ArtistPortfolio.Net

Born: 1867
Died: 1959
Gender: Male
Nationality: American

Born in Wisconsin to Unitarian parents of Welsh heritage, Wright was to become the most admired American architect of the20th Century. The landscapes of his youth were to inspire much of his work with the layers of eroded rock bluffs on the Wisconsin coast visible in his ‘Prairie Style’ for example. His fascination with architecture developed early on. After an apprenticeship to a minor architect named Silsbee, he found a draftsman post with Adler & Sullivan in Chicago at the age of 18. The chief partner, Louis Sullivan was to become his mentor, fostering in Wright a fine eye and a resistance to technological progress as opposed to traditional handicraft.

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Born: 1922
Died: 1993
Gender: Male
Nationality: American

“It was just that [in the 1960s and 1970s] artists who did feel nature was worth exploring were sidelined by the institutional and critical clout of purist abstraction.” Robert Hughes.

Richard Diebenkorn was born in Portland, Oregon but his family moved to San Francisco when he was two. He spent a good deal of his life in the Bay Area before moving to Santa Monica in 1963. He studied and taught at a number of schools including the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco from 1947 to 1950. Fellow teachers included Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still, and it was their influence that led him to abandon still-lifes and interiors and take up Abstract Expressionism.  (more…)

Born: 1839
Died: 1906
Gender: Male
Nationality: French

“All things, particularly in art, are theory developed and applied in contact with nature. Painting is not only to copy the object, it is to seize a harmony between numerous relations.” Paul Cézanne.

Paul Cézanne was born in Aix-en-Provence, the son of a wealthy banker. He was a talented student and among his school friends was Emile Zola who introduced him to Manet and Courbet and persuaded him to move to Paris to study art. Destined by his father to study law, he was eventually, at the age of 22, allowed to devote himself entirely to painting. A yearly allowance from his father enabled him to work without distraction for the next 23 years.

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Born: 1917
Gender: Male
Nationality: American

“…I happen to paint things that reflect the basic truths of life: sky, earth, friends, the intimate things.” Andrew Wyeth.

Wyeth was taught by his father Newell Convers Wyeth, a successful illustrator of children’s books. Yet it was the people and places he knew best that provided his main motivation, namely the Brandywine Valley around his native Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania and the Port Clyde region off the Maine coast. He had his first one-man exhibition at the Macbeth Gallery in New York in 1937 aged 20.

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Born: 1892
Died: 1942
Gender: Male
Nationality: American

“At first I felt I had to search for old things to paint - something soft and mellow. But now I have discovered a decorative quality in American newness.” Grant Wood.

Wood was born in Iowa where he was to remain for most of his life. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and attended the Academie Julian in Paris very briefly in the 20s. By and large, however, Wood was self-taught. Early on he worked as a metal-worker, interior decorator and teacher, and did camouflage work in his army service during the First World War. In 1927 he was commissioned to make stained glass windows for the Cedar Rapids Veteran Memorial Building and went to Munich the following year to supervise their manufacture. It was there that he was exposed to 16th century Flemish painting causing him to abandon his early Impressionist style and turn to more closely observed realism.

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