Ron Di Scenza, 1954 | Figurative impressionist painter

American artist🎨 Ron Di Scenza has a fitting last name. In Italian, conoscenza means knowledge or awareness, and a knowing sense of familiarity comes through Di Scenza's canvases, giving his images special meaning and significance.

Di Scenza's deep understanding of human nature is expressed in the faces and body language of his figures, much like Spanish painter Diego Velazquez🎨 and his ability to report life as it is recalls American painter John Singer Sargent🎨.

Especially exciting, Di Scenza's detailed realism is on par with Flemish painter Johannes Vermeer🎨, while the soulfulness of his subjects brings to mind Italian artist Michelangelo Caravaggio🎨.

Boleslaw Szankowski | Portrait painter

Bolesław Szańkowski (1873-1953) was an Polish painter, known for working in the Realist style.

Szańkowski studied at the academies in Cracow and Munich with Ludwig Herterich and in Paris with Benjamin-Constant, Gaudara and Jean Paul Laurens.

He went on to work in Munich, where he contributed to the periodicals, Youth (Jugend) and Simplicity (Simplicissimus).

From 1907 to 1925 he participated in the annual exhibitions of the Munich Glass Palace.

Mary Qian, 1973 | Impressionist painter

A Chicago-based fine art painter, Mary is a winner of many awards🎨, including Oil Painters of America gold Medal.

Originally from Shanghai, China, Mary went through the traditional Chinese educational system focusing on the sciences while studying Chinese painting and calligraphy on her own. Before coming to the US, she admired the ancient Chinese painters🎨 but found her true voice for painting when she discovered the western artists.

It was the realism of Rembrandt🎨, Velazquez🎨, Repin🎨 -her particular favorites- that she found to be the artistic style that she had been looking for.

Vito Campanella | Surrealist / Metaphysics painter

Although Vito Campanella (1932-2014) started to paint at the age of 14 in his native Monopoli, his love for visual arts began much earlier.

He was born in 1932 and endured the sorrow, agony and shortage that surrounded World War II.

In the aftermath of the armed conflict, daily life in Southern Italy changed forever.

Allied planes crisscrossing the sky and ceaseless bombings left indelible memories he later translated into works of art.

René Magritte | Surrealist painter

René Magritte🎨, in full René-François-Ghislain Magritte (born Nov. 21, 1898, Lessines, Belg.- died Aug. 15, 1967, Brussels) Belgian artist, one of the most prominent Surrealist painters🎨, whose bizarre flights of fancy blended horror, peril, comedy, and mystery.

His works were characterized by particular symbols-the female torso, the bourgeois "little man", the bowler hat, the castle, the rock, the window, and others.

After studying at the Brussels Academy of Fine Arts (1916-18), Magritte became a designer for a wallpaper factory and then did sketches for advertisements.

In 1922 he saw a reproduction of Giorgio de Chirico’s painting The Song of Love (1914), an evocative and haunting juxtaposition of odd elements (a classical bust and a rubber glove among them) in a dreamlike architectural space; it had a great influence on Magritte’s mature style.

Richard Schmid, 1934 | Realist / Impressionist painter

Born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, American🎨 Master painter Richard Schmid became one of the foremost Impressionist painters🎨 of the Southwest in the late 20th century.

He is known for what he calls "The Grand Manner", a certain mingling of virtuosity and unrestrained joy in art.

His earliest artistic influence came from his maternal grandfather, Julian Oates, an architectural sculptor. Richard's initial studies in landscape painting, figure drawing, and anatomy began at the age of twelve and continued into classical techniques under William H. Mosby at the American Academy of Art in Chicago.

Mosby, a graduate of the Belgian Royal Academy in Brussels and the Superior Institute in Antwerp, was a technical expert on European and American realism.

Studies with him involved working exclusively from life, at first using the conceptual and technical methods of the Flemish, Dutch and Spanish masters, and eventually all of the late 19th century European and American painters.

Jane Wells Loudon | The Victorian garden

Jane Loudon was to Victorian gardening what Mrs Beeton was to cookery. Her beautifully illustrated books on gardening and plant identification sold in their thousands and women all over the country were enthused enough by them to take up gardening as a hobby.

- Loudon [née Webb], Jane (1807-1858), writer on botany and magazine editor, was born on 19 August 1807 at Ritwell House, near Birmingham. Her mother died when she was twelve, and her father, Thomas Webb, a businessman, suffered financial reverses a few years later.

Little is known of Jane Webb's early education, but, following the death of her father in 1824, she set out to earn money by writing. In addition to Prose and Verse (1824) she published anonymously The Mummy!

A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (1827), a pioneering work of science fiction that brought together political commentary, Egyptomania, and interest in technology.

Ute Hadam, 1958 | Abstract painter

Ute Hadam paints on canvas of different sizes. She mixes herself pigments with acrylic mediums of différetes consistency in order to enhance the structure. Colors and shades are melted with subtle silk paper collages to obtain transparency and relief.

Inspiration

The universe of the artist is the endless wealth of nature. The dynamic play of shapes and lights of plant, mineral or human world becomes a pretext for an original artistic interpretation. In her compositions, you find always a research of beauty of nature.

Boris Kustodiev (1878-1927)

Boris Mikhaylovich Kustodiev / Бори́с Миха́йлович Кусто́диев was a Russian painter and stage designer.

Early life

Boris Kustodiev was born in Astrakhan into the family of a professor of philosophy, history of literature, and logic at the local theological seminary.

His father died young, and all financial and material burdens fell on his mother's shoulders.

The Kustodiev family rented a small wing in a rich merchant's house. It was there that the boy's first impressions were formed of the way of life of the provincial merchant class.

The artist later wrote, "The whole tenor of the rich and plentiful merchant way of life was there right under my nose... It was like something out of an Ostrovsky play". The artist retained these childhood observations for years, recreating them later in oils and water-colours.