Artists

1. Vincent Van Gogh

Also known as Vincent Willem van Gogh he was a Dutch post-Impressionist painter whose work, notable for its rough beauty, emotional honesty, and bold color, had a far-reaching influence on 20th-century art. I’ve loved his work ever since I first saw it in high school, and fascinated with his painting style, and also his usage of colours. Sadly however after years of painful anxiety and frequent bouts of mental illness, he died at the age of 37 from a gunshot wound, generally accepted to be self-inflicted. His work was then known to only a handful of people and appreciated by fewer still.

There is also a song that relates to the works of Vincent Van Gogh, it is sung by Don McLean’s called “Starry Starry Night”.

2. Joseph Mallord William Turner

Turner was an English Romantic landscape painter, watercolourist and printmaker. Turner was considered a controversial figure in his day, but is now regarded as the artist who elevated landscape painting to an eminence rivalling history painting. Although renowned for his oil paintings, Turner is also one of the greatest masters of British watercolour landscape painting. He is commonly known as “the painter of light” and his work is regarded as a Romantic preface to Impressionism.

3. H. R. Giger

Giger is a Swiss surrealist painter, sculptor, and set designer. He won an Academy Award for Best Achievement for Visual Effects for his design work on the film Alien. I came across Giger during my A Levels for Fine Art, I love the way he uses his night terrors to create some of the most teriffiying and iconic monsters in the horror industry. Also Korn’s Jonathan Davis commissioned Giger to design and sculpt a microphone stand, with the requirement that it be biomechanical, erotic, and movable. The contract allowed for five aluminium microphone stands to be made, but Davis purchased only two of the three he was entitled to. The design of the microphone stand was later adapted to Giger’s “Nubian Queen” transforming it into a fine art sculpture.

4. L. S. Lowry

Lowry was an English artist born in Barrett Street, Stretford, Lancashire. Many of his drawings and paintings depict nearby Salford and surrounding areas, including Pendlebury. Lowry is famous for painting scenes of life in the industrial districts of Northern England during the early 20th century. He had a distinctive style of painting and is best known for urban landscapes peopled with human figures often referred to as “matchstick men”. He also painted mysterious unpopulated landscapes, brooding portraits, and the secret ‘marionette’ works, the latter only found after his death. I’ve known of Lowry for quite some time, and have become a big fan of his. I’ve also got prints of his pictures surrounded in my home. I love the simplisity, and how each painting tells a story about the lives and living conditions that were surrounding the industries and the environments at that time.

5. Katsushika Hokusai

Hokusai was a Japanese artist, painter and printmaker. He was influenced by such painters as Sesshu, and other styles of Chinese painting. Hokusai is best known as author of the woodblock print series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, which includes the internationally recognized print,The Great Wave off Kanagawa, that he created during the 1820s.

6. Salvador Dali

Dalí 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.

7. John Constable

Constable was an English Romantic painter. Born in Suffolk, he is known principally for his landscape paintings of Dedham Vale, the area surrounding his home—now known as “Constable Country”—which he invested with an intensity of affection. “I should paint my own places best”, he wrote to his friend John Fisher in 1821, “painting is but another word for feeling”.

8. Jenny Saville

Saville is a contemporary British painter; best known as one of the Young British Artists. She is known for her large-scale painted depictions of naked women. I came across her work during my Fine Art A Levels and I have loved her work since. Her work is not to everyones taste, however I find her work to be beautiful, extraordinary, and powerful. It shows the physicality, and the weight of the mass of flesh in each painting. The Media that she uses is oil paints on canvas. She also did a painting called ‘Strategy’ which appeared on the cover of Manic Street Preachers’ third album, The Holy Bible. Stare (2005) was used the cover of the Manic’s 2009 album Journal For Plague Lovers. This album cover placed second in a 2009 poll for Best Art Vinyl.

9. Claude Monet

Monet was a founder of French impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement’s philosophy of expressing one’s perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. The term Impressionism is derived from the title of his painting Impression, Sunrise

10. Gerard Way

Way is an American musician and comic book writer who has served as lead vocalist and co-founder of the band My Chemical Romance since its formation in 2001. He is also the writer of the Eisner Award-winning comic book The Umbrella Academy.