What makes Homer such a great painter is his ability to capture the moment.   A fine artists has more latitude. Homer’s background as an illustrator hard-wired the ability to story tell into his art giving his work an immediacy. That coupled with the action and moment of his art tells a story that we can view clearly.

Winslow Homer (February 24, 1836 – September 29, 1910) was an American landscape painter and printmaker, best known for his marine subjects. He is considered one of the foremost painters in 19th century America and a preeminent figure in American art.

Largely self-taught, Homer began his career working as a commercial illustrator. He subsequently took up oil painting and produced major studio works characterized by the weight and density he exploited from the medium. He also worked extensively in watercolor, creating a fluid and prolific oeuvre, primarily chronicling his working vacations.

Born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1836, Homer was the second of three sons of Charles Savage Homer and Henrietta Benson Homer, both from long lines of New Englanders. His mother was a gifted amateur watercolorist and Homer’s first teacher, and she and her son had a close relationship throughout their lives. Homer took on many of her traits, including her quiet, strong-willed, terse, sociable nature; her dry sense of humor; and her artistic talent.^[4] Homer had a happy childhood, growing up mostly in then rural Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was an average student, but his art talent was evident in his early years.

Homer’s father was a volatile, restless businessman who was always looking to “make a killing”. When Homer was thirteen, Charles gave up the hardware store business to seek a fortune in theCalifornia gold rush. When that failed, Charles left his family and went to Europe to raise capital for other get-rich-quick schemes that didn’t materialize.

After Homer’s high school graduation, his father saw a newspaper advertisement and arranged for an apprenticeship. Homer’s apprenticeship at the age of 19 to J. H. Bufford, a Boston commercial lithographer, was a formative but “treadmill experience”. He worked repetitively on sheet music covers and other commercial work for two years. By 1857, his freelance career was underway after he turned down an offer to join the staff of Harper’s Weekly. “From the time I took my nose off that lithographic stone”, Homer later stated, “I have had no master, and never shall have any.”

Homer’s career as an illustrator lasted nearly twenty years. He contributed illustrations of Boston life and rural New England life to magazines such as Ballou’s Pictorial and Harper’s Weekly, at a time when the market for illustrations was growing rapidly, and when fads and fashions were changing quickly. His early works, mostly commercial engravings of urban and country social scenes, are characterized by clean outlines, simplified forms, dramatic contrast of light and dark, and lively figure groupings — qualities that remained important throughout his career. His quick success was mostly due to this strong understanding of graphic design and also to the adaptability of his designs to wood engraving.

In 1859, he opened a studio in the Tenth Street Studio Building in New York City, the artistic and publishing capital of the United States. Until 1863 he attended classes at the National Academy of Design, and studied briefly with Frédéric Rondel, who taught him the basics of painting. In only about a year of self-training, Homer was producing excellent oil work. His mother tried to raise family funds to send him to Europe for further study but instead Harper’s sent Homer to the front lines of the American Civil War (1861–1865), where he sketched battle scenes and camp life, the quiet moments as well as the murderous ones. His initial sketches were of the camp, commanders, and army of the famous Union officer, Major General George B. McClellan, at the banks of the Potomac River in October, 1861.

In a career that lasted until his death in 1910 Homer spent time in France, England and finally Maine where he produced hundreds of masterpieces. Homer never taught in a school or privately, as did Thomas Eakins, but his works strongly influenced succeeding generations of American painters for their direct and energetic interpretation of man’s stoic relationship to an often neutral and sometimes harsh wilderness. Robert Henri called Homer’s work an “integrity of nature.”

American illustrator and teacher Howard Pyle revered Homer and encouraged his students to study him. His student and fellow illustrator, N. C. Wyeth (and through him Andrew Wyeth and Jamie Wyeth), shared the influence and appreciation, even following Homer to Maine for inspiration. The elder Wyeth’s respect for his antecedent was “intense and absolute,” and can be observed in his early work Mowing (1907).Perhaps Homer’s austere individualism is best captured in his admonition to artists:

“Look at nature, work independently, and solve your own problems.”

For More...  Source: Wikipedia

Walter Wick (born February 23, 1953) is an American artist and photographer best known for the elaborate images in two series of publications, the I Spy and the Can You See What I See? books, which were published by Scholastic Books.

Wick was born in Hartford, Connecticut and attended the Paier College of Art. After school he embarked on a career as a commercial photographer and eventually shifted to photo-illustration for books and magazines. He contributed to Scholastic’sLet’s Find Out and Super Science series and photographed hundreds of mass-market magazine covers. He also created photographic puzzles for Games magazine.

Walter Wick Art

In 1991 Wick began a collaboration with writer Jean Marzollo on the enormously successful I Spy search-and-find picture books. Eight original titles were produced and millions of copies sold.

Wick has received the Boston Globe-Horn Book first prize for non-fiction and had his book Walter Wick’s Optical Tricks named one of the year’s “best illustrated books” by The New York Times. In 2003 Wick and his wife purchased an abandoned 1920 firehouse from the city of Hartford and renovated the building to become a new studio for his artwork. In 2009 Wick had a collection of his work, Walter Wick: Games, Gizmos, and Toys in the Attic, exhibited at the Brigham Young University Museum of Art.

Herman Courtens (Sint-Joost-ten-Node, 23 February 1884 – Brussels, 1 March 1956) was a Belgian painter. Herman Courtens was the son of Franz Courtens who was his first teacher. Later he became the pupil of Isidore Verheyden at the Academy for Clean Arts in Brussels. He became a teacher at the Higher Institute for Clean Arts in Antwerp. During the First world War, he was heavily wounded. He undertook trips in the neighboring countries and in Egypt. Herman Courtens painted figures, portraits, landscapes, flowers and interiors. His brothers were the sculptor Alfred Courtens and architect Antoine Courtens.

Daumier is one of my favorite artist and an artist whose work has had a great influence on some of my work. He is one of those rare artists who is not only a great technician, but his work has the added value of being political and useful in its depiction of French society in it’s time. The great thing about viewing his work now is it stands as a historical documentation of life in France in the 1800′s.

Traits of Daumier’s ancestry—a violent temperament, a generous and rather fanciful turn of mind, and an easily aroused capacity for pity—all form part of his character. His mother’s family was from a village in which samples of unique ancient sculptured reliefs—fierce primitive human heads—had been found. His grandfather and father both worked in Marseille as “glaziers”—that is to say, dealers in frames (or passe-partout pictures) and decorative tableaux that they painted themselves. His godfather was a painter. When Daumier was seven, his father abandoned his business in order to go to Paris and, like so many Provençals, seek his fortune as a poet. He was presented to the king, Louis XVIII; but his swift fall from favour—he was famous only for a fortnight—unbalanced him mentally. After apparently being confined for many years, he died in the Charenton asylum.

artwork by Lon Levin (influenced dy Daumier)

Daumier received a typical lower middleclass education, but he wanted to draw, and his studies did not interest him. His family therefore placed him with an old and fairly well-known artist, Alexandre Lenoir. Lenoir, a student and friend of Jacques-Louis David, a leading classicist painter, was more an aesthetician than a painter. He had a pronounced taste for Rubens, one of whose works he kept in his collection. A connoisseur of sculpture, he had saved the most beautiful medieval and contemporary sculptures from the Revolutionaries, which inspired a lasting interest in Daumier.

Daumier was then not at all the uncultured, self-taught genius that most art historians of the late 19th and early 20th centuries have depicted. He did not rise from an artistic void—he was the child of artists, however modest and unsuccessful they had been in making a name. Added to the advantage of this ancestry, he also benefitted from a more interesting artistic education than his contemporaries.

As a cartoonist, Daumier enjoyed a wide reputation, although as a painter he remained unknown. His fame was not based, any more than it is today, on critical appreciations but, rather, on the smiling or laughing admiration of those who read the satirical journals.

Source: Encyclopedia Britannica

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Truly the moist brilliant outdoor photographer that ever lived. Adam’s pictures of America are iconic and pristine and symbolize the height of artistic achievement while showcasing the majesty of our country.

Ansel Easton Adams (February 20, 1902 – April 22, 1984) was an American photographer and environmentalist, best known for his black-and-white photographs of the American West, especially in Yosemite National Park.

With Fred Archer, Adams developed the Zone System as a way to determine proper exposure and adjust the contrast of the final print. The resulting clarity and depth characterized his photographs and the work of those to whom he taught the system. Adams primarily used large-format cameras despite their size, weight, setup time, and film cost, because their high resolution helped ensure sharpness in his images.

Adams founded the Group f/64 along with fellow photographers Willard Van Dyke and Edward Weston. Adams’s photographs are reproduced on calendars, posters, and in books, making his photographs widely distributed.

Source: Wikipedia

For the entire biography click here

artwork by Murray Tinkelman

The second part of my conversation with Murray had to do with his own work and what he’s doing now.

Are you doing any gallery work now? No, no I’m not interested in that. I get invitations to gallery shows and if it’s a group situation I’ll submit something or by invitation I contribute something. But my projects, my self-initiated projects are about things I’ve been in love with since I was a kid. A pre-pubescent that grew up in Brooklyn. So when you say Dodgers I’m not thinking about the imposters that are out here…I have have friends that are my age pushing at eighty shifted their allegiance to the LA Dodgers. I said you’re a schmuck. How irrational is that? It’s like rooting for your accountant when he runs off with your wife! It makes no sense!(Much laughter followed)         So back on subject….The projects I come up with are the Brooklyn Dodgers of the 1950’s. So I did portraits mainly of the living Dodgers and had the players sign them. I met Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider and I had a one-man show at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, which was…I died and went to heaven. So you just initiated that and went to them. Yes yes and it’s all part of the phenomena of baseball card shows . I have every Dodger baseball card from the year I was born in 1933 to 1957 when they left for LA.

Wow, My mother threw most of mine away. That’s what mothers are for! (more laughter) ..So I would go to the autograph shows and I had Carl Erskine and the others sign the prints. I met Don Newcomb and Roy Campenella before he died. He signed with that electronic device he had because of his paralysis. One of my greatest memories…I did a 16×20 print, of Ebbets field with three ovals above it and I had the three winning pitchers of the 1955 World Series in each oval; Johnny Podres, Clem Labine and Roger Craig. That’s when the Dodgers finally won the series in Brooklyn. I was in a motel room with a stack of prints with the three of them signing. I paid them a fee to do it.
What about other projects? I did a series of 1950’s boxers like Jake La Motta and Carmen Basilio, Willie Pep great champions and I had them autograph the entire edition. And the editions were 150 and here I’m in a room with Jake La Motta the “raging bull” who was really a dufus…I mean he wasn’t stupid but he was mean-spirited. He hijacked me..raising the price at the last minute.
I also had a show about artists who ride motorcycles at the Society of Illustrators and it was featured in the magazine Upper and Lower case. So I just come up with something…what do I want to do and I do it.
My last series…I haven’t done anything with it yet.. is movie monsters, like King Kong who was born in 1933 the same as I was. And the Creature of the Black Lagoon and Dracula… Will you have King Kong sign the print? Just a paw print.

And do you have to get the rights to do the prints? … Let me tell you a great story. The LA Dodgers brought suit against an artist I know who did some Brooklyn Dodgers prints…a cease and desist, you cannot do this, we own the Dodgers. The case came before a judge in Brooklyn and the judge said NO…you do not own Brooklyn, you’re from LA…go home.
I’ll stop here and I want to make a comment about rights. If you choose to do something like Murray did it may be a good idea to run this issue by an attorney to be safe. There is no way to know if someone will do anything about you using images you don’t own or not but it is always best to be safe and not to take chances where you risk heavy financial fines.

To see more of Murray’s work

Early years

Brâncuşi grew up in the village of Hobiţa Romania, Gorj, near Târgu Jiu, close to Romania’s Carpathian Mountains, an area known for its rich tradition of folk crafts, particularly woodcarving. Geometric patterns of the region are seen in his later works.

His parents Nicolae and Maria Brâncuşi were poor peasants who earned a meager living through back-breaking labor; from the age of seven, Constantin herded the family’s flock of sheep. He showed talent for carving objects out of wood, and often ran away from home to escape the bullying of his father and older brothers.

At the age of nine, Brâncuşi left the village to work in the nearest large town. At 11 he went into the service of a grocer in Slatina; and then he became a domestic in a public house in Craiova where he remained for several years. When he was 18, Brâncuși created a violin by hand with materials he found around his workplace. Impressed by Brâncuşi’s talent for carving, an industrialist entered him in the Craiova School of Arts and Crafts (Şcoala de arte si meserii), where he pursued his love for woodworking, graduating with honors in 1898.

He then enrolled in the Bucharest School of Fine Arts, where he received academic training in sculpture. He worked hard, and quickly distinguished himself as talented. One of his earliest surviving works, under the guidance of his anatomy teacher, Dimitrie Gerota, is a masterfully rendered écorché (statue of a man with skin removed to reveal the muscles underneath) which was exhibited at the Romanian Athenaeum in 1903. Though just an anatomical study, it foreshadowed the sculptor’s later efforts to reveal essence rather than merely copy outward appearance.

Working in Paris

In 1903, Brâncuşi traveled to Munich, and from there to Paris. In Paris, he was welcomed by the community of artists and intellectuals brimming with new ideas.He worked for two years in the workshop of Antonin Mercié of the École des Beaux-Arts, and was invited to enter the workshop of Auguste Rodin. Even though he admired the eminent Rodin he left the Rodin studio after only two months, saying, “Nothing can grow under big trees.”

After leaving Rodin’s workshop, Brâncuşi began developing the revolutionary style for which he is known. His first commissioned work, “The Prayer”, was part of a gravestone memorial. It depicts a young woman crossing herself as she kneels, and marks the first step toward abstracted, non-literal representation, and shows his drive to depict “not the outer form but the idea, the essence of things.” He also began doing more carving, rather than the method popular with his contemporaries, that of modeling in clay or plaster which would be cast in metal, and by 1908 he worked almost exclusively by carving.

In the following few years he made many versions of “Sleeping Muse” and “The Kiss“, further simplifying forms to geometrical and sparse objects.

His works became popular in France, Romania and the United States. Collectors, notably John Quinn, bought his pieces, and reviewers praised his works. In 1913 Brâncuşi’s work was displayed at both the Salon des Indépendants and the first exhibition in the U.S. of modern art, the Armory Show.

In 1920, he developed a notorious reputation with the entry of “Princess X” in the Salon. The phallic shape of the piece scandalized the Salon, and despite Brâncuşi’s explanation that it was an anonymous portrait, removed it from the exhibition. “Princess X” was revealed to be Princess Marie Bonaparte, direct descendant of the younger brother of Napoleon Bonaparte. Brâncuşi represented or caricatured her life as a large gleaming bronzephallus. This phallus symbolizes the model’s obsession with the penis and her lifelong quest to achieve vaginal orgasm, with the help of Sigmund Freud.^{[citation needed]}

Around this time he began crafting the bases for his sculptures with much care and originality because he considered them important to the works themselves.

He began working on the group of sculptures that are known as “Bird in Space” — simple shapes representing a bird in flight. The works are based on his earlier “Măiastra” series. In Romanian folklore the Măiastra is a beautiful golden bird who foretells the future and cures the blind. Over the following 20 years, Brâncuşi would make 20-some versions of “Bird in Space” out of marble or bronze. Photographer Edward Steichen purchased one of the “birds” in 1926 and shipped it to the United States. However, the customs officers did not accept the “bird” as a work of art and placed a duty upon its import as an industrial item. They charged the high tax placed upon raw metals instead of the no tax on art. A trial the next year overturned the assessment. Athena Tacha Spear’s book, Brâncuşi’s Birds, (CAA monographs XXI, NYU Press, New York, 1969), first sorted out the 36 versions and their development, from the early Măiastra, to the Golden Bird of the late teens, to the Bird in Space, which emerged in the early ’20s and which Brâncuşi perfected throughout his life.

His work became popular in the U.S., however, and he visited several times during his life. Worldwide fame in 1933 brought him the commission of building a meditation temple in India for Maharajah of Indore, but when Brâncuşi went to India in 1937 to complete the plans and begin construction, the Mahrajah was away and lost interest in the project when he returned.

In 1938, he finished the World War I monument in Târgu-Jiu where he had spent much of his childhood. “Table of Silence”, “The Gate of the Kiss”, and “Endless Column” commemorate the courage and sacrifice of Romanian civilians who in 1916 fought off a German invasion. The restoration of this ensemble was spearheaded by the World Monuments Fund and was completed in 2004.

The Târgu Jiu ensemble marks the apex of his artistic career. In his remaining 19 years he created less than 15 pieces, mostly reworking earlier themes, and while his fame grew he withdrew. In 1956 Life magazine reported, “Wearing white pajamas and a yellow gnomelike cap, Brâncuşi today hobbles about his studio tenderly caring for and communing with the silent host of fish birds, heads, and endless columns which he created.”

Brâncuşi was cared for in his later years by a Romanian refugee couple. He became a French citizen in 1952 in order to make the caregivers his heirs, and to bequeath his studio and its contents to the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris.

Source: Wikipedia

Anders Leonard Zorn (February 18, 1860 – August 22, 1920) was one of Sweden’s foremost artists who obtained international success as a painter, sculptor and printmaker in etching.
Zorn was born in Yvraden, a hamlet in the village of Utmeland in the parish of Mora, Dalarna, and was raised on his grandparents’ farm in Yvraden. He studied at the age of twelve in the school at Mora Strand before progressing during the autumn of 1872 to a secondary grammar school in Enköping.
From 1875–1880 Zorn studied at Royal Swedish Academy of Arts in Stockholm, Sweden. He traveled extensively to London, Paris, the Balkans, Spain, Italy and the United States, becoming an international success as one of the most acclaimed painters of his era. While his early works were often brilliant, luminous watercolors, by 1887 he had switched firmly to oils. Zorn painted portraits, scenes depicting rustic life and customs. Zorn is also famous for his nude paintings and realistic depictions of water.
It was primarily his skill as a portrait painter that gained Zorn international acclaim based principally upon his incisive ability to depict the individual character of his model. His subjects included three American Presidents, one of whom was Grover Cleveland in 1899. At 29, he was made Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur at the Exposition Universelle 1889 Paris World Fair.

Source: Wikipedia