Richard S. Johnson, 1953 | Impressionist painter

Richard S. Johnson is an award-winning contemporary American painter based in Chicago, Illinois. Johnson was born in Chicago to a family of artists. While still in primary school, Johnson was accepted as a scholar to the Art Institute of Chicago.

A graduate of the American Academy of Art, he embarked on a career as an illustrator. Johnson's style has been regarded as having the technical excellence of Pre-Raphaelite Romanticism mixed with contemporary Expressionism and Abstraction.

Johnny Palacios Hidalgo, 1970 | Surrealist painter

Peruvian painter Johnny Palacios Hidalgo was born in Lima, Peru and studied art between 1988-1998 in the National Art Museum and the National School of Fine Arts.

He has exhibited regularly since 1984, developing a surreal hyperrealism style with unique powerful images full of beauty, which emphasizes the feminine beauty and animal figures more or less merged with the environment.

Ron Di Scenza, 1954 | Figurative impressionist painter

American artist🎨 Ron Di Scenza has a fitting last name. In Italian, conoscenza means knowledge or awareness, and a knowing sense of familiarity comes through Di Scenza's canvases, giving his images special meaning and significance.

Di Scenza's deep understanding of human nature is expressed in the faces and body language of his figures, much like Spanish painter Diego Velazquez🎨 and his ability to report life as it is recalls American painter John Singer Sargent🎨.

Especially exciting, Di Scenza's detailed realism is on par with Flemish painter Johannes Vermeer🎨, while the soulfulness of his subjects brings to mind Italian artist Michelangelo Caravaggio🎨.

Boleslaw Szankowski | Portrait painter

Bolesław Szańkowski (1873-1953) was an Polish painter, known for working in the Realist style.

Szańkowski studied at the academies in Cracow and Munich with Ludwig Herterich and in Paris with Benjamin-Constant, Gaudara and Jean Paul Laurens.

He went on to work in Munich, where he contributed to the periodicals, Youth (Jugend) and Simplicity (Simplicissimus).

From 1907 to 1925 he participated in the annual exhibitions of the Munich Glass Palace.

Mary Qian, 1973 | Impressionist painter

A Chicago-based fine art painter, Mary is a winner of many awards🎨, including Oil Painters of America gold Medal.

Originally from Shanghai, China, Mary went through the traditional Chinese educational system focusing on the sciences while studying Chinese painting and calligraphy on her own. Before coming to the US, she admired the ancient Chinese painters🎨 but found her true voice for painting when she discovered the western artists.

It was the realism of Rembrandt🎨, Velazquez🎨, Repin🎨 -her particular favorites- that she found to be the artistic style that she had been looking for.

Vito Campanella | Surrealist / Metaphysics painter

Although Vito Campanella (1932-2014) started to paint at the age of 14 in his native Monopoli, his love for visual arts began much earlier.

He was born in 1932 and endured the sorrow, agony and shortage that surrounded World War II.

In the aftermath of the armed conflict, daily life in Southern Italy changed forever.

Allied planes crisscrossing the sky and ceaseless bombings left indelible memories he later translated into works of art.

René Magritte | Surrealist painter

René Magritte🎨, in full René-François-Ghislain Magritte (born Nov. 21, 1898, Lessines, Belg.- died Aug. 15, 1967, Brussels) Belgian artist, one of the most prominent Surrealist painters🎨, whose bizarre flights of fancy blended horror, peril, comedy, and mystery.

His works were characterized by particular symbols-the female torso, the bourgeois "little man", the bowler hat, the castle, the rock, the window, and others.

After studying at the Brussels Academy of Fine Arts (1916-18), Magritte became a designer for a wallpaper factory and then did sketches for advertisements.

In 1922 he saw a reproduction of Giorgio de Chirico’s painting The Song of Love (1914), an evocative and haunting juxtaposition of odd elements (a classical bust and a rubber glove among them) in a dreamlike architectural space; it had a great influence on Magritte’s mature style.

Richard Schmid, 1934 | Realist / Impressionist painter

Born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, American🎨 Master painter Richard Schmid became one of the foremost Impressionist painters🎨 of the Southwest in the late 20th century.

He is known for what he calls "The Grand Manner", a certain mingling of virtuosity and unrestrained joy in art.

His earliest artistic influence came from his maternal grandfather, Julian Oates, an architectural sculptor. Richard's initial studies in landscape painting, figure drawing, and anatomy began at the age of twelve and continued into classical techniques under William H. Mosby at the American Academy of Art in Chicago.

Mosby, a graduate of the Belgian Royal Academy in Brussels and the Superior Institute in Antwerp, was a technical expert on European and American realism.

Studies with him involved working exclusively from life, at first using the conceptual and technical methods of the Flemish, Dutch and Spanish masters, and eventually all of the late 19th century European and American painters.