Y.G. Srimati (1926-2007)

Born in Mysore into a cultured Mandayam Brahmin Tamil family and educated in Madras (present-day Chennai, in South India), the Indian artist Y. G. Srimati, at a young age, received classical training in the four traditional South Indian arts-voice, music, dance, and painting.

She became a highly accomplished vocalist and performer of classical Indian music and kept a lifelong friendship with the preeminent Carnatic vocalist M.S. Subbulakshmi.

She also toured in India and the United States, and in the United Kingdom with the influential classical Indian dancer Ram Gopal.

Ismaël Costa, 1965

Coming from a family from Barcelona in Spain, Ismaël has lived in Provence since the age of nine.

His childhood was devoted to the practice of drawing, and more particularly to the genre of comic strips which he was fond of.

As a teenager, his interest led him more towards the study of portraits.

Ismaël began working at the age of sixteen, first as a designer for a publishing house, then as an illustrator in a Parisian communications agency.

Reuven Rubin | Post‐impressionist painter

Reuven Rubin (1893-1974) was a Romanian-born Israeli painter and Israel's first ambassador to Romania.

Rubin Zelicovici (later Reuven Rubin) was born in Galaţi to a poor Romanian Jewish Hasidic family. He was the eighth of 13 children.

In 1912, he left for Ottoman-ruled Palestine to study art at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem.

Finding himself at odds with the artistic views of the Academy's teachers, he left for Paris, France, in 1913 to pursue his studies at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts.

Claire Denarie-Soffietti, 1923

Born and raised in Versailles, Claire Denarie-Soffietti was an autodidactic art student from the outset.

After eight years living in Barbados and four children, the artist and her husband (an Italian architect) decided to settle for good and now reside in beautiful Dolphin Coast of South Africa.

Denarie works have evolved over the years.

Ryan Jensen | Plein Air painter

Ryan Jensen, born in the San Francisco Bay Area, moved around a bit growing up.

But his earliest memories are of family and include his father, a painter, and his mother, a graphic designer, arched together over a drafting board in their in-home studio; or his father's paint-covered hands on the steering wheel as he drove his son to school.

On the mornings Ryan's father left early for work, there would be a sticky-note sketch on the kitchen table, usually a comical depiction that always made Ryan laugh. Jensen began to sketch as a child and never stopped.