Ivan Kramskoi and Ilya Repin.  And if that's not enough, I've also been getting more into some other artists of this period such as Edouard Dantan, Jean Leon Gerome, and Jehan Georges Vibert.  Some of these names have been really obscure for me for a while, but since I've been checking out their work, my eyes have been opened a little more to some amazing artists. 

Don't get me wrong, I have heard of a few of these guys, and I'm not totally ignorant of the 19th century realists, but I've really started to appreciate them way more lately, and I kind of like just how basically unknown some of these artists are.  It makes them even better somehow.  So if you're interested in seeing what I mean about these painters, look them up!  I may just do a few entries dedicated to these artists soon, and I'll go into more depth about what I love about them.  In the meantime, stay tuned for some more updates coming soon...