Aaron's Fine Art

Having not studied Art since completing my School education I decided to look into the history and careers of a selection of Artists from the past and present.

Damien Hurst

Damien Hirst was born on 7 June 1965, he is an English artist who dominated the art scene in Britain during the 1990s and is internationally renowned. During the 1990s his career was closely linked with the collector Charles Saatchi, but increasing frictions came to a head in 2003 and the relationship ended.

He became famous for a series in which dead animals (including a shark, a sheep and a cow) are preserved in formaldehyde. His most iconic work is The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, a 14-foot (4.3 m) tiger shark immersed in formaldehyde in a vitrine. Its sale in 2004 made him the world's second most expensive living artist after Jasper Johns.

In June 2007, Hirst overtook Jasper Johns when his Lullaby Spring sold for £9.65 million at Sotheby's in London. On 30 August 2007, Hirst outdid his previous sale of Lullaby Spring with For The Love of God which sold for £50 million to an unknown investment group. In September 2008, he raised £111 million at Sotheby's, breaking the record for a one-artist auction, as well as his own record with £10.3 million for The Golden Calf, an animal with 18-carat gold horns and hooves, preserved in formaldehyde.

 

 

Jasper Johns

He grew up in Allendale, South Carolina. Johns studied at the University of South Carolina from 1947 to 1948, and then moved to New York City and studied briefly at Parsons School of Design in 1949. While in New York, Johns met Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham and John Cage. Working together they explored the contemporary art scene, and began developing their ideas on art. In 1952 and 1953 he was stationed in Sendai, Japan during the Korean War.

In 1958, gallery owner Leo Castelli discovered Johns while visiting Robert Rauschenberg's studio.  Johns currently lives in Sharon, Connecticut.

He is best known for his painting Flag (1954-55), which he painted after having a dream of the American flag. His work is often described as a 'Neo-Dadaist', as opposed to pop art.

 

 

                                                                                 Salvador Dalí

 

(May 11, 1904 – January 23, 1989), was a Spanish Catalan surrealist painter born in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain. His painterly skills are often attributed to the influence of Renaissance masters. His best known work, The Persistence of Memory, was completed in 1931. His also worked in film, sculpture, and photography. He also worked with Walt Disney on the unfinished Academy Award-nominated short cartoon Destino, which was completed and released in 2003.

Dalí had a habit for doing unusual things to draw attention to himself. His eccentric manner sometimes drew more public attention than his artwork which led to broad public recognition and many purchases of his works by people from all walks of life. He was known to carry a piece of driftwood to ward off evil spirits and was scared of grasshoppers.

 

 

 

 

 Vincent Willem van Gogh

 

(30 March 1853 – 29 July 1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist artist. His paintings and drawings include some of the world's best known, most popular and most expensive pieces.

 

Van Gogh spent his early adult life working for a firm of art dealers. After a brief spell as a teacher, he became a missionary worker in a very poor mining region. He did not start his career as an artist until 1880. Initially, Van Gogh worked only with sombre colours, until he encountered Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism in Paris. He produced more than 2,000 works, including around 900 paintings and 1,100 drawings and sketches, during the last ten years of his life. Most of his best-known works were produced in the final two years of his life, during which time he cut off part of his left ear following a breakdown in his friendship with Paul Gauguin. After this he suffered recurrent bouts of mental illness, which led to his suicide.   The central figure in Van Gogh's life was his brother Theo, who continually and provided financial support. Their lifelong friendship is documented in several letters they exchanged from August 1872 onwards. Van Gogh is a pioneer of what came to be known as Expressionism.

 

 

 Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci

April 15, 1452 – May 2, 1519) was a scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, painter, sculptor, architect, botanist, musician and writer. Born as the illegitimate son of a notary, Piero da Vinci, and a peasant woman, Caterina, at Vinci in the region of Florence, Leonardo was educated in the studio of the Florentine painter. He later worked in Rome, Bologna and Venice, spending his final years in France at the home given to him by King François I.  He is widely considered to be one of the greatest painters of all time and perhaps the most diversely talented person ever to have lived.

Two of his works, the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, occupy unique positions as the most famous, most reproduced and most parodied portrait and religious painting of all time. As an engineer, Leonardo's ideas were vastly ahead of his time. He conceptualised a helicopter, a tank, concentrated solar power, a calculator, the double hull and outlined a rudimentary theory of plate tectonics. Relatively few of his designs were constructed or were even feasible during his lifetime.

 

 

Alex Grey

 November 29, 1953) is an American artist specializing in spiritual and psychedelic art (or visionary art) that is sometimes associated with the New Age movement. His talent spans a variety of forms including performance art, process art, installation art, sculpture, visionary art, and painting. Grey is a member of the Integral Institute. He is also on the board of advisors for the Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics, and is the Chair of Wisdom University's Sacred Art Department. He and his wife Allyson Grey are the co-founders of the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, aka CoSM, a non-profit institution supporting Visionary Culture in New York City.

 

 

 

Claude Monett

was born on 14 November 1840. In 1845, his family moved to Le Havre in Normandy. His father wanted him to go into the family grocery store business, but Claude Monet wanted to become an artist. His mother was a singer.

On the first of April 1851, Monet entered the Le Havre secondary school of the arts. He first became known locally for his charcoal caricatures, which he would sell for ten to twenty francs. Monet also undertook his first drawing lessons from Jacques-François Ochard, a former student of Jacques-Louis David. On the beaches of Normandy in about 1856/1857 he met fellow artist Eugène Boudin who became his mentor and taught him to use oil paints. On 28 January 1857 his mother died. He was 16 years old when he left school, and went to live with his widowed childless aunt, Marie-Jeanne Lecadre.

When Monet traveled to Paris to visit The Louvre, he witnessed painters copying from the old masters. Monet would instead go and sit by a window and paint what he saw. Monet was in Paris for several years and met several painters who would become friends and fellow impressionists. One of those friends was Édouard Manet.

In June 1861 Monet joined the First Regiment of African Light Cavalry in Algeria for two years of a seven-year commitment, but upon his contracting typhoid his aunt Marie-Jeanne Lecadre intervened to get him out of the army if he agreed to complete an art course at a university. In 1862 Monet became a student of Charles Gleyre in Paris, where he met Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Frédéric Bazille, and Alfred Sisley. Monet's Camille or The Woman in the Green Dress (La Femme à la Robe Verte), painted in 1866, brought him recognition, and was one of many works featuring his future wife, Camille Doncieux; she was the model for the figures in The Woman in the Garden of the following year, as well as for On the Bank of the Seine, Bennecourt,. Shortly thereafter Doncieux became pregnant and gave birth to their first child, Jean. In 1868, due to financial reasons, Monet attempted suicide by throwing himself into the Seine.

Monet went to England in September 1870. In the Spring of 1871, Monet's works were refused authorisation to be included in the Royal Academy exhibition.

Monet lived from December 1871 to 1878 at Argenteuil, a village on the Seine near Paris, and here he painted some of his best known works.  In 1872 (or 1873), he painted Impression, Sunrise (Impression: soleil levant) depicting a Le Havre landscape. It hung in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874 and is now displayed in the Musée Marmottan-Monet, Paris.

At the age of thirty-two, Madame Monet died on 5 September 1879 of tuberculosis; Monet painted her on her death bed.

 

                               M.C. Escher

Born on June 17, 1898, in Leeuwarden, Netherlands, M.C. Escher (1898-1972) produced work that remains among the most widely reproduced and popular graphic art of the twentieth century. His prints use interlocking shapes, transforming creatures, and architectures to challenge the viewer's perceptions of reality. Expressing what he called a "keen interest in the geometric laws contained by nature around us," his Art combined realism with explorations of pattern, perspective, and space. Maurits Cornelis Escher was the youngest son of a hydraulic engineer. As a student he showed some artistic talent and so was encouraged by an art teacher to pursue his interests in woodcuts and drawing. His father then sent him to the School for Architectural and Decorative Arts in Haarlem to study architecture.

Apart from being a graphic artist, M.C. Escher illustrated books, designed tapestries, postage stamps and murals. He was born as the fourth and youngest son of a civil engineer. After 5 years the family moved to Arnhem where Escher spent most of his youth. After failing his high school exams, Maurits ultimately was enrolled in the School for Architecture and Decorative Arts in Haarlem After only one week, he informed his father that he would rather study graphic art instead of architecture, as he had shown his drawings and linoleum cuts to his graphic teacher Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita, who encouraged him to continue with graphic arts. After finishing school, he traveled through Italy, where he met his wife Jetta Umiker, whom he married in 1924. They settled in Rome, where they stayed until 1935. During these 11 years, Escher would travel each year throughout Italy, drawing and sketching for the various prints he would make when he returned home.  Two of his best-known prints, "Relativity" (1953) and "Ascending and Descending" (1960), feature staircases. His most popular work is probably "Hand With Reflecting Sphere" (1935), an image of himself as seen in a globe held in his outstretched hand.