Marie Laurencin | Cubist painter

Marie Laurencin (1885-1956) French painter, designer, illustrator, etcher and lithographer.

Born in Paris.

Studied at the Académie Humbert, where Braque was a fellow pupil. Met Picasso, André Salmon and Apollinaire; influenced by Picasso and Matisse, and began to paint pictures mainly of sloe-eyed girls in a decorative, arabesque-like style. Painted 'Apollinaire, Picasso and their Friends' 1909.

Lorado Taft ~ The Solitude of the Soul /La solitudine dell'anima, 1914

In stone, four life-sized figures, two male and two female, posed around and halfway emerging from, or captured by, an indistinct central volume.

By the American sculptor Lorado Taft, 1860-1936. In the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.

The Neoclassicism of the sculptors Harriet Hosmer and Randolph Rogers was replaced in the second half of the 19th century by the more realistic naturalism of French-trained sculptors such as American sculptor Lorado Zadoc Taf (1860-1936). An instructor in modeling at the School of the Art Institute for 20 years, Taft created public monuments for Chicago that made the city a center for sculpture. The figures in this work are only partly freed from the marble, a technique that emphasizes the mass and outline of the stone.
Explaining The Solitude of the Soul, Taft wrote, “The thought is the eternally present fact that however closely we may be thrown together by circumstances . . . we are unknown to each other”.

Dita Omuri | Fashion/Abstract painter

Award winning artist Dita Omuri, born and raised in northern Albania, escaped her home country running towards the unknown and away from the restricted ways of expressing her emotions through art.
From a very young age, Dita’s sketchbook was her constant companion. By winning a young art competition she secured a scholarship at a traditional Art school aged 14. Learning the “Old Masters Techniques” and becoming aware that the only legal art form in Albania was Social Realism. Her passion for art, freedom and creativity was stifled in Albania.

William Shakespeare | The Sonnets, 1609

Italian translation ➦ William Shakespeare ~ I Sonetti, 1609

Sonnet V

Those hours, that with gentle work did frame

The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell,

Will play the tyrants to the very same

And that unfair which fairly doth excel:

For never-resting time leads summer on

To hideous winter and confounds him there;

Sap cheque'd with frost and lusty leaves quite gone,

Beauty o'ersnow'd and bareness every where:

Then, were not summer's distillation left,

A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,

Beauty's effect with beauty were bereft,

Nor it nor no remembrance what it was:

But flowers distill'd though they with winter meet,

Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet.

Tom Lovell | Western painter and illustrator

Tom Lovell (1909-1997) was a founding member of the National Academy of Western Art. He received many honors for his illustrations and paintings. He was winner of the prestigious Prix de West award twice for his paintings. He was inducted into the Society of Illustrators in 1974. In 1992, Lovell received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame and the Robert Lougheed Memorial Award for Traditional Painter of Western History.