Alain Bonnefoit, 1937 | Impressionist painter

Painter, engraver and sculptor, Alain Bonnefoit was born in Montmartre, Paris.

From 1953 he attended the École des Arts Appliqués, from 1956 the École des Beaux Arts in Paris and from 1959 also the École des Beaux Arts in Brussels Engraving and Sculpture Department.

In 1961 he began a two year period in the studio of the sculptor Volti who would become his maestro in both art and life.

In 1964 he arrived at the form of expression that later made him famous: the female figures.

In 1965 he moved to Tuscany but kept on his studio in Paris.

Liu Yuanshou, 1967 | Figurative painter

Liu Yuanshou [劉元壽], Chinese painter, was born in Beijing in 1967.

He earned a degree in oil painting from the Capital Normal University of Beijing in 1991, and has exhibited in and won awards in many prestigious exhibitions throughout Asia, including China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Japan.

While Liu Yuanshou hails from the austere north of China, he has become fascinated by the seductively temperate cultural and physical climate of the eastern coastal province of Jiangsu, which lies east of Anhui and north of Shanghai.

I Violini di Chagall

La felicità non è felicità senza una capra che suona il violino, scriveva Marc Chagall 1887-1985, il poeta con ali da pittore, secondo la definizione dello scrittore statunitense Henry Miller (1891-1980).

L'interesse di Chagall per la musica risale al periodo dell'infanzia ed è connesso ai riti della comunità ebraico-chassidica di Vitebsk, di cui la sua famiglia faceva parte con profonda devozione.

Francesco Bachiacca | Renaissance painter

A Florentine painter and draughtsman Francesco Ubertini (1494-1557), alias Bachiacca is chiefly recognized as an artist who helped evolve the style of Mannerism.

He is said to have studied with Umbrian painter, Pietro Perugino (1446-1524) and also collaborated with other artists of the time such as Franciabigio (1482-1525) and Pontormo (1494-1557).

Pauline Gagnon, 1955 | Enigmatic eyes

Pauline Gagnon is originally from Quebec Canada, but she has travelled extensively throughout Asia, thus influencing her artistic style.

Although she focuses mainly on painting today, she has been very versatile in her interest, studying silkscreen, steel sculpture, jewelry and theater in Montreal; and stone sculpture in Italy.

As to her painting, after spending two decades in the nonfigurative style, she has adopted the portrait as the major genre of her work. The artist has had over 40 exhibitions in various international continents.

Jack Vettriano, 1951 | Romantic Figurative painter

Born in Fife, Scotland, Jack Vettriano left school at sixteen to become a mining engineer.

For his twenty-first birthday, a girlfriend gave him a set of watercolour paints and, from then on, he spent much of his spare time teaching himself to paint.

In 1989, he submitted two paintings to the Royal Scottish Academy’s annual exhibition; both were accepted and sold on the first day.

The following year, an equally enthusiastic reaction greeted the three paintings, which he entered for the prestigious Summer Exhibition at London’s Royal Academy and his new life as an artist began from that point on.

Over the last twenty years, interest in Vettriano’s work has grown consistently. There have been sell-out solo exhibitions in Edinburgh, London, Hong Kong and New York.

Giuseppe Arcimboldo | Mannerist painter

The bizarre works of Giuseppe Arcimboldo🎨, especially his multiple images, were rediscovered in the early 20th century by Surrealist artists🎨 like Salvador Dali🎨.

Arcimboldo🎨 was born in Milan in 1527, the son of Biagio, a painter who did work for the office of the Fabbrica in the Duomo. Arcimboldo was commissioned to do stained glass window designs beginning in 1549, including the Stories of St. Catherine of Alexandria vitrage at the Duomo.
In 1556 he worked with Giuseppe Meda on frescoes for the Cathedral of Monza.
In 1558, he drew the cartoon for a large tapestry of the Dormition of the Virgin Mary, which still hangs in the Como Cathedral today.

Wassily Kandinsky | Abstract / Expressionist painter

Wassily Kandinsky🎨 / Василий Кандинский (born December 4 [December 16, New Style], 1866, Moscow, Russia-died December 13, 1944, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France), Russian-born artist, one of the first creators of pure Abstraction in modern painting.

After successful avant-garde exhibitions, he founded the influential Munich group Der Blaue Reiter ("The Blue Rider"; 1911-14) and began completely abstract painting🎨.

His forms evolved from fluid and organic to geometric and, finally, to pictographic (e.g., Tempered Élan, 1944).

• Early years

Kandinsky’s mother was a Muscovite, one of his great-grandmothers a Mongolian princess, and his father a native of Kyakhta, a Siberian town near the Chinese border; the boy thus grew up with a cultural heritage that was partly European and partly Asian.
His family was genteel, well-to-do, and fond of travel; while still a child he became familiar with Venice, Rome, Florence, the Caucasus, and the Crimean Peninsula.
At Odessa, where his parents settled in 1871, he completed his secondary schooling and became an amateur performer on the piano and the cello. He also became an amateur painter, and he later recalled, as a sort of first impulse toward abstraction, an adolescent conviction that each colour had a mysterious life of its own.