David Piddock, 1960 | Magic Realism painter

David Piddock has shown in an extensive number of exhibitions across England including: 'Focus on Drawing', Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, the Spectator Open at Christie's, The Gallery in Cork Street, the 'Gallery Fiction' at The Fine Art Society, London, and 'New Acquisitions' at The Museum of London.

Piddock has also exhibited internationally in Centro Modigliani, Florence and Palm Beach Contemporary Art Fair, USA.

Pasquale Romanelli | Andromeda

"As soon as Perseus, great-grandson of Abas, saw her fastened by her arms to the hard rock, he would have thought she was a marble statue" – Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book IV

With Andromeda and the sea monster Romanelli chose a subject that had fascinated artists since the Renaissance. The myth is best known from Ovid’s dramatic account in his Metamorphoses. The poet tells of the Aethiopean princess, whose mother, Queen Cassiopeia, boasted that her daughter was more beautiful than Poseidon’s Nereids. Enraged, the god of the sea sent a monstrous sea creature to devastate the coast of their Aethiopean kingdom. The distraught King consulted the Oracle of Apollo for guidance, only to be told that he had to sacrifice his daughter to the monster to put an end to its rampage.

Pasquale Romanelli | Ruth

The Florentine sculptor Pasquale Romanelli achieved an international reputation for his finely carved mythological and biblical marble figures. Romanelli began his training at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence under Luigi Pampaloni but was soon taught by the foremost Tuscan neoclassical sculptor, Lorenzo Bartolini. Remaining in Bartolini’s favour, he went on to become his collaborator and, upon the master’s death in 1850, the successor of his studio. Romanelli’s mythological and allegorical compositions were highly prized by a cosmopolitan clientele, and he exhibited select models in Paris.

Denise Henley | Portrait painter

Born in Guyana, South America, Denise Henley first realized her artistic passion at the tender age of eight. She spent much of her young life immersed in drawing.

As an adolescent, she moved to the United States to study art and after obtaining a B.A in Visual Arts, went on to pursue a career as an artist.

While she works in several mediums and subject-matters, her passion lies in capturing the beauty of the human figure. A constituent of realism, she continuously strives to perfect her drawing skills, believing it to be the backbone of the portrait process.

Balthus | Modern painter

Balthus, pseudonym of Balthazar Klossowski, also spelled Balthasar Klossowsky (born February 29, 1908, Paris, France - died February 18, 2001, La Rossinière, Switzerland), reclusive French painter who, in the midst of 20th-century avant-gardism, explored the traditional categories of European painting: the landscape, the still life, the subject painting, and the portrait.

He is best known for his controversial depictions of adolescent girls.

Eduard Gordeev | Impressionist Cityscape photographer

Eduard Gordeev /Эдуард Гордеев is a talented photographer who lives and works in St. Petersburg, Russia.

He creates artistic landscape photo series of his beloved city St. Petersburg.

These magnificent cityscape images look impressive and atmospheric with a bit of effect of acrylic paintings.

These urban streets seem drenched in mystery and rain.

His captures look as if they were acrylic paintings.

The reflections of city lights and all melting colors turn them into extraordinary pieces of art.

Vatican Light Show Calls Attention to Climate Change

Pope Francis inaugurated a special year of Mercy at the Vatican on Tuesday but fears of terrorism meant that the crowds in St Peter’s Square were much more modest than expected.

The Vatican had hoped that up to 100,000 people would take part in an open-air Mass in the huge Renaissance piazza, but in the end an estimated 40,000 people attended.

Pope Francis inaugurates special Year of Mercy.

Cornelia Hernes, 1979 | Classical Realist painter

Cornelia Hernes was born and raised in Norway until the age of twelve when her family moved to Africa where Cornelia went to boarding schools in Kenya and Tanzania. Much of her fascination with exploring the human condition through her paintings can be attributed to her early exposure to different cultures. Her work is centered on portraying and evoking a large scope of emotions, ultimately with the aim of celebrating life.

Maggie Taylor, 1961 | Digital Surrealist /Visionary painter

Maggie Taylor (born in Cleveland, Ohio) is an artist who works with digital images. She won the Santa Fe Center for Photography's Project Competition in 2004. Her work has been widely exhibited in the United States and Europe and is represented within the permanent collections of several galleries and museums. She is the third wife of American photographer, Jerry Uelsmann.

She produces prints by scanning objects into a computer using a flatbed scanner, then layering and manipulating these images using Adobe Photoshop into a surrealistic montage.

Julius Olsson | Seascape painter

Albert Julius Olsson (1 February 1864 - 7 September 1942) was a British maritime artist and keen yachtsman.

He was born in Islington, London, to a Swedish father and an English mother. Olsson cruised with his yacht most summers, and The Studio (an illustrated fine arts and decorative arts magazine published in London from 1893 until 1964) commented: 'He knows the way from the Scillies to the Isle of Wight as most men know their way to the nearest railway station'.

He exhibited a painting of Newlyn in 1887, and sold a painting at Newlyn in 1897.

Henry Ossawa Tanner | Realist / Symbolist painter

Henry Ossawa Tanner, (born June 21, 1859, Pittsburgh, Pa., U.S.-died May 25, 1937, Paris, France), American painter who gained international acclaim for his depiction of landscapes and biblical themes.

After a childhood spent largely in Philadelphia, Tanner began an art career in earnest in 1876, painting harbour scenes, landscapes, and animals from the Philadelphia Zoo. In 1880 Tanner began two years of formal study under Thomas Eakins at Philadelphia’s prestigious Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), where he was the only African American.

Pablo Neruda / Maggie Taylor | Poetry / La poesia

And it was at that age... poetry arrived

in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where

it came from, from winter or a river.

I don't know how or when,

no, they were not voices, they were not

words, not silence,

but from a street it called me,

from the branches of night,

abruptly from the others,

among raging fires

or returning alone,

there it was, without a face,

and it touched me.

Georg Pauli | Symbolist /Cubist painter

Georg Vilhelm Pauli (2 July 1855 - 28 November 1935) was a Swedish painter.

Pauli was born in Jönköping. He studied at the Royal Academy of Arts in Stockholm in 1871-75 and 1878-79, and studied and worked in France and Italy for several years during the 1870s and 1880s.

He studied naturalist in- and outdoor painting, influenced by Bastien-Lepage. In 1887, he married Swedish painter Hanna Hirsch (1864-1940).

VR Morrison, 1976 | Figurative Realist painter

VR Morrison’s highly realistic and lavish paintings draw inspiration from classical painting traditions and allegorical subject matter which is mediated through the artist’s interest in popular culture, history and high fashion. This ultimately lends her paintings a fresh, contemporary edge and an often palpable, air of tension.

Born in Sydney Australia of Scottish, Samoan and Chinese heritage, VR Morrison ran away from school at the age of 15 to study fashion design.

Francis Picabia | Quotes / Aforismi

• La nostra testa è rotonda per permettere ai pensieri di cambiare direzione.
• Our heads are round so our thoughts can change direction.
• Notre tête est ronde pour permettre à la pensée de changer de direction.
• The devil follows me day and night because he is afraid to be alone.
• Il diavolo mi segue giorno e notte perché ha paura di essere solo.

Christiane Vleugels, 1963 | Timeless

Christiane Vleugels is a talented Traditional Artist from Belgium. Her giant Hyper realistic paintings seem to tell a story and invite you in for the experience.

For biographical notes -in english and italian- and other works by Vleugels, see Christiane Vleugels, 1963 | Hyperrealist painter.

Hermin Abramovitch | Abstract photographer

Hermin Abramovitch is a talented photographer from Romania.

Currently living in Israel and working as a Quality Assurance and Regulatory Affairs Manager at Harmonic at Harmonic. before he worked in Six Sigma Black Belt at GE Healthcare.

He studied at the Universitatea 'Politehnica' din Bucuresti, Romania.

Ancient Greek

Ancient Greece was a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to the end of antiquity (c. 600 AD).

Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era. Included in ancient Greece is the period of Classical Greece, which flourished during the 5th to 4th centuries BC.

Classical Greece began with the repelling of a Persian invasion by Athenian leadership. Because of conquests by Alexander the Great of Macedonia, Hellenistic civilization flourished from Central Asia to the western end of the Mediterranean Sea.

Classical Greek culture, especially philosophy, had a powerful influence on the Roman Empire, which carried a version of it to many parts of the Mediterranean Basin and Europe. For this reason Classical Greece is generally considered to be the seminal culture which provided the foundation of modern Western culture and is considered as the cradle of Western civilization.

Aaron Abraham Shikler | Portrait /Figurative painter

Aaron Abraham Shikler | Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, 1970

By William Grimesnov: - Aaron Abraham Shikler (1922-2015), an artist whose portraits of America’s economic, political and social elite included a brooding John F. Kennedy, a sorrowful Jacqueline Kennedy and a buoyant Ronald Reagan in jeans and work shirt, died on Thursday at his home in Manhattan. He was 93.

The death was confirmed by his daughter, Cathy Shikler van Ingen.

Mrs. Kennedy became an admirer of Mr. Shikler after seeing the paintings he had done of the children of the actor Peter Lawford and Patricia Kennedy Lawford, one of the president’s sisters. In 1967 she asked him to do pastel portraits of her children, Caroline and John, and a group portrait of all three. A commission to do official White House portraits of her and (a posthumous one) of her husband followed.

Marius Zabinski, 1956 | Cubist painter

Marius Zabinski began his career as a painter very early, immediately after completing four years of study at l'Ecole des Beaux Arts in Warsaw, Poland. His pictorial technique already revealed a remarkable eclecticism of styles. He is one of the rare kinds of artist in that from the beginning he was able to make a living from his paintings, unlike many others who become successful enough to do this only much later on in their careers.

Franck Ayroles, 1975 | Abstract /Mixed media painter

Franck Ayroles is a professional painter engaged with Maison des Artistes and is a member of the organization ADAGP. Franck Ayroles was born in Saint-Nazaire.

He worked as a chief decorator and made a film with the comedian Philippe Le Maire after his studies in advertising and film.

Thereafter, he decided to become entirely focused in his artwork.

Painting has since childhood always been the big passion in his life.

During the 80s, Franck Ayroles joined and won many competitions organized by TF1 in the TV program "Bonjour la France" hosted by Jean Claude Bourret.

Armando Barrios | Cubist / Abstract painter

Venezuelan Artist Armando Barrios (1920-1999) was born in Caracas in 1920. He entered the Academy of Fine Arts in Caracas in 1932. During Rómulo Gallegos management as education minister in the government of Eleazar Lopez Contreras, the institution was reformed in 1936 and changed its name to the School of Visual Arts and Applied Arts of Caracas. Antonio Edmundo Monsanto and other leading painters of the generation of the Fine Arts were called to direct and integrate their teaching staff.

Pietro Magni | The Reading Girl/ La Lettrice, 1856

Pietro Magni's marble statue The Reading Girl brought the Milanese sculptor international fame and recognition.

It was exhibited numerous times at international exhibitions throughout Europe and America, each time to great public and critical acclaim. Stylistically it owes much to the artistic tradition of verismo or "realism" that characterized Italian art during the middle years of the nineteenth century, but it also recalls earlier aspects of Italian romanticism.

William Wetmore Story | Delilah, 1877

Delilah (/dɪˈlaɪlə/; Hebrew: דלילה Dəlilah, meaning "[She who] weakened") is a character in the Hebrew bible Book of Judges, where she is the "woman in the valley of Sorek" whom Samson loved, and who was his downfall.

Her figure, one of several dangerous temptresses in the Hebrew Bible, has become emblematic: "Samson loved Delilah, she betrayed him, and, what is worse, she did it for money", Madlyn Kahr begins her study of the Delilah motif in European painting.

Luca Morelli, 1968 | Figurative Realist painter

Luca Morelli is an Italian painter, known for working in the Figurative style. Morelli was born in Rome. He graduated in 1990 from the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. Lives and works in Rome.

William Wetmore Story | The Libyan Sibyl, 1867

"The Libyan Sibyl", which American sculptor William Wetmore Story (1819-1895) described as “my anti-slavery sermon in stone”, was inspired by events leading up to the Civil War.

Oracle in hand, the Libyan Sibyl, eldest of the legendary prophetesses of antiquity, foresees the terrible fate of the African people.

This premonition is suggested by the heroic figure’s state of brooding cogitation.

Ancient Rome / La Civiltà romana

Ancient Rome, the state centred on the city of Rome. This article discusses the period from the founding of the city and the regal period, which began in 753 bc, through the events leading to the founding of the republic in 509 bc, the establishment of the empire in 27 bc, and the final eclipse of the Empire of the West in the 5th century ad. For later events of the Empire of the East, see Byzantine Empire.

William Wetmore Story | Medea, 1865

In the ancient Greek tragedy by Euripides, Medea was the sorceress who assisted Jason in obtaining the Golden Fleece and later became his wife.

When he abandoned her, Medea murdered their two children and planned the death of his new love, Creusa.

To nineteenth-century theater audiences, Medea was a sympathetic character forced to choose between relinquishing her children and protecting them by destroying them herself. Story similarly deemphasized Medea’s revenge, leaving to the viewer’s imagination the scene of infanticide to come. | © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

William Wetmore Story | Cleopatra, 1858

Neoclassical sculptors often drew upon mythology, ancient history, the Bible, and classical and contemporary literature for their subject matter. The full-size marbles of Massachusetts native William Wetmore Story exemplify this trend, and Cleopatra, his most famous work, was one of dozens of subjects such as Medea, Delilah, Electra, and Saul that were produced in his Rome studio.

Mark Yale Harris | Abstract Figurative sculptor

Mark Yale Harris realized his true passion in the Southwest. Stone carving became his life’s work, as Santa Fe became his home in the late 1990s. He dedicated himself to creating in 1996, and with much to learn, the artist chose a mentor whom he had long admired to assist with honing his burgeoning artistic skills, sculptor Bill Prokopiof (Aleut, 1944-1999). In the spirit of the nation’s most recognized Native American artist, Allan Houser (Chiricahua Apache, 1915-1994), Prokopiof and sculptor Doug Hyde (Nez Perce) took Harris under their wings and generously shared their immense knowledge, talent, and vision. Inspired by the geographical region and grounded in the wisdom of his teachers, he began feverishly creating sculpture.

Leonora Carrington | Surrealist painter and sculptor | Sculpture

Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) was a painter, writer, sculptor, alchemist, visionary, and was the darling of the 1930s Surrealism movement.

She never tried to be a Surrealist, but her paintings of fantastical creatures and living furniture happened to encapsulate the essence of the movement.

Victor Brauner | Surrealist painter

Victor Brauner (1903-1966) was a Romanian Jewish sculptor and painter of surrealistic images.

Brauner was born in Piatra Neamț, Romania, the son of a timber manufacturer who subsequently settled in Vienna with his family for a few years.

It is there that young Victor attended elementary school.

When his family returned to Romania in 1914, he continued his studies at the Evangelical school in Brăila.

His interests revolved around zoology during that period.

Petr Dick /Пётр Дик | Figurative pastel painter

The famous artist Petr Gergardovich Dick /Пётр Гергардович Дик (1939-2002) descendant of immigrants from Northern Germany, was born in Altai. Dick graduated Sverdlov Art School named after I.D. Shadr and Moscow Higher Art Industrial School. Since 1960’s he lived in Vladimir. Peter Dick worked in original style - pastel and charcoal on sandpaper. Characteristic features of his creative activity are strong and delicate color combinations, expressive antiquity of laying figures.

Roberto Weigand, 1968

Roberto Weigand is an award-winning illustrator of children's books and magazine cover designer in Brazil.

Roberto Weigand studied Architecture in São Paulo’s University and in 1991 he started working as an Illustrator for newspapers, magazines and children’s books.

From 1999 he worked as Illustrator and Infographist for Veja magazine, from 2001 he became responsible for Istoé magazine covers and from 2002 he started to write for Publish magazine.

Wieslaw Smetek, 1955 | Conceptual Illustrator

Wieslaw Smetek, born in 1955 in Poland, has been illustrating for the big names among the publishing houses for over twenty years now. He gives their magazines a face, makes them instantly recognizable at the kiosk - and he does it with witty and impudent, but always intelligent allusions. He shows former Federal Chancellor Schröder as a drenched and bedraggled poodle looking very woebegone, or Chancellor Merkel as a mother hen gathering her charges under her wings, or the globe as a beach ball with water running out of it.

Laura Harris | Abstract painter

Described as 'beautifully imperfect' Laura's paintings speak to an inner voice often ignored - with strikingly bold colours and texture, each one takes you on a journey that requires contemplation and offers discovery.

Mostly self-taught, Laura began painting in her teens.

With her draftsman father teaching her perspective and technique, he also encouraged freedom of expression.

Before becoming a 'serious' painter, Harris had a small graphic design company that specialized in corporate identity.

Stefan Georgiev, 1954 | Mixed media painter

Bulgarian painter Stefan Georgiev / Стефан Георгиев born on June 24-th in the Town of Veliko Tarnovo. In 1974 he graduates from Arts school in the Town of Kazanlak, Bulgaria.

He then continues his education in "St Cyril and St Methodius" University of Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria in the Faculty of fine arts.

He is a member of the Greek Artists Union, He lived in Athens from 2000 to 2014.

He works mainly on canvas with oil paint, mixed techniques or pencils. However he also uses watercolor, pastels and acrylics. With the help of a spatula, he mixes the materials in order to get the wished deepness, thickness and effect. His paintings are figurative with a stylized and decorative style.