I surrendered to a world of my imagination.

Andrew Wyeth

Stop 2008

Andrew Newell Wyeth (July 12, 1917 – January 16, 2009) was a visual artist, primarily a realist painter, working predominantly in a regionalist style. He was one of the best-known U.S. artists of the middle 20th century and was sometimes referred to as the “Painter of the People,” due to his work’s popularity with the American public.

In his art, Wyeth’s favorite subjects were the land and people around him, both in his hometown of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and at his summer home in Cushing, Maine.

One of the most well-known images in 20th-century American art is his painting, Christina’s World, currently in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wyeth

Talent does whatever it wants to do. Genius does only what it can

Eugene Delacroix

Death of Ophelia 1843

Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix (26 April 1798 – 13 August 1863) was a French Romantic artist regarded from the outset of his career as the leader of the French Romantic school.Delacroix’s use of expressive brushstrokes and his study of the optical effects of colour profoundly shaped the work of the Impressionists, while his passion for the exotic inspired the artists of the Symbolist movement. A fine lithographer, Delacroix illustrated various works of William Shakespeare, the Scottish writer Sir Walter Scott and the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

In contrast to the Neoclassical perfectionism of his chief rival Ingres, Delacroix took for his inspiration the art of Rubens and painters of the Venetian Renaissance, with an attendant emphasis on color and movement rather than clarity of outline and carefully modeled form. Dramatic and romantic content characterized the central themes of his maturity, and led him not to the classical models of Greek and Roman art, but to travel in North Africa, in search of the exotic.[2] Friend and spiritual heir to Théodore Géricault, Delacroix was also inspired by Byron, with whom he shared a strong identification with the “forces of the sublime”, of nature in often violent action.

However, Delacroix was given neither to sentimentality nor bombast, and his Romanticism was that of an individualist. In the words of Baudelaire, “Delacroix was passionately in love with passion, but coldly determined to express passion as clearly as possible.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Delacroix

You can’t make people respond.

Arthur Boyd

The Hunter 1944

Arthur Merric Bloomfield Boyd, AC, OBE (20 July 1920 – 24 April 1999) was a member of the prominent Boyd artistic dynasty in Australia, with many relatives being painters, sculptors, architects or other arts professionals. His sister Mary Boyd married John Perceval, and then Sidney Nolan, both artists. His wife Yvonne Boyd née Lennie, and son Jamie and daughters Polly and Lucy are also painters. Boyd is best known for his experimental and sometimes complex painting of figures and impressionist, pastoral landscapes. He was a member of the Antipodeans, a group of Melbourne painters that also included Clifton Pugh, David Boyd, John Brack, Robert Dickerson, John Perceval and Charles Blackman.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Boyd

The holy grail is to spend less time making the picture than it takes people to look at it.

Banksy

What Are You Looking At 2006

Banksy is a quasi-anonymous English graffiti artist. He is believed to be a native of Yate, South Gloucestershire, near Bristol and to have been born in 1974, but there is substantial public uncertainty about his identity and personal and biographical details.According to Tristan Manco, Banksy “was born in 1974 and raised in Bristol, England. The son of a photocopier technician, he trained as a butcher but became involved in graffiti during the great Bristol aerosol boom of the late 1980s.” His artworks are often satirical pieces of art on topics such as politics, culture, and ethics. His street art, which combines graffiti writing with a distinctive stencilling technique, is similar to Blek le Rat, who began to work with stencils in 1981 in Paris and members of the anarcho-punk band Crass who maintained a graffiti stencil campaign on the London Tube System in the late 1970s and early 1980s. His art has appeared in cities around the world. Banksy’s work was born out of the Bristol underground scene which involved collaborations between artists and musicians.

Banksy does not sell photos of street graffiti. Art auctioneers have been known to attempt to sell his street art on location and leave the problem of its removal in the hands of the winning bidder.

Banksy’s “The Flower Chucker” is included in the feature film The Age of Stupid to represent all modern art stored in an archive after the end of the world as we know it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banksy

The artist is not responsible to any one. His social role is asocial… his only responsibility consists in an attitude to the work he does

Georg Baselitz

Georg Baselitz (born 23 January 1938) is a German painter who studied in the former East Germany, before moving to what was then the country of West Germany. Baselitz’s style is interpreted by the Northern American[clarification needed] as Neo-Expressionist, but from a European perspective, it is more seen as postmodern.

His career was kick-started in the 1960s after police action against one of his paintings, (Die große Nacht im Eimer), because of its provocative, offending sexual nature.

Baselitz is one of the world’s best-selling living artists. He is a professor at the renowned Hochschule der Künste in Berlin.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Baselitz

The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.

Salvador Dali

Last Supper 1955

Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, 1st Marquis of Púbol (May 11, 1904 – January 23, 1989) was a Spanish Catalan surrealist painter born in Figueres.

Dalí (Spanish pronunciation: [daˈli]) was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist work. His painterly skills are often attributed to the influence of Renaissance masters. His best-known work, The Persistence of Memory, was completed in 1931. Dalí’s expansive artistic repertoire includes film, sculpture, and photography, in collaboration with a range of artists in a variety of media.

Dalí attributed his “love of everything that is gilded and excessive, my passion for luxury and my love of oriental clothes” to a self-styled “Arab lineage,” claiming that his ancestors were descended from the Moors.

Dalí was highly imaginative, and also had an affinity for partaking in unusual and grandiose behavior, in order to draw attention to himself. This sometimes irked those who loved his art as much as it annoyed his critics, since his eccentric manner sometimes drew more public attention than his artwork.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Dal%C3%AD

To create one’s world in any of the arts takes courage.

Georgia OKeeffe

Radiator Building—Night, New York 1927

Georgia Totto O’Keeffe (November 15, 1887 – March 6, 1986) was an American artist. Born near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, O’Keeffe was a major figure in American art from the 1920s. She received widespread recognition for her technical contributions, as well as for challenging the boundaries of modern American artistic style. She is chiefly known for paintings of flowers, rocks, shells, animal bones, and landscapes in which she synthesized abstraction and representation. Her paintings present crisply contoured forms that are replete with subtle tonal transitions of varying colors. She often transformed her subject matter into powerful abstract images.

O’Keeffe played a central role in bringing an American art style to Europe at a time when the majority of influence flowed in the opposite direction. This feat enhanced her art-historical importance given that she was one of few women to have gained entry to this level of professional influence. She found artistic inspiration, particularly in New Mexico, where she settled late in life.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_O’Keeffe

Creativity takes courage.

Henri Matisse

Icarus 1947

 

Henri Matisse (31 December 1869 – 3 November 1954) was a French artist, known for his use of colour and his fluid, brilliant and original draughtsmanship. He was a Master draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but excelled primarily as a painter. Matisse is regarded, with Picasso, as the greatest artist of the 20th century. Although he was initially labeled as a Fauve (wild beast), by the 1920s, he was increasingly hailed as an upholder of the classical tradition in French painting. His mastery of the expressive language of colour and drawing, displayed in a body of work spanning over a half-century, won him recognition as a leading figure in modern art.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Matisse

I give thanks everyday that I’ve been able to take my craziness and make it work for me.

Fritz Scholder

Man in Blue mid 1980’s

Fritz Scholder, Luiseño, was born in Breckenridge, Minnesota on October 6, 1937. His long and prolific career includes that of painter, sculptor, lithographer, teacher, mentor, and bookmaker. The style of Abstract Expressionism inspired his use of strong images and color. The style of Pop Art inspired his ideas of clichés and interest in popular culture.

Scholder’s early awareness of art included his high school association with Indian artist Oscar Howe in Pierre, South Dakota, who had been exposed to contemporary art in Paris during World War II. Fate, as well, brought him to study at Sacramento City College in 1957 where Abstract Expressionism ran rampant in California and was a natural visual style for Scholder. He was granted a full scholarship to the Southwestern Indian Art Project at the University of Arizona in 1960, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation.

In 1965, Scholder found his own students at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe to be angry and alienated, as disenfranchised members of American society. Using Pop Art ideas, he attempted to break the long-held Indian clichés. Fritz Scholder can be discussed as a Postmodernist for his use of “mass-culture social commentary.” He sought to “deconstruct” more than a century of romantic images of Native Americans and approach the American Indian in real terms. In 1970, Scholder began a collaboration with Tamarind Institute to produce lithographs of his Indians.

Scholder’s work can be appreciated as being simultaneously Indian, American, and twentieth-century art. He has acknowledged his consciousness of Goya, Matisse, Picasso and Munch. His work is also a complicated blend influenced by modern styles such as those of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Francis Bacon and Wayne Thiebaud. The human figure has been a central and continuing image for Scholder, mostly in the form of the female model in a range of poses and degrees of realism. His recent work contains mysterious forms of shaman figures and allegorical emblems. As well as extending his subject matter, he has continued to expand his technical capacities, most notably into the field of monotypes.

Mr. Scholder died on February 10, 2005 at his home in Scottsdale, Arizona.

http://www.bbhc.org/wgwa/scholder.cfm

Focusing isn’t just an optical activity, it is also a mental one.

Bridget Riley

Cataract 1967

Bridget Louise Riley CH CBE (born April 24, 1931 in Norwood, London) is an English painter who is one of the foremost proponents of op art.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridget_Riley