The Art of Joachim Luetke

Art is no esthetic enterprise but a powerful form of magic determined to be a mediator between that strange, hostile world and us. It is a way to seize control by giving shape as well to our frights as to our longings. - Pablo P.

Judson Huss

was born in Durham, North Carolina in 1942. He later studied at various art and design schools, before he grew dissatisfied with the 'modernist' direction of his instruction and traveled to Europe. It was there that he discovered the Old Masters and later, the contemporary fantastic artists, such as Ernst Fuchs and the French Visionaries. It was this visual epipheny that propelled Huss in the fantastique direction he continues pursue. This artist has evolved into a virtuoso of masterful abilites and vibrant imaginationings. As filmmaker Terry Gilliam remarked, "Judson Huss is a new Old Master."

other sites
http://www.ergeal.ru/pix/huss/
http://fantasy.fasthost.tv/judsonhuss/
http://purga.ru/index.php?sectionid=106&catid=665

Sandra Sue

was born in Middlesex, England but lives and works in Spain. She studied photography at the Spectrum Gallery in Zaragoza and at the Video Studies Center in Madrid. Having started her photographic career documenting the restoration process of some 18th century paintings in the Palace of the Duchess of Osuna, she went on to work as a commercial photographer with several graphic media as well as with advertising agencies and graphic design studios. After living in Buenos Aires,

Argentina for a year she returned to Spain via New York where she films a scientific video for Lippincot Raven Publishing. Was during this trip that she turned to her personal photographic work, in a form of rebellion against the excessively commercial aspect of her previous work and began a collection of portraits in black and white which she titled "Eyes". From that moment on, it is in this aspect of photography that she trew all her energy into.

Fernando Botero 1932-
Medellin, Colombia

"Fernando Botero, Colombian painter. In 1948, he started work as an illustrator. In 1950, he went to Europe, where he attended the Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, copied Velaquez and Goya in the Prado and admired the frescoes in Florence.

He went on a long visit to Mexico in 1956-57 and the experience of Muralism significantly influenced his future direction. In his own work, he introduced inflated forms, puffing up to an exaggerated size human figures, natural features, and objects of all kinds, celebrating the life within them while mocking their role in the world.

He combined the regional with the universal, constantly referring to his native Colombia and also creating elaborate parodies of works of art from the past - whether Deuer, Bonnard, Velaquez or David.

Not without humour, the symbols of power and authority everywhere - presidents, soldiers and churchmen - are targeted in his attacks on a society still infantile in its behaviour."

other sites
http://posters.seindal.dk/artist_botero_fernando_byrank.1.html
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/B/botero.html

Scott Radke

Scott Radke was born n Cleveland Ohio, spent his childhood in Strongsville, and has lived in the city of Cleveland for the last 9 years. His work has been shown locally and nationally, and is collected and has been commissioned throughout the US and Canada. 12+ of his puppets will be featured in a film starring Thomas J. Ryan, directed by independent filmmaker and former NBC news producer Kathleen Harty.

Radke has public art displayed throughout the Tremont and Ohio City neighborhoods in the form of murals/graffiti, and 20+ spray-painted chickens featured on various sidewalks and walls. While his current focus is on the creation of marionettes and stylized drawings, Radke is also recognized for his sand-sculpture/photography from 5 summers creating at Edgewater park beach, some of which have been published in the German authored SUNDE UN SEELE featuring sand art from around the globe, in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and in Savage magazine.

Kay Sage

Born in Albany, Sage attended art classes in Washington, but it was not until 1918 when she went to live in Rome that she began to study art seriously. In 1937 she moved to Paris and met Yves Tanguy whose painting she greatly admired. She began painting in the Surrealist style, influenced by the works by DeChirico, Dali and Tanguy, whom she married in 1940.

By the early 1940s, Sage had moved away from biomorphism and established her own vocabulary of "sharp, spiny forms," covered by rigid draperies, sometimes suggesting figurative shapes beneath.

Other sites

Colini

The painter Colini was born in 1924, in Kolin Czechoslovakia, now a part of the Czech Republic. During his high school years, after the end of WWI, the Surrealists were at the peak of their influence in Central Europe. As part of his monthly visit to Prague, the young man would view their works in the art galleries. He was so impressed it became his lifelong ambition to become a great painter.

As he matured, Colini became fascinated with Italian art of the Renaissance Era, and decided to paint only in Egg Tempera. He began to find ways to improve the Surrealists weaknesses by overlaying a Renaissance flavor. Thus was developed the unique style that is the trademark of Colini today.

When the Communists took over Central Europe after WWII, Colini lived in Switzerland and then France from which he was forced to leave for Venezuela because he had no papers. He became a citizen of Venezuela and then immigrated to Canada, where he had his first exhibition in Toronto. He later moved to the United States, living in the New York area for many years, returning to Europe each year to study art, and exhibit in Switzerland and Germany.

Other sites
http://d2.gap.net/colini/col22.asp
http://d2.gap.net/COLINI/

De Chirico

Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978), a Greek/Italian surrealist painter. Some of his trademarks are sharp contrasts between light and shadow, strange perspectives and bizarre environments.

Giorgio de Chirico was born in Greece into the family of an Italian railroad engineer and later studied in Athens, Florence and Munich, where he was much influenced by Nietzsche's philosophy and Arnold Bocklin's Symbolist art. In 1910, de Chirico moved to Paris where he made contact with Picasso and befriended Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), French poet and leader of the avant-gardistic movement rejecting poetic traditions in outlook, rhythm, and language. In Paris he began to produce highly troubling dreamlike pictures of deserted cities, eg.

The Great Tower, The Soothsayer's Recompense, Mystery and Melancholy of a Street, etc.; pictures with fantastic combinations of images that carried a charge of mystery, eg. Love Song, Portrait premonitoire de Guillaume Apollinaire, The Uncertainty of the Poet, et al. The same haunting shapes tend to appear again and again in poetic combinations.

Other sites
http://www.artinvest2000.com/de_chirico_giorgio-new.htm
http://www.abcgallery.com/C/chirico/chirico.html
http://www.imageandart.com/tutoriales/dechirico/dechirico.html

Just look around: you can see birds heading to the sunset, some faraway island, the castle below and the girl flying high above and looking for the distant land. See the empty boat with the mermaid carved in its bow, the symbol of safe voyage. Symbolism? Yes, but isn't it the stuff the dreams are made of?

Maggie Taylor

Maggie Taylor was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1961, and graduated from Yale University in 1983 with a BA in philosophy. In 1987 she received an MFA in photography from the University of Florida. During this time her work evolved from black-and-white suburban landscapes to more personal and narrative color still-life imagery. Using an old 4x5 view camera and natural light, she photographed bits and pieces of the everyday: old toys, broken bottles, and animals from the garden.

Since 1987 her still-life photographs have been exhibited in more that 60 one-person exhibitions throughout the U.S. In 1996 and 2001 she received State of Florida Individual Artist’s Fellowships. Her current images explore the use of a computer and a flatbed scanner in place of a camera.

By placing objects directly on the glass top of the scanner she is able to create a unique type of digital image which has some photographic qualities. These digital images are printed on an Iris ink jet printer.

Christophe Vacher

Christophe Vacher is a multi-talented artist who has provided backgrounds and visual development for Walt Disney Feature Animation since 1993.

A native of France, Vacher worked at Disney's Paris-based animation studio for three years, where he painted backgrounds for such animated films as "The Hunchback of Notre Dame", "Runaway Brain" and served as head of background for the 1995 feature, "A Goofy Movie".

Relocating to California in 1996, he continued his association with Disney, where his most recent credits have included painting backgrounds for "Hercules," "Tarzan" and the powerful Stravinsky Firebird finale for "Fantasia 2000". In addition, he has contributed visual development for the Studio's ambitious new in-house computer-animated feature, "Dinosaur." After working on visual development and backgrounds for "Treasure Planet", he left the Disney studios in February 2002. He is now working on his personal artwork for galleries, as well as books, cds and video game covers.

Other sites
http://www.epilogue.net/cgi/database/art/list.pl?gallery=1849

ROBERT PARKEHARRISON
(b.1968) American
Robert ParkeHarrison is an inventor, both of primitive machines that would put Rube Goldberg to shame, and of fictive photographic tableaux that weave a tale of one man's poignant efforts to renew the natural world. The nameless protagonist in ParkeHarrison's photographs tries in vain to heal the wounds left on the landscape by the abuses of modern society. These photographs, which are poetic reveries on the perennial theme of man's relationship to nature, comprise the compelling book The Architect's Brother (Twin Palms, 2000), the artist's recently published first monograph.

The Architect's Brother assembles seven chapters of ParkeHarrison's epic narrative. With series titles such as "Exhausted Globe," "Promisedland," and "Earth Elegies," the continuity of ParkeHarrison's subject matter over the years becomes evident. The sense of scale of ParkeHarrison's original works, many of which are quite large, is often lost in reproduction, but the narrative nature of this imagery lends itself beautifully to book form. The effective sequencing of the images in this elegantly produced tome reflects the crescendos and decrescendos of the drama played out before the viewer, who alternately feels hope and despair in the face of the protagonist's struggle.

Other sites
http://www.artnet.com/ag/artistdetails.asp?aid=13086
http://www.sfcamerawork.org/books/0944092845.html

Balthus [French Painter, 1908-2001]

French painter. Born in Paris to Polish parents, he was considered a child prodigy and was encouraged by family friends P. Bonnard and A. Derain. Without formal training, he supported himself by commissions for stage sets and portraits. He had his first one-man show in 1934.

His paintings are characterized by large, mysterious interiors and austere, muted landscapes peopled with isolated, pensive adolescent girls. From 1961 to 1977 he served as director of the French Academy in Rome. His disturbing and erotic images, incl. the scandalous The Guitar Lesson, and his carefully cultivated persona have made him an international cult figure.

Other sites
http://www.cosmopolis.ch/english/cosmo14/balthus.htm
http://utenti.lycos.it/inmostra/index-36.html
http://www.epdlp.com/balthus.html
http://www.masdearte.com/galeria.cfm?idGaleria=49

Giuseppe Arcimboldo,
http://www.arcimboldo.art.pl/
Italian artist who lived from 1527 to 1593.

To those with a passion for illusions and optical twists, he is Arcimboldo the self-proclaimed inventor of a form of painting called the “composite head” where faces and human features are painted, not in flesh, but with rendered clumps of assorted vegetables and other materials. To this invention Arcimboldo applied his great talent and genius.

other :
http://www.guestinitaly.com/mostre/arcimboldo/
http://www.skidmore.edu/academics/fll/janzalon/arcimboldo.html

Prodigies by James G. Mundie
http://www.missioncreep.com/mundie/index.htm

Pen and ink drawings of sideshow freaks in the context of famous paintings by Philadelphia artist James G. Mundie.

Introducing a wonder of the age Prodigies

A series of drawings brought forth for your edification and amusement from the hand of James G. Mundie. As curious a collection of Anomalous Humans as one is ever likely to see gathered together on these shores! They are pronounced by all who see them as the Greatest Curiosities in Existence! This Congress of Oddities awaits your intimate and learned inspection!

Hieronymus Bosch

Hieronymus, or Jerome, Bosch, b. c.1450, d. August 1516, spent his entire artistic career in the small Dutch town of Hertogenbosch, from which he derived his name.
At the time of his death, Bosch was internationally celebrated as an eccentric painter of religious visions who dealt in particular with the torments of hell. During his lifetime Bosch's works were in the inventories of noble families of the Netherlands, Austria, and Spain, and they were imitated in a number of paintings and prints throughout the 16th century, especially in the works of Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

Bosch was a member of the religious Brotherhood of Our Lady, for whom he painted several altarpieces for the Cathedral of Saint John's, Hertogenbosch, all of which are now lost. The artist probably never went far from home, although records exist of a commission in 1504 from Philip the Handsome (later king of Castile), for a lost Last Judgment altarpiece. None of Bosch's pictures are dated, although the artist signed many of them.

BoschUniverse http://www.boschuniverse.org
Hieronymus Bosch paintings http://www.hieronymusbosch.nl/ http://www.abcgallery.com/B/bosch/bosch.html
http://www.fictionwise.com/knight/

Alessandro Bavari

Gallery 1 - Sodom and Gomorrah, a reportage from the lost cities

Alessandro Bavari was born in 1963 and today lives near Rome, Italy. An interest for painting was already present even as a three year old. Later as a fifteen year old an interest for photography developed. It was Alessandro's father who gave him a Practica and a little later Alesandro bought anenlarger and began photo-montage.

http://www.alessandrobavari.com

The haunting, poetic images created by Italian artist Alessandro Bavari, with their luscious textures and exquisite detail, are the fruits of a long journey of exploration to discover a personal artistic language that can transcend the limits of established media through what he describes as "a kind of contamination amongst the arts dissolving the boundaries which distinguish them".

Bavari's images make many references to the paintings of Italian and Flemish artists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; Giotto, Piero della Fancesca and Hieronymus Bosch, amongst others. Not the grandeur of the high Renaissance, but the essentially humanistic outlook of the painters who wished to convey the pathos and pleasures of our inner lives. Bavari's works are Gothic in feel, with their fantastical imaginings, adoration of detail and fascination with the natural world. The size of your screen will not do them justice - these should be shown ten feet tall so you could climb into them to appreciate their complexity and wealth of content.

M.C. Escher
http://www.worldofescher.com/

Maurits Cornelis Escher, born in Leeuwarden, 17 june 1898, received his first instruction in drawing at the secondary school in Arnhem, by F.W. van der Haagen, who helped him to develop his graphic aptitude by teaching in the technique of the linoleum cut. From 1919 to 1922 he studied at the School of Architecture and Ornamental Design in Haarlem, where he was instructed in the graphic techniques by S. Jessurun de Mesquita, whose strong personality greatly influenced escher's further development, as graphic artist. In 1922 he went to Italy and 1924 settled in Rome. During his 10 year stay in Italy he made many study-tours, visiting Abruzzia, the Amalfi coast, Calabria, Sicily, Corsica and Spain. In 1934 he left Italy, spent two years in Switzerland and five years in Brussels before settling in Baarn (Holland) in 1941, where he died on march 27, 1972, at the age of 73 years.

Peter Gric
http://www.gric.at/
A large collection of fantastic/surreal paintings and illustrations of the Czech painter P.Gric (acrylic, oil, digital collage)

Born 1968 in Brno/Czechoslovakia, lives in Austria since 1980. 1988-1993 studies at the academy of arts in Vienna, lives and works in Vienna. Objects: acrylic-oil paintings, partially mixed with collages. Themes: weird physics, antigravitation, monumental architecture, organical putrefaction and anomaly, geological erosion, cataclysms...

ODD NERDRUM
http://www.nerdrum.com/

ODD NERDRUM | Post-Modern Rembrandt
The introspective sitter and monochromatic palette commonly used by Dutch and Flemish masters have been combined in a portrait that is reminiscent of an another time and different kind of artist. The diffused Caravaggist light source, and obvious skill in portraying the human subject in a self-reflective manner not unlike Rembrandt, is the product of Odd Nerdrum.

Odd Nerdrum was born in 1944 in Norway. The cultural history and geographical location may account for the disturbing nature that viewers find to be confrontational. Odd has always been drawn to Northern European art from the Baroque period with its somber color schemes, a development of Leonardo's chiaroscuro. He uses the techniques of the old masters that require time, expertise, discipline, a handsome pinch of talent, and a great understanding of the human form, figure, and psychology. Goya, Velazquez, Durer, and Rembrandt are artists called to mind when viewing Odd's work. He shares with these artists a common understanding that process is the most influential determinant of the quality of the product. By slowing down production the artist enables himself to increase the thinking involved which in turn creates a more introspective and deliberate work of art. In the six to eight paintings he produces per year, it affords him the opportunity to develop his style, technique, and attitude.

Robert Gregory Griffeth
http://www.robertgregorygriffeth.com/

Robert Gregory Griffeth - Official Site

Joel-Peter Witkin

Joel-Peter Witkin is a photographer whose images of the human condition are undeniably powerful. For more than twenty years he has pursued his interest in spirituality and how it impacts the physical world in which we exist. Finding beauty within the grotesque, Witkin pursues this complex issue through people most often cast aside by society -- human spectacles including hermaphrodites, dwarfs, amputees, androgynes, carcases, people with odd physical capabilities, fetishists and "any living myth . . . anyone bearing the wounds of Christ." His fascination with other people's physicality has inspired works that confront our sense of normalcy and decency, while constantly examining the teachings handed down through Christianity.

reference site
http://www.edelmangallery.com/witkin.htm
http://www.correnticalde.com/witkin/
http://www.debased.com/joel-peter-witkin-pictures.html

Duane Michals

Duane Michals was born in Mckeesport, Pennsylvania into a typical working-class environment: his father was a steel worker and his mother a housekeeper. His interest in art began at age 14, when he began taking Saturday-afternoon watercolor classes at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. He received a B.A. from the University of Denver in 1953, and though he made a decision not to pursue a fine-arts career at that time, he developed a keen interest in the work of other artists - particularly surrealist masters such as Magritte, de Chirico and Balthus.

reference site
http://www.digitaljournalist.org/issue0106/voices_michals.htm
http://www.fotopub.com/Legende/duane/
http://www.trailerparkcreations.com/legends/michals/michals.htm
http://www.studium.iar.unicamp.br/zero/chance.htm
http://www.twinpalms.com/Pages/frameset.html?=michals.html
http://www.queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/Weingberg.html
http://www.omero.it/michals.htm

Rene Magritte

Belgian surrealist painter, born in Lessines. He studied at the Academie Royale des Beaux-Arts, Brussels. His first one-man exhibition was in Brussels in 1927. At that time Magritte had already begun to paint in the style, closely akin to surrealism, that was predominant throughout his long career. A meticulous, skillful technician, he is noted for works that contain an extraordinary juxtaposition of ordinary objects or an unusual context that gives new meaning to familiar things. This juxtaposition is frequently termed magic realism, of which Magritte was the prime exponent. In addition to fantastic elements, he displayed a mordant wit, creating surrealist versions of famous paintings, as in Madame Recamier de David, in which an elaborate coffin is substituted for the reclining woman in the famous portrait by Jacques Louis David. Magritte's work was first shown in the United States in New York City in 1936 and again in that city in two retrospectives, one at the Museum of Modern Art in 1965 (U.S. tour, 1966), and the other at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1992.

reference site
http://web.genie.it/utenti/f/frankmas/magritte/magritte.htm
http://vision.info.bg/magritte/default.htm
http://www.pasqualeart.com/magritte.html

Scott Musgrove
"Late Fauna of Early North America"

Scott Musgrove was born in the South, raised in the Midwest, lived in the Pacific Northwest and then moved to the Southwest. After a childhood spent doing God knows what, he was sent off the to the Big City to attend Columbus College of Art and Design in downtown Columbus, Ohio where he studied illustration and painting. Very little work survives from that period. After college, Scott moved to Seattle, Washington and drew comic books. His comic books have been published by Fantagraphics Books and he is a contributing cartoonist to various comic anthologies. His animated TV series Fat Dog Mendoza, (which airs almost everywhere in the world except the United States) brought him to Los Angeles to work with Cartoon Network Europe, Sony Wonder and Sunbow Entertainment. Musgrove's work blends the bizarre comic book world of quirky, often grotesque, characters against rich, vibrant, finely executed landscapes. He is influenced by the work of dead artists, Carlo Crivelli, Jan van Eyck and Hieronymous Bosch and the undead Donald Roller Wilson, Botero and Odd Nerdrum. Scott Musgrove has exhibited his painted works at The Alexander Gallery in New York City, 111 Minna Gallery in San Francisco and Seattle's Roq La Rue Gallery.

reference site
Scott Musgrove
La Luz de Jesus Gallery

Gustav Klimt
RDA presents a site dedicated to the life and works of Austrian painter Gustav Klimt

Gustav Klimt was born July 14, 1862 in Baumgarten, a Viennese suburb. His father, an immigrant from Bohemia, failed in his occupation as a gold engraver, and his children were raised in utter poverty. Klimt's family, like many others in Vienna in the 1860's, was in desperate need of money. Frequently changing address, they lived in small and poorly lit houses, wherever they could afford.
When he was just 14, Gustav quit school, but managed to enroll at a local college of art and craft. While at BArgerschule, Klimt's artistic abilities were recognized, and he was encouraged to develop them. He applied for and gained a place at the Kunstgewerbeschule (Arts and Crafts school), one of two Viennese public art schools. He was so talented, he began earning a living off commissions while still at school. He formed a partnership with his brother Ernst and another student, Franz Matsch. Up until the 1890's , Klimt-Matsch & Co. were getting rich on commissions for the new buildings being constructed.

reference site
THE KLIMT COLLECTION
Gustav Klimt Museum

other
http://www.clarkart.edu/klimt/klimt/
http://www.expo-klimt.com/
http://www.klimt.at/
http://klimt.freeweb.supereva.it/

ZDZISLAW BEKSINSKI

Zdzislaw Beksinski was born in Poland in the town of Sanok near the Carpathians Mountains in 1929. After a childhood was spent during the Second World War, Beksinski went on to university where he studied architecture in Cracow. Subsequent to this education he spent several years as a construction site supervisor, a job he hated, frought with pressures and countless boring details. He would soon throw himself into the arts. In 1958, Beksinski began to gain critical praise for his photography, and later went on to drawing. His highly detailed drawings are often quite large, and may remind some of the works of Ernst Fuchs in their intricate, and nearly obsessive rendering.

Beksinski eventually threw himself into painting with a passion, and worked constantly, always to the strains of classical music. He soon became the leading figure in contemporary Polish art.

NEW WORK
http://www.webmarket.com.pl/beksinski/
http://www.polishartgallery.com/exhibition/landscape01.htm

Other sites
Beksi?ski - fotografie z lat 1953 - 1959
Monografia Beksinskiego
lunatic asylum -beksinski
http://peintre.beksinski.free.fr/
http://zaiste.w.interia.pl/beksinski.html

H. R. Giger

Hans Rudi Giger was born and raised in 1940 at Chur in Switzerland,as a chemist's son. Even as a child he was highly interested inthe morbid, death, and in the supernatural.
In his parent's house he made a ghost ride in the cellar. He invited local girls to sit in the little card in the dark. He and a few of his friends pushed these girls through the cellar where they had put up cardboard skeletons, monsters and corpses. Small flashlights, stolen from bicycles on the street, shown their little lights which gave the cellar an eerie atmosphere. One of the greatest thrills to little Hans Rudi was, when one of the elder girls came in and sat down in the chart to be pushed around.

After a few years, H.R. discovered books like 'La belle et la bete', which made his ghost ride somewhat primitive. So he started working on a 'Black Chamber', at the top floor of his parents house. It was meant to play jazz in with his friends, and to make out with girls.

In 1959 some underground magazines, among which were 'Clou' and 'Hotcha', and his school newspaper published his 'Atom children', drawings of deformed children which he drew on calender sheets. A poem went with these pictures.

Other sites
http://www.giger.com
http://www.littlegiger.com/
http://hem.passagen.se/h2/giger/

Jerry N. Uelsmann

Born in Detroit in 1934, Jerry N. Uelsmann received his B.F.A. from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1957 and his M.S. and M.F.A. from Indiana University in 1960. He has taught at the University of Florida since 1960, and held the position of Graduate Research Professor at UF since 1974. Uelsmann received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1967 and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1972. He is a founding member of the American Society for Photographic Education, a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain, and has served as a trustee of the Friends of Photography.

Uelsmann's work has been exhibited in more than 100 solo shows in the United States and abroad over the past thirty years. His photographs are in the permanent collections of numerous museums worldwide including the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Chicago Art Institute, The International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Biblioteque National in Paris, the National Museum of American Art in Washington, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the National Galleries of Scotland, the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, Arizona, the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto, Japan, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the National Gallery of Canada, and the National Gallery of Australia.

Wes Benscoter
The official website of Wes Benscoter, an award winning artist whose bizarre airbrushed paintings have been used by Slayer, Relapse Records, and numerous magazines.

Award-winning illustrator Wes Benscoter is notorious for the bizarre album cover artwork that he's been creating since 1992.

Besides records, Wes's art has also been featured in a highly diverse assortment of magazines, books, and gallery exhibitions around the world.

JACEK YERKA

Born in Northern Poland in 1952, JACEK YERKA paints in the classic tradition of the Flemish masters, and found his main inspiration from artists such as Jan van Eyck, Robert Campin (Master of Flemalle) and Hugo ver der Goes.

Painter Jacek Yerka was born in a small city in Northern Poland in the early 1950s. His developing years were spent playing amidst the wonderfully preserved architecture of medieval Europe, as his hometown was spared much of the bombing that beset Poland during the war. It is this environment of reddish brown brickwork that immediately calls to mind the works of Bosch and Brueghel, whose palette Yerka shares.

Yerka studied art at University, before rebelling against the trend to paint with less attention to realism and detail. Instead, he found his education studying the works of the Northern European masters like the Van Eycks, Dierck Bouts, Robert Campin, Bosch, and surrealists such as Magritte.

Yerka's carefully rendered paintings (acrylics on canvas) are filled with images from the artist's childhood, one heavily influenced by the surroundings of his home during the 1950's, and his grandmother's kitchen, wherein he spent much of his time. Odd little beasts, and wonderfully whimsical landscapes are the hallmarks of Yerka's delightful works.

Jacek Yerka's work has been exhibited in Poland, Germany, Monaco, France, and the United States. His works also hang in Polish art museums.

"Yerka's art brims with echoes of the famous surreal artists of the past, Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Brueghel to Salvador Dali and Rene' Magritte


Other sites
http://www.ergeal.ru/pix/yerka/
http://museummorpheus.com/contemp/yerka/

Todd Schorr

Todd Schorr's artistic journey is one that hardly conforms to the time-honored stereotype of Bohemian artist. It is rather a post-war tale bracketed by an America infatuated with the limitless potential of consumerism. His formative years were spent in a world surrounded by the atomic and space ages, by Saturday morning cartoons and racks of comic books at the local drug store, a land populated by Revell models,

Mad Magazine, Testors glue, Mickey Mouse and Rat Fink. Further fueling his developing image bank were the seemingly endless icons from television's early years: Robbie the Robot,

Mighty Joe Young and reel upon reel of animated toons from the likes of Tex Avery, George Pal and Max Fleischer The compulsion to replicate these characters led to a formal art education and exposure to a new set of influences drawn from the world of advertising and commercial art.

Gustave Dore

Gustave Dore (1832-1883) was unquestionably the most celebrated 19th-century French illustrator. He displayed artistic talent from the age of five, and at fourteen, published his first album, Les Travaux d’Hercules.He debuted at the Salon in 1847 with two drawings, and was hired by Charles Philipon to produce caricatures for the Journal pour Rire. Already well-known by the age of sixteen, he continued his high school studies at the Lycee Charlemagne, copied paintings at the Louvre, and studied prints at the Bibliotheque Nationale. In the Salon of 1864, he exhibited paintings as well as religious sculptures, and also began to submit cartoons to publications such as the Journal pour tous, Cariacature, and the Charivari. In all he produced some total 10,000 lithographic illustrations!
At the age of 23, Dore turned from print journalism to making wood engravings for classic texts, and would illustrate some twenty editions between 1852 and 1883. He had a gift for dramatizing his subjects--a talent that was complemented by his incredibly vivid imagination and speedy execution. Dore’s first 104 woodcuts for Joseph Bry’s edition of Rabelais’ Pantagruel (1854) were followed by those for Balzac’s Contes drolatiques, 1856) and Dante’s Inferno (1861). He produced numerous illustrations for some works, including 377 for Don Quixote (Cervantes, 1863) and 248 for La Fontaine's Fables (1868). The Bible (1866), Paradise Lost (Milton, 1866), Capitaine Fracasse (Gautier, 1866), and Les Travailleurs de la mer (Hugo, 1867) are among his other "collaborations."

Dore illustrated two other fairy tale collections --Nouveaux contes de fees by the Comtesse de Segur (1857) and the Adventures of Baron von Munchausen (1862)--before turning to those of Charles Perrault. The Contes de ma mere l’Oye (Mother Goose Tales, 1697) is uncontestably the most popular French fairy tale collection, including such classics as Sleeping Beauty (La Belle au bois dormant), Little Red Riding Hood (Le Petit chaperon rouge), Blue Beard (La Barbe-bleue), Puss ‘n’ Boots (Le Maitre chat ou Le Chat botte), The Fairies (Les Fees), Cinderella (Cendrillon ou La Petite pantoufle de verre), Ricky with the Tuft (Riquet a la Houppe), and Tom Thumb (Le Petit poucet). The illustrations reproduced on these pages are among those originally published by Pierre-Jules Hetzel for his 1861 edition of the Contes.

William Blake

Poet, printmaker, visionary, the British artist William Blake (1757-1827) made work that is both profoundly personal and universal. Tate Britain is now presenting the most comprehensive exhibition of Blake's work ever held (9 November - 11 February 2001). The aim is to show Blake as an artist, as a poet and as a man.

British poet, painter, visionary mystic, and engraver, who illustrated and printed his own books. Blake proclaimed the supremacy of the imagination over the rationalism and materialism of the 18th- century. He joined for a time the Swedenborgian Church of the New Jerusalem in London and considered Newtonian science to be superstitious nonsense. Misunderstanding shadowed his career as a writer and artist and it was left to later generations to recognize his importance.

Blake was born in London, where he spent most of his life. His father was a successful London hosier and attracted by the doctrines of Emmanuel Swedenborg. Blake was first educated at home, chiefly by his mother. His parents encouraged him to collect prints of the Italian masters, and in 1767 sent him to Henry Pars' drawing school. From his early years, he experienced visions of angels and ghostly monks, he saw and conversed with the angel Gabriel, the Virgin Mary, and various historical figures.

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