Because most artists are “sensitive” in every sense of the word, if you don’t take charge, negative emotion can ruin you…

Gaye Adams

Pears On Glass 2010

 

Gaye Adams has been a professional artist for over twenty years. She started her career as a pastellist, and then expanded her portfolio to include acrylics and oils while maintaining the use of strong light and color for which her work is known. While subject matter may vary, Gaye continues to be fascinated with the exploration of light transitions. The light has become her primary subject matter and offers endless challenge for her.

Gaye has won awards at both the national and international levels, and her work has been published in both International Artist magazine and Pastel Artist International.

Gaye is a popular and effective workshop instructor, known for the easy, affable way she has with her students.

Gaye holds senior signature status with The Federation of Canadian Artists (SFCA) as well as a Master Pastellist designation (MPAC) from the Pastel Artists of Canada.
Her work hangs in private and corporate collections both here and abroad.

http://www.gayeadams.com/

He who wonders discovers that this in itself is wonder.

M. C. Escher

Monkey Men

Maurits Cornelis Escher (17 June 1898 – 27 March 1972), usually referred to as M.C. Escher (English pronunciation: /ˈɛʃər/, Dutch: [ˈmʌʊ̯rɪts kɔrˈneːlɪs ˈɛʃər] ( listen)),was a Dutch graphic artist. He is known for his often mathematically inspired woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints. These feature impossible constructions, explorations of infinity, architecture, and tessellations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._C._Escher

An artist is an explorer. He has to begin by self-discovery and by observation of his own procedure. After that he must not feel under any constraint.

Henri Matisse

 

Odalisques 1928

Henri Matisse (French pronunciation: [ɑ̃ʁi matis]; 31 December 1869 – 3 November 1954) was a French artist, known for his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter. Matisse is regarded, along with Picasso and Marcel Duchamp, as one of the three seminal artists of the 20th century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture. Although he was initially labelled 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

When you’ve got it, you’ve got it. When you haven’t, you begin again. All the rest is humbug.

Edouard Manet

Dead Toreador 1864

Édouard Manet (French pronunciation: [edwaʁ manɛ]), 23 January 1832 – 30 April 1883, was a French painter. One of the first nineteenth century artists to approach modern-life subjects, he was a pivotal figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism.

His early masterworks The Luncheon on the Grass and Olympia engendered great controversy, and served as rallying points for the young painters who would create Impressionism. Today these are considered watershed paintings that mark the genesis of modern art.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89douard_Manet

Experience is real. Painting, which comes out of experience, is real. The world is an illusion.

Darby Bannard

 

Yellow Rose #1  1963

Walter Darby Bannard (born September 23, 1934 in New Haven, CT), also known as Darby Bannard, is an American abstract painter.

Bannard attended Phillips Exeter Academy and Princeton University, where he struck up a friendship and working relationship with Frank Stella, which continued after graduation and eventuated in the extreme minimalism both artists engaged in around 1959 and thereafter. The first paintings from the 1959-1965 period contained few forms, as little as a single band painted around a field of color, and then developed into somewhat more complex geometric forms by the mid-60s. In the late 60s the forms dissolved into pale, atmospheric fields of color applied with rollers and paint-soaked rags. He was associated with Lyrical Abstraction, Minimalism, Formalism (art), Post-painterly Abstraction and Color Field painting.

He began using the new acrylic mediums in 1970 and his paintings evolved into colorful expanses of richly colored gels and polymers applied with squeegees and commercial floor brooms, which continues to the present.

Bannard was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1968.

Bannard’s first solo show was at the Tibor de Nagy gallery in January, 1965 and he had exhibitions there until 1970. He began showing at the Lawrence Rubin Gallery, and then in 1974 at the Knoedler Contemporary Gallery, where he showed for the next 15 years. He has exhibited in numerous museums and galleries nationally and internationally to the present day.

Bannard has had close to a hundred solo exhibitions, been in several hundred group shows and is represented in the collections of all the major New York museums and many others around the world. He is a prolific writer on art with over a hundred published essays and reviews; Bannard has taught, lectured and participated in panel discussions, and has been a Co-chair of the International Exhibitions Committee of the National Endowment for the Arts. He curated and wrote the catalog for the first comprehensive retrospective exhibition of the paintings of Hans Hofmann, at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C.

Currently Bannard is Professor and Head of Painting of the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Miami.

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

The stronger and more intense my desire becomes to capture and record that which is unsayable, the more tightly my mouth stays shut.

Max Beckmann

The Descent From the Cross 1917

Max Beckmann, a metaphysical protagonist of reality, expressed in his own terms, crudely, softly, finely; which ever the subject demanded. But the subject did not dictate, Beckmann held the brush!

Beckmann was born in Leipzig on February 12, 1884, to farmer parents from the farming area of Braunschweig. After Max’s birth they gave up the farm and moved into Leipzig where his father, Carl, worked as a real estate agent and flour merchant. Later he took work in a laboratory making artificial meerschaum. Young Max preferred drawing to schoolwork, and began his formal studies in 1900 at the Weimar Art Academy.

In 1903 he married Minna Tube and they both moved to Paris. Beckmann was never influenced by any art movement, or the work of any artist. That is a hard thing to say and mean about any artist living or dead. Oh yes, he studied the classics, but had so very real an energy, so real a need to express himself that imitation of any kind, outside the Aristolean meaning, would never have satisfied his lust or vision.

He painted freely.

Beckmann probably painted more self-portraits than any other artist. He painted subjects from the entertainment world, many portraits of family and friends, and countless allegorical compositions with characters symbolic of ancient myths.

Beckmann spent the years of World War Two in Germany, outlawed by Hitler from exhibiting, but his paintings, though branded as “degenerate by the Third Reich, were never confiscated or destroyed. He was drafted, but rejected as unfit. After the war he came to America where he and his wife lived in Missouri. Beckmann was a Painter in residence at Washington University in St. Louis.

In the late ’40s he moved to Manhattan, where he died of a heart attack enroute to see his work in a show at the Metropolitan Museum on December 27, 1950. many say he was merely walking his dog, but at any rate he was caught in the middle of living.

Nothing meant more to Max Beckmann than his own originality, as a human being, and as an artist. He was a deeply spiritual man, with his own ideas, and we end with this quote, the one we started with, for it sums up this man entirely: “The greatest mystery of all is reality.”

http://www.sohoart.com/beckmann.htm

If we all have continuous confidence in our creativity, it would become dull and not very inspiring.

Lida van Bers

Pompeii

Lida van Bers was born and educated in ‘The Netherlands’.She has been painting full time since moving to ‘ Vancouver Island’ from Ontario.
Since living there for 16 years she has moved back to Ontario recently.
She has been a part time student for many years in Fine Arts.
Lida’s original works are very textured using different materials and bold colors.Her abstract work is her ‘soul’ she says and each piece is an adventure.
She participated in many exhibitions, received awards, published in newspapers and television.
Her work can be found in Canada, US, and Europe.

http://fineartamerica.com/profiles/1-lida-van-bers.html

All my life, my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name.

Andre Breton

‘Le Déclin de la société bourgeoisie’ 1930

French poet, essayist, critic, and editor, chief promoter and one of the founders of Surrealist movement with Paul Eluard, Luis Buñuel, and Salvador Dali among others. Breton’s manifestoes of Surrealism are the most important theoretical statements of the movement.

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/abreton.htm

Life has no meaning unless one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one’s will. Virtue, good, evil are nothing but words, unless one takes them apart in order to build something with them; they do not win their true meaning until one knows how to apply them.

Paul Gauguin

Spirit of the Dead Watching 1892

Gauguin, (Eugène-Henri-) Paul (b. June 7, 1848, Paris, Fr.–d. May 8, 1903, Atuona, Hiva Oa, Marquesas Islands, French Polynesia), one of the leading French painters of the Postimpressionist period, whose development of a conceptual method of representation was a decisive step for 20th-century art. After spending a short period with Vincent van Gogh in Arles (1888), Gauguin increasingly abandoned imitative art for expressiveness through colour. From 1891 he lived and worked in Tahiti and elsewhere in the South Pacific. His masterpieces include the early Vision After the Sermon (1888) and Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897-98).

Although his main achievements were to lie elsewhere, Gauguin was, to use a fanciful metaphor, nursed in the bosom of Impressionism. His attitudes to art were deeply influenced by his experience of its first exhibition, and he himself participated in those of 1880, 1881 and 1882. The son of a French journalist and a Peruvian Creole, whose mother had been a writer and a follower of Saint-Simon, he was brought up in Lima, joined the merchant navy in 1865, and in 1872 began a successful career as a stockbroker in Paris.

In 1874 he saw the first Impressionist exhibition, which completely entranced him and confirmed his desire to become a painter. He spent some 17,000 francs on works by Manet, Monet, Sisley, Pissarro, Renoir and Guillaumin. Pissarro took a special interest in his attempts at painting, emphasizing that he should `look for the nature that suits your temperament’, and in 1876 Gauguin had a landscape in the style of Pissarro accepted at the Salon. In the meantime Pissarro had introduced him to Cézanne, for whose works he conceived a great respect—so much so that the older man began to fear that he would steal his `sensations’. All three worked together for some time at Pontoise, where Pissarro and Gauguin drew pencil sketches of each other (Cabinet des Dessins, Louvre).

In 1883-84 the bank that employed him got into difficulties and Gauguin was able to paint every day. He settled for a while in Rouen, partly because Paris was too expensive for a man with five children, partly because he thought it would be full of wealthy patrons who might buy his works. Rouen proved a disappointment, and he joined his wife Mette and children, who had gone back to Denmark, where she had been born. His experience of Denmark was not a happy one and, having returned to Paris, he went to paint in Pont-Aven, a well-known resort for artists.

http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/gauguin/

We must hold enormous faith in ourselves.

Giorgio de Chirico

Hector et Andromache 1917

Giorgio de Chirico (Italian pronunciation: [ˈdʒɔrdʒo deˈkiriko]; July 10, 1888 – November 20, 1978) was a pre-Surrealist and then Surrealist Greek-Italian painter born in Volos, Greece, to a Genovese mother and a Sicilian father. He founded the scuola metafisica art movement. His surname is traditionally written De Chirico (capitalized De) when it stands alone.

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