Artist Feature: Rolf Armstrong

Hello friends!

I'm now safely and successfully in England! If you haven't read on here before, I'll be here, in Oxford, until December studying for school. Two weeks before my classes are out, Gracie will be coming to England and after school ends we'll take a week to travel somewhere, anywhere, in Europe! It will be hard to choose where to go together, and it will be severely limited by our limited funds, but being together will make anywhere grand!

Not that this place isn't grand - my goodness, Oxford is absolutely stunning! I've been to England before, but only ever to London, and I think Oxford is far superior... I'm going to sound very tourist-y and gush-y and effusive and say that Oxford is just really, really, really beautiful. Ancient architecture everywhere, amazing gardens, the greenest grass, cobblestone streets... a totally different landscape from the mildly drought-ridden and extremely hot South US! Obviously the place is chock-full of history, much of it very interesting, and I learned just a fraction of it today when my fellow students and I got a tour of Oxford. I feel so foolish for not bringing my camera, because everything was picture-worthy, but I can always walk down there again... I'll just feel awkward doing it when I'm not in a group! 

Anyway, I'll put some pictures up soon, the house I'm staying in is also beautiful, it's this restored Victorian mansion and I've got the room right overlooking the lovely gardens in the back! 

Okay, onto the point of the post - another artist that I adore very much, Rolf Armstrong! I love his super saturated jewel tone palatte and the often dramatic way he paints his lovely ladies. He's pretty popular, so I'm sure most of you have seen some of his images at some point or another - but here are a few of my favorites!

Artist Feature: Enoch Bolles

My blogging may be rather sparse over the next two weeks as I'll be moving back to Atlanta and then immediately heading out to Oregon for a few days for my cousin's wedding... 

So - I'll leave you with some eye-candy: the gorgeous and, ahem, very naughty artwork of Enoch Bolles! One of the most successful earlier glamour artists, he did cover art for tons of magazines in his heyday (the nineteen-teens through the 1940s), but he also did a lot of advertising work - an interesting and unfortunate little piece of trivia is that his "Windy Girl" work for Zippo lighters is often mis-credited to Alberto Vargas (who was in fact very influenced by Bolles).

While gathering up some pictures from around the web for this post, I happened across a fabulous blog dedicated to his artwork! Check it out if you like his images, there is a lot of good information (and tons of rare images) there. 

I just love the utter richness of his work: the jewel-toned color palates, the "overripe girls" (a perfect description from the folks at the Bolles blog), the impossible/ridiculous but wonderfully fantastical poses and situations of the Bolles girls. And as it is with any pinup work, his portrayals of the female figure are unrealistic: the girls have cartoonishly beautiful faces and impossible curves that could make Rita Hayworth look boyish, but that doesn't spoil it for me - in fact, its part of what I enjoy about his work, and good pinup art in general. It's not supposed to be realistic, its idealized and over-the-top and it doesn't take itself too seriously. 

But enough talk, here are just a few of the many beautiful illustrations done by Bolles. Believe it or not, I actually tried to choose his less-naughty/suggestive pieces - Google his name and there is some much more blush-inducing work of his out there! 

Enjoy!

1941. This gorgeous lady reminds me a bit of an inflated Hedy Lamarr... inflated boobs, inflated lips..

1916. "Look before you leap this year!"
This is definitely one of my top favorites! Because the first time I saw this I laughed out loud, very loud. And I still audibly chuckle most times I look at this. The guy's face is priceless, and it's a moment perfectly suspended in time, both sentimentally beautiful and genuinely humorous, something that I think is very difficult to pull off in images and is thus very impressive to me. I know the feeling of the guy in the water - I always get afraid of getting accidentally jumped on by friends at the pool, and I also always check the water before I jump off a diving board!