Brush with Peril

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For his comic book, Brush with Peril, Chris Wisnia re-envisions Van Gogh’s Self-Portraits as a brotherhood of vicious thugs for hire. (Read more about Brush with Peril’s Van Gogh Thugs.) Watch a time-lapse video of Chris inking. Here is Chris’s finished piece:

The piece is modeled after Vincent Van Gogh, Self-Portrait (1887), Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam:

Chris created this image as part of a series of digital prints, which kind $4 Patreon Supporters can access at www.Patreon.com/ChrisWisniaArts.

Read the comic book, “Brush with Peril”:

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see A Small List of Great Artists : RENÉ MAGRITTE (Belgian, 1898-1967)

(Read previous: Magritte’s Paintings of Pipes (Treachery of Images))

(Read more: A SERIES of Magritte’s Paintings of Pipes)

When I was in college and began thinking about and studying art, my relationship with artwork was that these were all just a bunch of images we would look at in art books, or that the professors would project on the wall as slides, to talk about. Some of the work spoke to me, and a lot of it didn’t. (We all like we what we like, don’t we? And that’s ok!) And during that college time, as I got older and got out and saw more of the world, something that might seem really simple and self-evident to you occured to me, and kind of surprised and delighted me to realize it. Sure, I understood in an abstract sense that these aren’t just pictures in books – These are all actual, real, one-of-a-kind objects that physically exist in our world. All these paintings. But the surprise and revelation for me was that, as objects that exist in different locations, they are viewable. They’re in publicly accessible museums – all over the place, anywhere you go. Either you can just go somewhere and then view whatever they have, or if you want to view something particular, then you just need to find out where, and then you can go there, and then you can view it. They’re out there!

My first visit out to New York, popping into the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I stupidly asked one of the gallery attendants, “Wait a minute, is that the actual piece, and not a duplicate?” He was understandably baffled at the question. Here I was looking – all in one place – at a bunch of the most famous paintings I knew of, by all the most famous artists I could think, and that I new of since they were in all my books. Somewhere back in time, that actual artist held a brush in their actual hand, and chose and mixed that particular hue of color and chose that very spot of their canvas, and touched their brush against that very canvas, and now here is that finished work, right before me.

Don’t take my word for it: Pop into your local museum! Or if you’re on vacation, pop into THEIR museum! Go see these amazing works of art! Spend time with them! It’s a record of time, these paintings, recording these moments of the artist’s life – what was before the artist’s eyes, and the fact that the artist recorded it on their canvas. And YOU can be right there with these pieces, face to face, seeing what the artist sees for as long as you like; study them, enjoy them, think or talk about them! And every city around the world you go to will have a new and exciting and uniquely different selection. It’s like the ultimate scavenger hunt! This has come to become a source of great joy to me, popping out to art museums and getting a chance to see and snap a photo with all these amazing works of art. Please look forward to more of this from me, on all the other of these artist pages.

(Read previous: Magritte’s Paintings of Pipes (Treachery of Images))

(Read more: A SERIES of Magritte’s Paintings of Pipes)

Read the comic book, “Brush with Peril”:


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see A Small List of Great Artists: Gauguin’s Tahiti

PAUL GAUGUIN (French, 1848-1903) was a stock broker and successful business man, painting in his free time and married with five children, until the Paris stock market crashed in 1882, which led him to become a full time painter and leave his family.  His art became influenced by folk art and Japanese prints, as he tried to find a technique to express the essence of objects, eliminating subtle gradations of color and classical perspective, and painting from the imagination. He sought to capture the “primitive” magic of spiritual and imaginative states in his art. He befriended Van Gogh and spent nine weeks in 1888 painting at his Yellow House in Arles. Their relationship deteriorated, and when Gauguin said he was leaving town, van Gogh confronted him with a straight razor, then cut off his own ear that evening. They never saw each other again, but they continued to correspond. In 1891, Gauguin sailed for Tahiti, producing many of his most famous paintings there, of the exotic location, its forgotten culture and religion, and its natives – or his romanticized visions of all of it in his mind. He wrote in a travelogue that he married a thirteen year old and had a child with her before leaving in 1893. Upon his return, he continued to paint from his Tahitian memories, then returned again from 1895-1901, taking in a fourteen year old who gave him two children, but one died in infancy. His health declined, and he was hospitalized several times.  He moved to the Marquesas Islands, took in a fourteen year old to live with him and dress his sores, and she had his daughter. Weak, in great pain, his sight beginning to fail him, and resorting to morphine, he died in 1903.

Read the comic book, “Brush with Peril”:


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see Arneson’s Self-Portraits

ROBERT ARNESON (American, 1930-1992) was the Father of the Funk Art movement of the 1960’s. His work was labelled as confrontational, immature, naughty, irreverent, sardonic, or edgy. It feels to me like a prankser stomping on the foot of notions of high art, and winking and smirking with us at this conceited conception of the role or prestige of “the artist.” He taught ceramics at U.C. Davis while I was there, and fellow students boasted what a great professor he was, and how I absolutely had to take as many classes as I could get into with him. I was never particularly interested in sculpture, and I was only at the campus for a year and didn’t manage to get into his classes before he retired, and then he passed away from liver cancer a short year later. But his presence was everywhere, most especially with the five Egg Head sculptures that began appearing all over campus the year after he died. In 1997 a group of us fellow graduates of Davis trekked to see his exhibit Self-Reflections at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and I saw there that humor, self-deprecation, sarcasm, and visual puns could be art. But his self-portraits of his cancer and chemotherapy treatments were some of the most affecting reflections of mortality and deterioration of the body I’d experienced.

Read the comic book, “Brush with Peril”:


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