Alexi Torres, 1976

Cuban painter Alexi Torres creates works that capture the creative powers of the universe as well as the problems facing it. He grapples with how to express the influences of the past, possibilities of the future and the responsibilities of the now. Torres creates woven canvasses which immortalize influential figures and emblems past and present.
He paints leaves, feathers, and other organic materials to create his works, which represent everything from Oprah Winfrey to Pablo Picasso to an unnamed soldier. His works are all-natural, fragile and ephemeral, serving as an answer to his own appreciation of Earth’s needs.

Jacques Prévert | Paris at night..

Tre fiammiferi accesi uno per uno nella notte

Il primo per vederti tutto il viso

Il secondo per vederti gli occhi

L'ultimo per vedere la tua bocca

E tutto il buio per ricordarmi queste cose

Mentre ti stringo fra le braccia.

Stanislav Aristov

Leonardo da Vinci | Parla il musico col pittore

Trattato della Pittura - Parte prima /26

Dice il musico, che la sua scienza è da essere equiparata a quella del pittore, perché essa compone un corpo di molte membra, del quale lo speculatore contempla tutta la grazia in tanti tempi armonici quanti sono i tempi ne' quali essa nasce e muore, e con quei tempi trastulla con grazia l'anima che risiede nel corpo del suo contemplante.

Michael Klein, 1980 | The Novorealism Movement

American painter Michael Klein is a bourgeoning artist in the NovoRealism Movement creating melancholic paintings that have a distinct, contemplative quality.

Klein grew up in the Midwest where he developed a special connection with nature and a desire to express himself accurately through his work.

He began his academic training at just 19 with Richard Whitney and subsequently enrolled in Richard Lack’s The Atelier in Minneapolis, MN.

Juan Fortuny, 1939 | Impressionist / Realist painter

Juan Fortuny was born in Badalona, a small fishing town near to Barcelona.
A work of art signed by Fortuny is, first and foremost, a suite of details, each and every one of which is of primary importance. A surprising and outstanding composition, fruit of long years of experience with colours, canvas, techniques, visits to galleries and museums. The route that leads to Juan Fortuny today takes the traveller backwards in time, to his childhood. Four years later his affair with drawings, his passion, triumphed and started a new career as a painter.

Dariusz Żejmo, 1966 | Fantasy /Venice painting

Dariusz Zejmo has graduated Fine Arts School and Fine Arts Faculty at Nicolas Copernicus University (painting) in Toruń, Poland under the guidance of prof. Janusz Kaczmarski. Zejmo is the author of illustration and artwork to several dozen books, publishing graphic designer, magazine covers and illustrations for children.

Van Gogh: Sogno di dipingere e poi dipingo il mio sogno!

'Bisogna aver sempre presente la meta da raggiungere e che la vittoria ottenuta dopo un'intera vita di laboriosa fatica vale più di un facile successo. Chiunque viva sinceramente e affronti senza piegarsi dolori e delusioni è assai più degno di chi ha sempre avuto il vento favorevole, non conoscendo altro che una relativa prosperità'.

John Mason ~ Visionary landscape painter

American painter John Mason is not only a brilliant artist, but also a musician, and a computer animator as well. John thinks of his images as "painting from the mind's eye". His images create visionary landscapes that "glow" with life, and John seems fascinated with ancient civilizations and the innate beauty of pristine nature.

Jeremiah Stermer, 1946 ~ Surrealist photographer

'I call myself a realist/surrealist, though I think of my brand of surrealism as being grounded in tradition. At the age of eleven I taught myself how to paint in oils. After a life-changing NDE out-of- body experience when I was 30, I want my art to allude to that sampling of nirvana. I appreciate when someone says my work looks like a photograph, but my goal is for everything to look and feel real, to go beyond the purely visible. I pay a lot of attention to the air around everything. I apply colors in layers in thin flat relief leaving virtually no evidence of brushstroke. The most important aspect of my work is MOOD.

My works are in various renowned collections around the country. I have been represented in galleries in Bethesda, Chevy Chase and Baltimore, Maryland. South Hampton, and New York City, New York. Wellesley, Massachusetts. Naples and Palm Beach, Florida. I have two pieces in the collection of a well known television and movie actor, and am in the permanent collection of The Hickory Museum of Art, Hickory, North Carolina. I have several pieces in ‘The World’s Top 200 Collections’. I have given numerous lectures and demonstrations on realistic oil painting and surrealism at various institutions in Maryland.

Paul Klee: "L'arte è quello che c'è fra il colore e la tela"

'I colori, come i lineamenti, seguono i cambiamenti delle emozioni'. Pablo Picasso

Eric Wert, 1976 ~ Hyperrealist Floral Still Life painter

Eric Wert was born in Portland, Oregon. He received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from Northwestern University. He currently paints full time from his studio in Portland.
His work has been shown across the U.S. and in Europe. In the last decade, he has had ten solo exhibits and has participated in over fifty group exhibitions. He has been featured in numerous publications, including American Art Collector, New American Paintings and Artists Magazine. Public collections include the New Britain Museum of American Art, in Connecticut, and the Illinois State Museum. 'I want to create an image that one can be lost within. To me, still life painting is about looking intensely, about intimately exploring a subject. I hope that the paintings can convey that sense of intensity and fascination'.

Victor Charreton | Post-Impressionist painter

Victor Charreton (1864-1936) belongs to a generation of artists who devoted themselves to ‘le paysage’, just like the Impressionists did before them, paying attention to the influence of seasons, light and colours. Furthermore, he traveled extensively and together with his wife, he visited Italy, Germany, The Netherlands, Belgium, England, Spain and Marocco.
His evolution tended towards a use of richer and brighter colours, notably in the mauves and violets which characterize his style. Victor Charreton is famous for his landscapes and still-life paintings, often sharing Impressionist preoccupations whilst trying to capture momentary effects of specific times of day or seasons, at sunset or in a snowy landscape.

John Murray | Abstract painter

John Francis Murray is an American painter, known for working in the Abstract style. His subject matter includes figure, landscape, still-life and portraiture. Inspired by the classical masters as a boy, his traditional training and artistic development has lead to work of quality. His paintings carry an appealing sense of clarity and color.

As a classically trained artist, Murray's choice for subject matter revolves around figure, still-life, portrait and landscape. His work is a combination of traditional subject matter, infused with bold brushwork and contemporary compositions.

Vincent Van Gogh | In the springtime a bird in a cage, 1880

Vincent van Gogh letter to Theo van Gogh, Cuesmes, 24 June 1880:

In the springtime a bird in a cage knows very well that there’s something he’d be good for; he feels very clearly that there’s something to be done but he can’t do it; what it is he can’t clearly remember, and he has vague ideas and says to himself, "the others are building their nests and making their little ones and raising the brood", and he bangs his head against the bars of his cage.

And then the cage stays there and the bird is mad with suffering. "Look, there’s an idler", says another passing bird - "that fellow’s a sort of man of leisure".

Loren D. Adams, 1945 | Surrealist painter

American Loren D. Adams, Jr. was born in Linton, Indiana.

He developed a profound interest in painting at the age of nine years old. One of these very early original Art-works found it's way into a major retrospective exhibition at the prestigious R.W. Norton Art Gallery, a Museum of Early American, European and Contemporary Fine Art in Shreveport, Louisiana in February of 1979.

His first public exhibit was at the Roseville Museum, Roseville, California in 1967. This was the same year he quit his day job as an emergency room L.P.N. to devote full time to his Art. The young Artist began to chase after his dream to become a Master.

Holly Sierra ~ American Magic realism painter

Whether wandering through the forest or exploring an ancient crumbling castle, Holly Sierra finds inspiration all around her. Holly has been drawn to painting things ‘mystical and magical’ for as long as she can remember. After her fine art education at SUNY Purchase in NY, the next decade found Holly living and traveling extensively in Asia. She now blends her marvelous multicultural memories with themes that influence and fascinate her today.

Roger Suraud ~ French Symbolist painter

French painter and sculptor Roger Suraud, was born in Saint-Étienne the 13th of October 1938.
The Suraud's painting are a grand spectacle where music travels with Sculpture and Architecture.
Suraud is represented in many exposures and international living rooms: Paris, Genève, Monaco, Lyon, Bordeaux, Saint-Tropez.

Federico García Lorca | Potessero le mie mani sfogliare la luna

Pronunzio il tuo nome

nelle notti scure,

quando sorgono gli astri

per bere dalla luna

e dormono le frasche

delle macchie occulte.

Leon Wyczolkowski

Pablo Neruda | In Te la terra / In you the Earth

Marc Chagall, 1927

Piccola

rosa,

rosa piccina,

a volte,

minuta e nuda,

sembra

Felice Casorati | Magic Realism painter

Born in Novara, Felice Casorati (1883-1963) spent his formative years in Padua, where he developed an interest in music and literature.

He began to paint in 1902, and read law at the University of Padua, graduating in 1906, while frequenting the studio of Giovanni Viannello (1873-1926).

Casorati's early paintings were in the symbolist mode of the Vienna Secession.

His adherence to this style was strengthened by seeing Klimt's installation at the 1910 Venice Biennale, where he met the Austrian painter.

Leonardo da Vinci | Pittore che disputa col poeta

Trattato della Pittura - Parte prima /14

Qual poeta con parole ti metterà innanzi, o amante, la vera effigie della tua idea con tanta verità, qual farà il pittore?

Quale sarà quello che ti dimostrerà i siti de' fiumi, boschi, valli e campagne, dove si rappresentino i tuoi passati piaceri, con più verità del pittore?

Marty Bell | Vintage style painter

With her passion for beauty, color and style, American painter Marty Bell [1931-2003] was a prolific and influential artist. Her work has been internationally collected and she enjoyed the respect of both her peers and fine art collectors.
In her lifetime, Marty painted more than 3,000 oil paintings ranging from old English cottages and California landscapes to impressionistic pieces and colorful still lifes.

Leon Richman ~ Figurative sculptor

Beginning in medium to large-scale marble figures, his passion to explore the beauty of the human form in all dimensions soon led him to a more pliable medium, allowing more freedom in the creative process. The result has been an inspired body of work, each piece possessing its own unique spirit and personality.
Leon Richman is a California artist with a formal education from the renowned Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, and years of practical experience in the field of commercial art, but his soul and passion have always been deeply rooted in the finer arts. He has almost as many years experience in drawing and painting as he’s been living and breathing. Now he has directed his creative ambitions towards the art of sculpture.
Chosen to study under the tutelage of the internationally acclaimed sculptor Richard MacDonald, Leon Richman has since become even more skillful at the physical interpretation of the human spirit, not settling for a simple duplication of a posing body, but instilling his sculptures with the same passion he feels in their creation.

Eva Gonzalès | Les grandes dames of Impressionism

Eva Gonzalès (1849-1883) was a French Impressionist painter.

She was one of the four most notable female Impressionists in the nineteenth century, along with Mary Cassatt (1844-1926), Berthe Morisot (1841-95) and Marie Bracquemond (1840-1916).

Gonzalès began her professional training and took lessons in drawing in 1865, from the society portraitist Charles Chaplin, who was also Mary Cassatt's teacher.

Martin Johnson Heade and the Hudson River School

Art historians have come to disagree with the common view that Martin Johnson Heade (-1819-1904) is a Hudson River School painter, a view given wide currency by Heade's inclusion in a landmark exhibition of Hudson River School landscapes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1987.

The leading Heade scholar and author of Heade's catalogue raisonne, Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., wrote some years after the 1987 Hudson River School exhibition that "...other scholars-myself included-have increasingly come to doubt that Heade is most usefully seen as standing within that school".

Albert Carrier-Belleuse | Chryselephantine sculpture

Carrier-Belleuse is the name used by this sculptor -born Carrier de Belleuse- on his mature pieces, after initially signing works "A. Carrier". His career began firmly in the applied arts, with his apprenticeship at thirteen to a Parisian ciseleur today known as Bauchery (or Beauchery), and he did subsequent work for Jacques-Henri Fauconnier and Fannière Frères. His formal education took place at the Petite Ecole - chosen after an unhappy stint at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1840 under the direction of David d'Angers, his official master.

While at the Petite Ecole in the 1840s, Carrier-Belleuse began his lifelong practice of providing commercial houses with models for edition, as statuettes or as ornament for functional pieces. Around 1850, the sculptor moved to England as a designer for Minton China Works, at Stoke-upon-Trent, as well as for Wedgewood, Coalbrookdale Ironworks, and Graham Jackson furniture makers.

Even after returning to Paris in 1855, he continued to send models to British firms throughout his life.

He began to garner acclaim as a fine-arts sculptor after ten years of showing in the Salon, beginning with two portrait medallions in 1850 and a flurry of busts and groups with mythological or historical subjects between 1857-1861, the latter of which earned him a third-class medal.

Catherine Calcagni | Ed intanto fuori piove..

Assorta nella penombra

delle pagine gialle della mia vita

mi siedo con l'abbandono

con le mani raccolgo il vuoto

e mi conforta la pena

non guardo fuori...

sento solo....confesso

il rigurgito fuso delle mie angosce

eppur..... c'era il sole

Jeremy Mann

The fountain of the Four Rivers / La Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi, 1651

Quattro enormi allegorie sedute in pose contrastanti agli angoli delle rocce in marmo bianco che rappresentano i maggiori fiumi di ciascuno dei quattro continenti noti, secondo le cognizioni geografiche del XVII secolo:

Il Danubio per l'Europa, scolpito da Antonio Raggi;

Il Gange per l'Asia di Claude Poussin;

Il Rio della Plata per l'America di Francesco Baratta;

Il Nilo per l'Africa di Antonio Fancelli.

Will Barnet | Abstract painter

American painter and printmaker Will Barnet (1911-2012) has lived through every major artistic school in modern American art.

He can remember watching John Singer Sergent paint murals on the ceiling of the Boston Public Library in the 1920s, and being the printmaker in New York for Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco.

He remembers the explosion of Abstract Expressionism that would come to define the so-called New York School of artists.

Alda Merini / Michelangelo | Bambino..

Bambino,

se trovi l'aquilone della tua fantasia

legalo con l'intelligenza del cuore.

Vedrai sorgere giardini incantati

e tua madre diventerà una pianta

che ti coprirà con le sue foglie.

Michelangelo Buonarroti | La Madonna di Bruges 1503-1505

Edgar Allan Poe | Il Corvo, la poesia illustrata da Manet

Il Corvo - The Raven - ed altre poesie è una raccolta di poesie scritte da Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), scrittore, poeta, critico letterario, giornalista, editore, storyteller e saggista statunitense, considerato tra le figure più importanti della letteratura americana, inventore del racconto poliziesco, della letteratura horror e del giallo psicologico, finisce per diventare anche uno dei rappresentanti maggiori del racconto gotico.

Il Corvo fu pubblicato per la prima volta il 29 gennaio 1845, sul New York Evening Mirror.

Édouard Manet 1832-1883 | Illustration for The Rave by Edgar Allan Poe

Richard Baxter, 1966

Richard Baxter is an Australian painter, photographer and digital artist.

These three aspects of visual art constantly interweave for me, and I don't like to create borders between them as they all enhance each other in different ways.

The main, simple message in all my recent work is that life is joyous and explosive, here and now in the present, amidst the ordinary, amongst the flowers and the garbage.

Yannick Bouchard, 1982 | Surrealist / Symbolist painter

I am not claiming myself as a "surrealist artist", but my art is undeniably marked by their influence.

I was also very impressed by some notable fantasy artists, as well as erotic artists; the way they depict beauty and sensuality, and how they bring grandiose imaginary worlds to life.
Overall, my paintings are more or less a mixture of all those types; surrealism, fantasy with a touch of symbolism and even sometimes macabre.

But most of all, my paintings are images resulting of my inner thoughts and feelings; they are the expression of my love for the human body, the inspiring curves of femininity, as well as the superphysical side of the human mind, the mystical and the magical, or just very simple little things, like textures, colors and nature.

They are not intellectual pieces. They don't depict sophisticated and complicated opinions and cryptic theories.

Their essence is to stimulate the imagination and guide viewers where only they want to go. Mostly, I paint for myself; I paint what I want, I paint what I like, what moves me, what I feel and what I am.

Kent R. Wallis | Romantic Impressionist painter

Kent R. Wallis, born in Ogden, Utah, began his formal art endeavors rather late compared to most other artists.

He received his Bachelors' and Masters' degrees from Utah State University in Business Administration in 1969; after which he was employed by the B. F. Goodrich Company in Akron, Ohio.

He worked for six years in the fields of marketing and finance. During that 6-year experience, personal feelings kept reoccuring that his career was not fulfilling his creative needs.

With his sense of frustration growing, in January of 1975 he renewed an old hobby that had been abandoned years earlier but which he had enjoyed during his young life--drawing and painting. He did so in an effort to sharpen his creative faculties and give more purpose to his free time.

Momix Ballet

Conosciuta nel mondo intero per le sue opere di eccezionale inventiva e bellezza, Momix è una compagnia di ballerini, diretta dall'americano Moses Pendleton. Sin dalla fondazione ha acquisito grande notorietà per la sua capacità di evocare un mondo di immagini surreali utilizzando il corpo, costumi, attrezzi, luci e giochi d’ombra.

The Vigeland Sculpture Park

Il Parco delle sculture di Vigeland, un'area di circa 320 ettari, si trova all'interno del Frognerparken di Oslo, l'antica Kristiania, in periferia della capitale norvegese.
E' dedicata all'esposizione permanente di sculture, bassorilievi e opere in ferro battuto dell'artista norvegese Gustav Vigeland. Disseminate nel Parco Vigeland oltre 200 sculture che ritraggono scene di vita quotidiana.

Il tema di fondo dell'intero parco, il ciclo della vita, dalla nascita e della morte, si articola in cinque aree: Il Cancello, Il Ponte, La Fontana, La Terrazza del Monolite e la Ruota della Vita.
Tutti i sentieri del Parco Vigeland portano all’obelisco, monolite granitico si staglia in cielo per 17 metri, con scolpiti 121 corpi avvinghiati. Vigeland si occupò anche del design e della progettazione architettonica del parco.

Mark Mawson | Conceptual photographer

Mark Mawson is a London based photographer with 25 years experience of producing creative and inspiring images.

He specialises in shooting liquids and his colourful liquid work, titled "Aqueous", has become very well known and collectable. An Aqueous video was projected onto the walls of Buckingham Palace for The Queen's diamond jubilee concert.

Mark also enjoys shooting underwater fashion and beauty and his non commissioned personal work shows a love of atmospheric, cinematic work.

His work is held in many private collections around the world.

Ronit Baranga, 1973 | Surrealist sculptor

An Israeli artist with a head full of memories. Memories that might come from childhood, confronting the hands of an adult? An art that creates mysterious characters, images of women hiding behind their masks, or objects that have a life of themselves, and some human presence.

Miriana Mitrovich | Abstract photographer

Miriana Mitrovich is Bulgarian-born Canadian artist, born in Sofia. As a daughter of a ballerina and a sculptor, she was enrolled in a classical ballet and piano lessons by the age of six and sculpting portraiture under the guidance of her father. At the age of ten, she was accepted as one of twenty-eight children from across the country into a nine-year program at the National Ballet School in Sofia.