Emil Nolde | Flowers and Quotes

• "Every true artist creates new values, new beauty.. .When you notice anarchy, recklessness, or licentiousness in works of contemporary art, when you notice crass coarseness and brutality, then occupy yourself long and painstakingly precisely with these works, and you will suddenly recognize how the seeming recklessness transforms itself into freedom, the coarseness into high refinements. Harmless pictures are seldom worth anything".

• "A new day. Calm as seldom the beginning of such a one. Did I dream? No! Dream and contented pure was the night.. .It is the sure certainty of having found unity with nature, this calm causes one of the strongest experiences.

Man, air, trees, world are laid bare and are one!

Contented sleep releases the limbs. We await full moon. Await the dance"!

Antonio Balestra (1666-1740) | Baroque painter

Antonio Balestra was a painter and engraver from a merchant family in Verona, Italy.

He was an enthusiastic amateur painter, but at the age of 17, following the sudden death of his father, he had to interrupt his studies to take care of the family business with his brothers.

Subsequently, he decided to dedicate himself to painting and moved to Venice for three years.

Carol Cavalaris | Fantasy painter

Reality and fantasy blend together as she combines photo sources and painting techniques to create her unique mixed medium images that she calls 'living art'.

Carol Cavalaris lives in the middle of a forest in the high country of Colorado. It is the wild beauty of her surroundings that inspires her digital paintings of wildlife and nature.

She grew up in Southern California and has been creating since childhood, always drawing, painting or making something. She has enjoyed many creative adventures, including sculpting, stained glass art, being a display artist, an interior designer, a graphic artist, a copywriter, and a creative director. She owned an ad agency with husband, LJ, Heart, for years, doing everything from producing books to print ads to tv commercials.

Pietro Rotari | Baroque painter

Pietro Antonio Rotari (1707-1762) was an Italian painter and pastellist who was born in Verona.

Here he initially trained with Antonio Balestra, then moved to Venice and studied with Giovanni Battista Piazzetta.

In 1727, he went to Rome and in 1729 to Naples, where he worked with Francesco Solimena.

He later returned to Verona where he opened a private drawing academy and was made a count in 1749.

Fletcher Sibthorp, 1967 | Figurative painter

British painter Fletcher Sibthorp has worked as a full-time artist for the past twenty years, producing work in the commercial market, as well as selling paintings to private and corporate collectors.

Rank Xerox, British Telecom, Chase Manhatten Bank, Railtrack and Kirin Brewery are just a few of the companies that own his paintings as part of their collections. Initially, Fletcher was attracted by the concept of movement and its effect on the human form.

This naturally lead to his interest in sport and abstract portrayals of gymnasts and athletes, culminating in an exhibition 'In Motion' in London in 1992.

Nadar | The photographer of the Impressionists

Ringmaster, publicist, and performer in a highly theatrical life, the legendary Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, 1820-1910) wore many hats - those of journalist, bohemian, left-wing agitator, playwright, caricaturist, and aeronaut.

He had success in all these roles, but what he did best was collect a pantheon of friends whom he honored with his generous and perceptive photographic portraits.

Born Gaspard-Félix Tournachon in 1820, the son of a liberal publisher, Nadar grew up in Paris in the heady ferment of Romanticism.

Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, and Eugène Delacroix were his early heroes; Gérard de Nerval, Théophile Gautier, and Charles Baudelaire his maturing friends. Nadar’s imagination, wit, and spontaneity, like his passion for the colorful, unconventional, and free, were tendencies shared with both generations of Romantic writers and artists.

George Sand (French Romantic writer, 1804-1876) by Nadar, 1864

Pietro Antonio Rotari | A peasant girl In profile wearing a white scarf

Pietro Antonio Rotari 1707-1762) was an Italian painter of the Baroque period.

Born in Verona, he led a peripatetic career, and died in Saint Petersburg, where he had traveled to paint for the Russian court.

His portraits, mostly of women, are renowned for being beautiful and realistic.

Rotari's works were generally limited to royal portraits held by notables such as emperors and court ladies.

Marcel Proust: "Non smettere di cercare ciò che ami, o finiresti per amare ciò che trovi"

• "Dobbiamo essere grati alle persone che ci rendono felici. Sono i premurosi giardinieri che fanno fiorire la nostra anima".

• "Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom".

• "La musica è forse l’esempio unico di ciò che avrebbe potuto essere - se non ci fossero state l’invenzione del linguaggio, la formazione delle parole, l’analisi delle idee - la comunicazione delle anime".

• "La felicità è benefica per il corpo, ma è il dolore che sviluppa i poteri della mente".

• "Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind".

Henri Fantin-Latour | Symbolist painter

Henri Fantin-Latour, in full Ignace-Henri-Jean-Théodore Fantin-Latour, (born Jan. 14, 1836, Grenoble, France-died Aug. 25, 1904, Buré), French painter, printmaker and illustrator noted for his still lifes with flowers and his portraits, especially group compositions, of contemporary French celebrities in the arts.

Fantin-Latour’s first teacher was his father, a well-known portrait painter.

Later, he studied at the school of Lecoq de Boisbaudran and attended the École des Beaux-Arts.

Paul Cézanne | The Card Players series

Paul Cézanne | The Card Players, 1890-1892 | Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The Card Players is a series of oil paintings by the French Post-Impressionist artist Paul Cézanne.

Painted during Cézanne's final period in the early 1890s, there are five paintings in the series.

The versions vary in size, the number of players, and the setting in which the game takes place.

Paul Cézanne | Post-Impressionist painter

Cézanne's🎨 works were rejected numerous times by the official Salon in Paris and ridiculed by art critics when exhibited with the Impressionists.

Yet during his lifetime Cézanne was considered a master by younger artists who visited his studio in Aix.

Along with the work of Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, the work of Cézanne, with its sense of immediacy and incompletion, critically influenced Matisse and others prior to Fauvism and Expressionism.

After Cézanne died in 1906, his paintings were exhibited in a large museum-like retrospective in Paris, September 1907.

The 1907 Cézanne retrospective at the Salon d'Automne greatly affected the direction that the avant-garde in Paris took, lending credence to his position as one of the most influential artists of the 19th century and to the advent of Cubism.

Cézanne's explorations of geometric simplification and optical phenomena inspired Picasso, Braque, Metzinger, Gleizes, Gris and others to experiment with ever more complex views of the same subject and eventually to the fracturing of form.

Cézanne thus sparked one of the most revolutionary areas of artistic enquiry of the 20th century, one which was to affect profoundly the development of modern art.

• Picasso referred to Cézanne as "the father of us all" and claimed him as "my one and only master!"

Other painters such as Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Gauguin, Kasimir Malevich, Georges Rouault, Paul Klee, and Henri Matisse acknowledged Cézanne's genius.

Vladimir Gusev / Владимир Гусев, 1957 | Impressionist painter

Russian artist🎨 Владимир Гусев🎨 successfully works on genre paintings, landscapes, still lifes and portraits.

Rejecting the naturalistic way of fine, Vladimir Gusev🎨 in his work does not neglect certainty.

His landscape works are always interesting on composition, spatial and color palette. Optimistic perception of nature allows him to make a sharp poetic expression.

Painting Gusev gives a feeling of lightness and ease of perception. Gusev - an active participant in many youth, Moscow, national and international exhibitions.

His works are in private collections in the USSR, Japan, France, Italy, Yugoslavia, Germany, Britain, Poland and Finland.

Graham Gercken, 1960 | Landscape painter

Award Winning Australian painter🎨 Graham Gercken was born at Southport Qld, but spent most of his life in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney.

Predominantly self taught he chose oil paints as his medium and painted wet into wet, which is the style of the impressionist artists and lends itself best for outdoor painting like those of the Australian Heidelberg school of artists.

Albert Einstein / Giuseppe Arcimboldo: "La creatività è l'intelligenza che si diverte"!

Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527-1593)🎨 | The Librarian. 1566 | Skokloster Castle Sweden

"Creativity is intelligence having fun".

"La creatività è l'intelligenza che si diverte".

Albert Einstein (1879-1955)🎨

David Hettinger, 1946

L'artista pluripremiato David Hettinger ha iniziato la sua carriera quando è salito su un aereo dalla città ferroviaria di Aurora, Illinois, ed è atterrato a New York City.

Si trasferì a New York su consiglio di Joseph Welna, proprietario della Welna Gallery di Chicago, non avendo praticamente alcuna saggezza mondana, solo un feroce desiderio di "imparare cosa fosse essere un vero artista".

Welna iniziò a mostrare il lavoro di Hettinger mentre il giovane artista frequentava ancora l'American Academy of Art, a Chicago.

Ha diretto Hettinger a studiare con David Leffel e Richard Schmid a New York e su come guadagnarsi da vivere come artista sin dal primo giorno.

Bob Quinn, 1948 | Figurative sculptor

Bob Quinn works full time as a sculptor in Blackrock Co Dublin.

He has pursued his love of drawing and sculpture throughout his career and has illustrated several publications and has been a regular contributor of illustrations to Independent Newspapers.

His sculptures appear in private collections and gardens throughout Ireland, Britain and Europe.

Dan Thompson | Figurative painter

American painter🎨 Dan Thompson was born in Alexandria, Virginia, and graduated from the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, DC.

He earned his MFA from the Graduate School of Figurative Art of the New York Academy of Art, and supplemented his training with several additional years of private study and studio apprenticeships along the east coast of the United States.

He has been awarded🎨 two grants from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation and has twice received the Ethel Lorraine Bernstein Memorial Award🎨 for Excellence in Painting from the Corcoran College of Art and Design. In 2001, Thompson won Best of Show in the American Society of Portrait Artist’s International Portrait Competition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

In 2006 Dan Thompson co-founded the Grand Central Academy of Art in New York.

In 2008, he co-founded the Janus Collaborative School of Art in New York. Dan Thompson has also instructed privately at Studio 126 in New York and is on the faculty of Parsons the New School for Design, the New York Academy of Art, The Art Students League of New York, and Studio Incamminati, in Philadelphia, PA.

He has demonstrated and taught workshops in San Francisco, Seattle, Santa Fe, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Washington, D.C, and Sarasota, FL. He has also demonstrated and instructed internationally in Toronto, Canada, Subiaco, Italy, and in the Provence region of France.  In 2007, Thompson was selected an ARC Living Master Artist.

Since 2002 Mr. Thompson has demonstrated portrait drawing and painting and served as a juror and board member for the Portrait Society of Canada’s International Portrait Conference in Toronto.

He has also lectured at the Dahesh Museum of Art, served as a speaker at Studio Incamminati’s Advanced Portrait Workshop and Symposium, and written on technique and painting practice for several art publications across the United States.

His work can be found in public and private collections throughout the United States, and in Canada, Europe, and the Middle East.