Author: lwilson

Beatriz Milhazes was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1961. She is still alive and currently lives and works in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. Over the past two decades she built up a rich and complex repertoire of images, forms and colours in her work, she also shows an adventurous fusion of influences. Her canvases have an undeniably Brazilian flavour to them filled with brightly coloured elements.
She works in the pure aesthetic style of the Pattern and Decoration movement. Her native land of Brazil was what influenced her to do this, her vibrant and bold use of colour and patterns create work that is as much playful, free and psychedelic, as it is geometric, organized and rhythmic. She mainly did her work using painting techniques.
Beatriz Mihazes work was based on monotype and collages merging in a lot of images to create one image by using layering, pattern, contrasting colours and different shapes in order to make more interesting and eye catching pieces of work.

Things to discuss:
Content (what is in the picture and how is it represented?)
Explain the artist’s choice of composition (why is it laid out like it is? How does it draw you in?)
Describe the colour scheme (bright, dull, light, dark, shadows etc)
The important bit:
Finally give your opinion and how this artist links to your work or gives you ideas for your own work.

Paul Cézanne,
one of the creators of modern art, was called the ``solidifier ofImpressionism''. And indeed he does not draw his picture before painting it: instead, he creates space and depth of perspective by means of planes of color, which are freely associated and at the same time contrasted and compared. The facets which are thus produced create not just one but many perspectives, and in this way volume comes once again to dominate the composition, no longer a product of the line but rather of the color itself. His still-lifes, in their simplicity and delicate tonal harmony, are a typical work and thus ideal for an understanding of Cézanne's art.
Most of his pictures are still lifes. These were done in the studio, with simple props; a cloth, some apples, a vase or bowl and, later in his career, plaster sculptures. Cézanne's still lifes are both traditional and modern. The fruits and objects are readily identifiable, but they have no aroma, no sensual or tactile appeal and no other function other than as passive decorative objects coexisting in the same flat space. They bear no relation to the colorful vegetables of Provence -- gorgeous red tomatoes, purple aubergines, and bright green courgettes. In his pursuit of the essence of art, Cézanne had to suppress earthly delights.

Things to discuss:
Content (what is in the picture and how is it represented?)
Explain the artist’s choice of composition (why is it laid out like it is? How does it draw you in?)
Describe the colour scheme (bright, dull, light, dark, shadows etc)
The important bit:
Finally give your opinion and how this artist links to your work or gives you ideas for your own work.

MC ESCHER
Eye is an excellent example of the technique referred to as globular reflection. This means that when Escher drew this sketch he drew it from looking at it in a reflection. In this case the eye, his own as a matter of fact was drawn from its reflection in a concave shaving glass. He says that he tried to “copy it as faithfully as possible.” Escher felt it was “necessary and logical to convey somebody, an observer reflected in the convex mirror of the eye” and so he decided to draw a skull because again in his own words, “we are all confronted with death whether we like it or not”. Some other examples of Escher work done with reflections includes: Hand with Reflecting Sphere and Three Spheres. In these drawings Escher draws his whole upper body as he can see himself reflected in the ball. Escher worked as a graphic artist for decades with his innovative style being recognized by only a small inner circle of people, mostly other artists. He was discovered relatively late in his life. 1952 was his breakthrough year and he was already fifty three years old. Escher preferred being referred to as a graphic artist than as an artist because he believed that graphic art was a very particular form and style that required much work, technique and discipline. One of the distinctive characteristics of graphic artists such as Escher is that they work primarily in black and white and the various shadings in between. Among other things, Eye is an example of this style.

Things to discuss:
Content (what is in the picture and how is it represented?)
Explain the artist’s choice of composition (why is it laid out like it is? How does it draw you in?)
Describe the colour scheme (bright, dull, light, dark, shadows etc)
The important bit:
Finally give your opinion and how this artist links to your work or gives you ideas for your own work.

René Magritte (21 November 1898 – 15 August 1967) was a Belgian surrealist artist. He became well known for a number of witty and thought-provoking images. His intended goal for his work was to challenge observers’ preconditioned perceptions of reality and force viewers to become hypersensitive to their surroundings.
Philosophical and artistic gestures
Magritte’s work frequently displays a juxtaposition of ordinary objects in an unusual context, giving new meanings to familiar things. The representational use of objects as other than what they seem is typified in his painting, The Treachery of Images (La trahison des images), which shows a pipe that looks as though it is a model for a tobacco store advertisement. Magritte painted below the pipe “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (“This is not a pipe”), which seems a contradiction, but is actually true: the painting is not a pipe, it is an image of a pipe. It does not “satisfy emotionally”—when Magritte once was asked about this image, he replied that of course it was not a pipe, just try to fill it with tobacco. Pipe and passport of René Magritte
Magritte used the same approach in a painting of an apple: he painted the fruit realistically and then used an internal caption or framing device to deny that the item was an apple. In these “Ceci n’est pas” works, Magritte points out that no matter how closely, through realism-art, we come to depicting an item accurately, we never do catch the item itself. The Human Condition, 1935
Among Magritte’s works are a number of surrealist versions of other famous paintings. Elsewhere, Magritte challenges the difficulty of artwork to convey meaning with a recurring motif of an easel, as in his The Human Condition series (1933, 1935) or The Promenades of Euclid (1955) (wherein the spires of a castle are “painted” upon the ordinary streets which the canvas overlooks). In a letter to André Breton, he wrote of The Human Condition that it was irrelevant if the scene behind the easel differed from what was depicted upon it, “but the main thing was to eliminate the difference between a view seen from outside and from inside a room.” The windows in some of these pictures are framed with heavy drapes, suggesting a theatrical motif.

Things to discuss:
Content (what is in the picture and how is it represented?)
Explain the artist’s choice of composition (why is it laid out like it is? How does it draw you in?)
Describe the colour scheme (bright, dull, light, dark, shadows etc)
The important bit:
Finally give your opinion and how this artist links to your work or gives you ideas for your own work.

Georgia O’Keeffe began working on her flower paintings around 1919, creating closely cropped and enlarged compositions that were not always immediately recognizable as flowers. At once abstract and realistic, the spirals and wave-like forms of her flowers suggest the movement and flow of growth. As O’Keeffe explained, she chose the magnified scale for the effect it would have on viewers: “Paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it—I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers.” Her friend and fellow artist Marsden Hartley once said that her flowers are “so huge that they shut out the sky above them—shut out even the morning that opens them.”
Georgia O'Keeffe, known for her bold and colorful still-life compositions, was inspired by nature. We see the elements all throughout her work, flowers, driftwood, animal skulls and the infinite views of the desert. Her flower prints, especially, used bright colors as seen in "Black Iris" and "Red Poppy". Her oversized flowers are what Georgia is most well known for. She often painted huge canvases of flowers, sometimes showing the entire flower and others times she would focus on just a portion and paint a close up image of it. Flowers, though, were not the only subjects she used for her giant prints.

Things to discuss:
Content (what is in the picture and how is it represented?)
Explain the artist’s choice of composition (why is it laid out like it is? How does it draw you in?)
Describe the colour scheme (bright, dull, light, dark, shadows etc)
The important bit:
Finally give your opinion and how this artist links to your work or gives you ideas for your own work.

Carol Schiff
An artist from Florida.
She paints things she finds near her seaside home, and is interested in use of colour and shadow. She uses paint quite thickly to get a textured finish to her paintings. Her use of colour often suggests an atmosphere, particularly in the seagull paintings where the backgrounds are simple but feature greys and blues. The colours in this painting are harmonious, so you are drawn to the beak and the chest where there is a splash of contrasting colour.

Things to discuss:
Content (what is in the picture and how is it represented?)
Explain the artist’s choice of composition (why is it laid out like it is? How does it draw you in?)
Describe the colour scheme (bright, dull, light, dark, shadows etc)
The important bit:
Finally give your opinion and how this artist links to your work or gives you ideas for your own work.

Camille Pissarro (10 July 1830 – 13 November 1903) was a Danish-French Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist painter
French Impressionist painter, etcher and lithographer of landscapes and figures. Born in Saint Thomas in the Danish West Indies, of French parents. Accompanied the Danish artist Fritz Melbye to Caracas 1853-5, making drawings and watercolours, then moved to Paris in 1855 to study art. After a brief period at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, left to work at the Académie Suisse where he met Monet, Cézanne and Guillaumin. Influenced by Corot and then by Courbet. Settled in 1866 at Pontoise where he gave advice about 1872-4 to Cézanne and later to Gauguin, occasionally painting alongside them from the same motif. Contributed to all six Impressionist exhibitions 1874-86, and was the most constant supporter of the group. After meeting Seurat and Signac in 1885, worked 1885-90 with a Divisionist technique. Moved in 1882 from Pontoise to Osny and in 1884 settled at Eragny near Gisors (Eure). First one-man exhibition at the Galerie Durand-Ruel, Paris, 1883. From 1893 began to paint series of views of Paris (the Boulevard Montmartre, the Pont Neuf, etc.), and also series of Rouen, Dieppe and Le Havre. Died in Paris.

Things to discuss:
Content (what is in the picture and how is it represented?)
Explain the artist’s choice of composition (why is it laid out like it is? How does it draw you in?)
Describe the colour scheme (bright, dull, light, dark, shadows etc)
The important bit:
Finally give your opinion and how this artist links to your work or gives you ideas for your own work.

Things to discuss:
Content (what is in the picture and how is it represented?)
Explain the artist’s choice of composition (why is it laid out like it is? How does it draw you in?)
Describe the colour scheme (bright, dull, light, dark, shadows etc)
The important bit:
Finally give your opinion and how this artist links to your work or gives you ideas for your own work.

Damien Hirst
English sculptor, installation artist, painter and printmaker. He was a leading figure in the group of ‘Young British Artists'. He studied at Goldsmiths College, London (1986–9), and in 1988 curated the exhibition Freeze. His works are explicitly concerned with the fundamental dilemmas of human existence; his constant themes have included the fragility of life, society's reluctance to confront death, and the nature of love and desire, often clothed in titles which exist somewhere between the naive and the disingenuous.
Dead animals are frequently used in Hirst's installations, forcing viewers to consider their own and society's attitudes to death. Containers such as aquariums and vitrines are used as devices to impose control on the fragile subject-matter contained within them and as barriers between the viewer and the viewed. The animals are preserved as in life, but at the same time are emphatically dead, with their entrails and flesh exposed.
Butterflies:
Visitors saw the butterfly pupae pinned to white canvases while adults specimens flew freely around the rooms, feeding on flowers and sugar water as well as fruit. The Tate’s description of In and Out of Love said “the themes of life and death as well as beauty and horror are highlighted, dualities that are prevalent in much of the artist’s work”. Defending the use of the creatures, a Tate spokesman said: “The butterflies used in this [Hirst] work were all sourced from reputable UK butterfly houses and were selected from varieties known to thrive in the conditions created. “The butterflies lived out the final stage of their natural life cycle inside this room. Approximately 400 butterflies were introduced to the exhibition over the course of each week, with many enjoying longer lifespans than in the wild due to the high quality of this environment.”

Tracey Bush
Tracey Bush is a British artist who works with paper.
The collections of British Butterflies browns and blues are cut from envelopes postmarked from around Britain. Other collections of British Butterflies are cut from vintage maps of the British Isles. There are quirky links between the butterfly name and the material used. Hence the High Brown Fritillary is cut from the dun contours of the Cheviots. The poetic names such as Meadow brown, Chalkhill blue and Small heath are hand-written in brown ink on tiny scientific labels. Butterflies are amongst the first indicators of environmental change; these collections hope to highlight their frailty and diversity, as an alternative to a collection of actual specimens.

Things to discuss:
Content (what is in the picture and how is it represented?)
Explain the artist’s choice of composition (why is it laid out like it is? How does it draw you in?)
Describe the colour scheme (bright, dull, light, dark, shadows etc)
The important bit:
Finally give your opinion and how this artist links to your work or gives you ideas for your own work.

Claude Monet 1840-1926
French Impressionist painter, mainly of landscape subjects. Born in Paris, childhood and youth spent in Le Havre. As a youth showed flair for caricature. In 1858 met Boudin and was encouraged by him to paint out of doors. Moved to Paris 1859-60 and worked at the Académie Suisse, then served two years in the French Army in Algiers. Discharged 1862, met Jongkind and entered the studio of Gleyre in Paris where his fellow pupils Renoir, Sisley, Bazille became his friends. Worked in Normandy, in the Forest of Fontainebleau, and in and around Paris. Exhibited at the Salons of 1865 and 1866, but his paintings thenceforth almost invariably rejected. Painted frequently with Renoir at Bougival and Argenteuil c.1869-74, studying effects of light and reflections. Took a major part in the foundation of Impressionism (the name of the movement having been suggested by the title of one of his pictures 'Impression, Sunrise'), and exhibited with the Impressionists 1874-9 and again 1882. First one-man exhibition at La Vie Moderne, Paris, 1880. Settled at Argenteuil 1872, Vétheuil 1878, Poissy 1881 and in 1883 at Giverny, where after 1890 he created a beautiful garden and lily pond which provided themes for most of his later paintings. Growing success from 1890 when he began to paint series of canvases of the same motif: Haystacks, Poplars, Rouen Cathedral, Water-Lilies etc. Also painted series of London and Venice. Died at GivernyIn the 1890s, Monet developed a Japanese-style water-garden around the pond at his home in Giverny, north-west of Paris. The garden became an ‘outside studio’ for the artist, and the water-lilies floating on the surface of the pond became the principal motif of his later paintings. Filling the canvas, the pond becomes a world in itself, inspiring a sense of immersion in nature. At times verging on abstraction, the water-lily pictures are the culmination of Monet’s fascination with light and its changing effects on the natural environment.
.

Things to discuss:
Content (what is in the picture and how is it represented?)
Explain the artist’s choice of composition (why is it laid out like it is? How does it draw you in?)
Describe the colour scheme (bright, dull, light, dark, shadows etc)
The important bit:
Finally give your opinion and how this artist links to your work or gives you ideas for your own work.

Corinne Okada

Things to discuss:
Content (what is in the picture and how is it represented?)
Explain the artist’s choice of composition (why is it laid out like it is? How does it draw you in?)
Describe the colour scheme (bright, dull, light, dark, shadows etc)
The important bit:
Finally give your opinion and how this artist links to your work or gives you ideas for your own work.

Raymond Saá
uses tropical plants, fruit and foliage as a metaphor to explore the resilience of Caribbean culture that is transplanted to a new life in the United States. Saá was raised in Miami by his exiled mother and grandparents and his work draws on his family’s experience of displacement and struggle to maintain their Cuban heritage here. He is interested in the way that food, fruits and flowers from the market or the imagination can conjure associations with the old world. He layers paper, card and paintings to create his pieces, overlapping individually made sections to become one. He covers the 19th-century European-style wall surfaces with Caribbean-style tropical plants to demonstrate his ideas about transplanting culture. He renders the plants in stark black and white to hint at the dislocation first generation immigrants experience in a new and competitive culture.

Things to discuss:
Content (what is in the picture and how is it represented?)
Explain the artist’s choice of composition (why is it laid out like it is? How does it draw you in?)
Describe the colour scheme (bright, dull, light, dark, shadows etc)
The important bit:
Finally give your opinion and how this artist links to your work or gives you ideas for your own work.

Randy Saffle
This was my first attempt using a monochromatic block-in. I let it dry for three days before adding color. I really dropped the ball by not taking progress photos, but I was totally absorbed and fascinated by the technique. I have seen other painter use this method, but to tell the truth it sounded kinda tedious to me. Why paint everything, just to repaint it again with more color? Now I understand and have become very intrigued to try it again. It was much easier establishing my values by using only a dark and middle tone and letting the board show though for my lightest light, than using all the colors on my palette, especially on a much larger than my normal size painting. After I had my values clearly established it was so easy to put on the color. I was able to add color very quickly and it came to life before my eyes. The speed of the coloring process made this studio painting feel closer to my plein air work.

Things to discuss:
Content (what is in the picture and how is it represented?)
Explain the artist’s choice of composition (why is it laid out like it is? How does it draw you in?)
Describe the colour scheme (bright, dull, light, dark, shadows etc)
The important bit:
Finally give your opinion and how this artist links to your work or gives you ideas for your own work.

Gavin Rutherford
I'm a freelance artist and aspiring surface pattern designer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. As an illustration graduate, my work and patterns are based around a simple love for linear and decorative designs, taking their inspiration from virtually any source, whether it be a trip to the museum, a flick through a science textbook or a jaunt to the local shop. I specialise in the creation of unique patterns and intricate one-off prints, focusing on abstract shapes, delicate details and bespoke designs.

Things to discuss:
Content (what is in the picture and how is it represented?)
Explain the artist’s choice of composition (why is it laid out like it is? How does it draw you in?)
Describe the colour scheme (bright, dull, light, dark, shadows etc)
The important bit:
Finally give your opinion and how this artist links to your work or gives you ideas for your own work.

Cindy Chinn
I started at the Academy of Art in SF when I was sixteen, where I studied mainly sculpture and jewelry, hanging up the oils to let them dry, so to speak. Many years and many art careers later I have decided to hang up the sculpture tools and start painting on stretched canvas again. This time with acrylics, I have found a new love to nurture.
She focuses on use of colour, ensuring strong contrast between background and foreground to bring your attention to the focal point—the insect.

Things to discuss:
Content (what is in the picture and how is it represented?)
Explain the artist’s choice of composition (why is it laid out like it is? How does it draw you in?)
Describe the colour scheme (bright, dull, light, dark, shadows etc)
The important bit:
Finally give your opinion and how this artist links to your work or gives you ideas for your own work.

Karen Hickerson
a self-taught visionary artist who resides in Lubbock, Texas, USA. Her work is intricate and abstract, blending the organic and primitive with the urban industrial and steampunk. Karen's paintings contains symbols and messages: some visible, but most hidden beneath the many complex layers of her paintings. Her modern folk art reflects her interest in the natural and built environment, spirituality, religions and ceremonies both ancient and contemporary.

Things to discuss:
Content (what is in the picture and how is it represented?)
Explain the artist’s choice of composition (why is it laid out like it is? How does it draw you in?)
Describe the colour scheme (bright, dull, light, dark, shadows etc)
The important bit:
Finally give your opinion and how this artist links to your work or gives you ideas for your own work.

For many years Tracey made scrapbooks, collections of printed paper that could not be thrown away. The use of scraps is a way of recycling both materials and images in a process of reconstruction. These books have now emerged as Lepidoptera; butterflies and moths, ancient symbols of transformation. Each moth or butterfly is hand-cut from layers of recycled papers and then sewn together using a bookbinders pamphlet stitch. They are then pinned out in entomological boxes made by the suppliers of the Natural History Museum London and the Paris Museum.

Both elegant and mundane elements compose my sculptures: silks, food wrappers, newspapers, and plastic produce netting. The sculptures explore the pulling apart and reassembling of modern day artifacts. I am fascinated by the resulting textures and colliding and merging stories. Many of these gatherings of fragments are inspired by family stories of plantation era Hawaii in which my grandmother and father grew. Fixed in my imagination are tales of paper apple wrappers folded into kimonos for dolls and stories of blankets sewn of hundreds of tiny tobacco bags. Toy boats were made of leaves and pinwheels of flowers. Thriftiness and creativity mingled in wonderful harmony.
I often incorporate food wrappers familiar from childhood visits to Hawaii. My family was always greeted by Japanese relatives with Hawaiian leis made of Chinese snacks ("crack seed"). My work reflects on this intersection of cultures. The collage assembly also reveals a fragmented knowledge of Japanese culture filtered through the cloudy prism of generations. Scraps of modern Japan in the form of manga, wrappers and throw away containers are hand stitched and glued into my patchwork sculptures. Japan's variety of purely disposable plastic products strikes me as a fascinatingly foreign. They could only arise in a Japan jarred from the thrifty Meji Era of my family's collective memory by both war and industrialization. By knitting together disposable cultural artifacts with the spirit of reuse preserved from earlier generations, my work muses on the evolution of cultures in their homeland and in Diaspora. I attempt to abstractly voice muted memories and pay respect to creativity born of necessity. Most recently, my work is exploring the intersection of cultures in the San Jose area by incorporating food wrappers from various ethnic groups.