Cheri Blum (1969-2003)

An artist who celebrated beauty in imperfection. These kinds of simple contradictions were Cheri Blum’s trademarks and perhaps the key to her remarkable success.

Cheri Blum who was born in Maryland on 1969 and passed away at her home in Georgetown on November 4, 2003, at the age of 34. In her brilliant but brief career, Cheri Blum created more than 400 original paintings. Cheri Blum began her careeas an illustrator and muralist, creating trompe l’oeil, faux painting and decorative furniture finishes. This background not only provided her with the techniques she used to create her beautiful, unique backgrounds, but also a strong desire to bring art into everyday life. “We should be able to surround ourselves with beautiful art in our homes and offices, not just when we visit museums and galleries”.

Cheri’s approach was inspired by the past, but reflected today’s modern styles. She strove to create art that was peaceful, tranquil and edited of unnecessary detail. The simple, graceful shapes she painted have a timeless quality and restful feeling that make them easy to live with and enjoy.

Galina Chuvilyaeva, 1957 | Angels

Galina Chuvilyaeva / Галина Чувиляева is a famous St. Petersburg artist, jeweler, member of the Union of Designers and the Union of Artists of Russia, a participant in numerous exhibitions.

Galina Chuvilyaeva was born in 1957 on the Volga. Childhood and youth passed in Ukraine, where his father served.

The beauty of the Carpathians, mountains, rivers and gardens blooming twice a year - all this has left an indelible mark on the artist's soul.

Claude Monet | Figures / Portraits | Page 2

Vincent van Gogh | The Ravine of the Peyroulets, 1889

In the autumn of 1889, Van Gogh painted the ravine near the asylum in the southern French town of Saint‑Remy.

He wrote about it to his dear friend Emile Bernard:

"Such subjects certainly have a fine melancholy, but then it is fun to work in rather wild places, where one has to dig one’s easel in between the stones lest the wind should blow the whole caboodle over".

The following spring, Van Gogh sent this painting to Paris, where Paul Gauguin saw it and wrote to him:

Hans Dahl (1849-1937)

Hans Dahl (19 February 1849 - 27 July 1937) was a Norwegian painter.

Hans Dahl was famous for his paintings of Norwegian fjords and surrounding landscapes.

Dahl had his first exhibition in Düsseldorf in 1876. Dahl lived in Düsseldorf until 1888, when he moved to Berlin. Almost every summer, he was back to Norway. In 1893, he commissioned the firm of Jacob Digre in Trondheim to build his summer residence, Villa Strandheim.

It is located on the banks of the Sognefjord at Balestrand in the county of Sogn og Fjordane. Norwegian painter Adelsteen Normann had settled in Balestrand during 1891. Dahl's villa was of a similar design to the villa built for Normann.

James Smetham | The Mandolin, 1866

James Smetham (9 September 1821 - 5 February 1889) was an English Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood painter and engraver, a follower of Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Smetham worked in a range of genres, including religious and literary themes as well as portraiture; but he is perhaps best known as a landscape painter.

His "landscapes have a visionary quality" reminiscent of the work of William Blake, John Linnell and Samuel Palmer.

Claude Monet | Rising Tide at Pourville, 1882

Throughout his career Claude Monet depicted France’s English Channel coastline.

In works such as Rising Tide at Porville / Marée montante à Pourville, he combined keen observation with Impressionism’s subjective use of color and light effects.

Henrik Willem Mesdag also painted churning waters, of the nearby North Sea.

Here, a small ship with wind-torn sails is tossed by massive, white-capped waves.

The broad expanse of water, almost matching the tone of the sky, dramatizes nature’s mighty power.

Claude Monet | Rising Tide at Pourville (Marée montante à Pourville), 1882 | Brooklyn Museum

Claude Monet | Boats below the Cliffs at Pourville, 1882

Bateaux devant les falaises de Pourville / Boats below the Cliffs at Pourville features a bold geometrically structured composition of diagonals and horizontals, reflective of the more simplified approach that Monet was then exploring.

The horizon line bisects the canvas into two parts of roughly equal size; two tranches of nearly identical size and shape form the sand and sea, whilst the diagonal line of the cliff runs to the very centre of the composition.

The slightly raised vantage point from which Monet has captured this view serves, in comparison with other views from this group, to considerably foreshorten the angle of the shoreline.

Edward William Cooke (1811-1880)

Edward William Cooke was an English🎨 landscape and marine painter and gardener.

Cooke was born in Pentonville, London, the son of well-known line engraver George Cooke; his uncle, William Bernard Cooke (1778-1855), was also a line engraver of note, and Edward was raised in the company of artists.

He was a precocious draughtsman and a skilled engraver from an early age, displayed an equal preference for marine subjects (in special in sailing ships) and published his "Shipping and Craft" - a series of accomplished engravings - when he was 18, in 1829.

Vladimir Kush, 1965 | Pillow Book

Il dipinto raffigura il momento del risveglio.

Quando la notte tiene ancora le redini nella parte oscura del letto-libro, e la luce dorata del mattino penetra attraverso le tende aperte dello spazio dell'abitazione.

I sogni guariscono la propria anima, bilanciando la realtà con elementi di magia ed il mondo intangibile della fantasia.

Morpheus sta ancora salvaguardando il sonno dorato che rimane sulle ciglia setose della ragazza.

Un segnalibro a forma di piuma d'uccello simboleggia il volo dell'immaginazione.

Franz Skarbina | Pittore impressionista

Franz Skarbina (1849-1910) è stato un pittore impressionista Tedesco, disegnatore, incisore ed illustratore.

Nato a Berlino, era figlio di un orafo di Zagabria.

Dal 1865-1869, ha studiato all'Accademia delle arti prussiane.

Dopo la laurea, ha trascorso due anni come tutor alle figlie del conte Friedrich von Perponcher-Sedlnitzky (1821-1909), durante il quale ha viaggiato a Dresda, Vienna, Venezia, Monaco, Norimberga e Merano.

Dietz Edzard (1893-1963)

Dietz (Dietrich Hermann) Edzard (1893-1963) was born in Bremen.

From 1911, he studied painting at Max Beckmann in Berlin, and worked in the Netherlands thereafter.

In 1927, he moved to France, and in 1929 the first exhibition of his work took place in Paris at the Jeu de Paume, a museum exclusively devoted to Impressionist masters. He got married to the artist Suzanne Eisendieck (1908-1998) in 1938.

During the Second World War, he was captured in the detention and deportation camp Les Milles.

His works are held by the collections of international art museums, and by American and Canadian private collections.

Guiding themes of his creativity are the circus and the theatre.

Luciano Ventrone | Hyperrealist painter

Born in Rome, Luciano Ventrone attended Liceo Artistico in Rome. After graduation in 1946 he started studying Architecture. In 1968 he left the University and focused on painting.

Even though Luciano Ventrone is internationally recognized as one of the master realist painters of his generation, he believes that his works are really about optics:

"Painting is not about the mere representation of an object, but its color and light", he says.

"The subject cannot be seen as it is but as an abstract element".

Luigi Pastega | Genre painter

Luigi Pastega (Venice, 1858-1927) was an Italian painter, mainly of genre subjects.

He was a pupil of Pompeo Marino Molmenti and Napoleone Nani at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice.

He continued to reside in Venice painting vedute and genre subjects in a style that recalled Giacomo Favretto.

Napoleone Nani | Genre painter

Napoleone Nani (Venice 1841- Verona, 1899) was an Italian painter, active in Venice, where he became professor of the Accademia di Belle Arti.

In 1877 at Naples, he displayed his self-portrait and a canvas titled: La posa; in 1881 at Venice, he displayed: La macchina riposa, il cuore lavora; at the 1883 Promotrice of Florence: Lo studio dal vero; at Rome the same year: Lo studio del nudo and Il primo pensiero ai miei fiori. Successively in Turin, Milan, and Rome, he exhibited: Vizio, Trattative di conciliazione, Giudizio di un intelligente, and Studio.

Cesar Santos

Cesar Santos (born July 10, 1982) is a contemporary Cuban-American artist and portrait painter.

He is better known for his body of work "Syncretism", a term he uses to describe paintings where he presents two or more art tendencies in aesthetic balance.

He has completed numerous commissions and his work is held in private as well as public collections around the world.

Max Liebermann (1847-1935) | Life and Artworks

Max Liebermann (20 July 1847 - 8 February 1935) was a German painter and printmaker of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry, and one of the leading proponents of Impressionism in Germany.

The son of a Jewish fabric manufacturer turned banker from Berlin, Liebermann grew up in an imposing town house alongside the Brandenburg Gate.

He first studied law and philosophy at the University of Berlin, but later studied painting and drawing in Weimar in 1869, in Paris in 1872, and in the Netherlands in 1876-77.

During the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), Liebermann served as a medic with the Order of St. John near Metz. After living and working for some time in Munich, he finally returned to Berlin in 1884, where he remained for the rest of his life. He was married in 1884 to Martha Marckwald (1857-1943).

Henry John Stock | Influences, 1905

Henry John Stock (1853-1930) is one of those minor but highly individual artists who are among the glories of the English Romantic tradition.

Born in Greek Street, Soho, in 1853, he went blind in childhood but recovered his sight on being sent to live at Beaulieu in the New Forest.

He studied at the St. Martin's School of Art and the Royal Academy Schools, and is said to have been encouraged by the engraver W.J. Linton, who took him to Italy. (It seems unlikely that this was before 1866, when Linton settled in America, since Stock would only have been thirteen at the time.

Eugeniusz Żak | Pittore Post-Impressionista

Eugeniusz Zak (1884-1926) è stato un pittore Polacco.

All'inizio Zak espresse il suo temperamento artistico attraverso un sofisticato uso della linea, facendo riferimento nei suoi ritratti a sanguigna alle opere di Leonardo, Botticelli, Hans Holbein il giovane e Dürer.

Poi, nella prima fase della sua carriera, si accostò allo stile dei Nabis, mediante l'elaborazione di superfici piatte, circoscritte in modo sfumato, senza contorni precisi e dai colori leggermente opachi.

Ernest Higgins Rigg (1868-1947) | The Potato Pickers

Ernest Higgins Rigg was a British painter🎨 of rural genre, landscapes and portraits.

Rigg was born in Bradford and studied at the School of Art there and then at the Acade´mie Julian in Paris.

He first visited Staithes in 1896 and lodged in Hinderwell at Quaker Garth and later stayed at the village’s Commercial Hotel. He moved to Sussex in 1908, but returned to Yorkshire after the First World War, living in Shipley in 1918 and Richmond in 1919. His brothers, Alfred and Arthur H. were both artists.

Giuseppe Arcimboldo (Italian, 1527-1593)

Giuseppe Arcimboldo was an Italian painter best known for creating imaginative portrait heads made entirely of such objects as fruits, vegetables, flowers, fish and books, that is, he painted representations of these objects on the canvas arranged in such a way that the whole collection of objects formed a recognizable likeness of the portrait subject.

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.

Giuseppe Arcimboldo did not leave written certificates on himself or his artwork. After the deaths of Arcimboldo and his patron—the emperor Rudolph II—the heritage of the artist was quickly forgotten, and many of his works were lost. They were not mentioned in the literature of the 17th and 18th centuries. Only in 1885 did the art critic K. Kasati publish the monograph "Giuseppe Arcimboldi, Milan Artist" in which the main attention was given to Arcimboldi's role as a portraitist.

Ettore Tito | Le mondine in Polesine, 1885

Ettore Tito🎨 (17 December 1859 - 26 June 1941) was an Italian artist🎨 particularly known for his paintings of contemporary life and landscapes in Venice and the surrounding region.

He trained at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice and from 1894 to 1927 was the Professor of Painting there.

Tatiana Deriy (Russian painter, 1973)

Tatiana Deriy is a dynamically growing painter, whose major creative goal is comprehension of unity of the world's esthetic beauty and its profound meaning as well as rendering them to viewers through painting.

Born in a wonderful part of Moscow region, not far from ''Archangelskoye" estate full of creations of famous architects and sculptors, refinement of palace parks and canvases by Veroneze and Tintoretto, at an early age she developed special world outlook which later on defined the tenor of her work, based on the sense of harmony and beauty.

Comprehending the secrets of mastery of great painters of the past became her primary objective. In 1985 she entered Moscow Art College a hors concurs, graduated from it, which enabled her to continue education in Moscow State Academic Institute named after V.Surikov.

Max Svabinsky (1873-1962)

Max Švabinský (1873-1963) was a Czech painter🎨, draughtsman, graphic artist, and professor in Academy of Graphic Arts in Prague.

Švabinský is considered one of the more notable artists in the history of Czech painting and produced significant work during the first half of the 20th century.

He was relatively unusual among modernist artists in that his work was accepted by the communist regime; this was due at least in part to his having formed his artistic personality prior to 1900, prior to the advent of cubism. | © Wikipedia

Pierre-Auguste Renoir | Seascape, 1879

Artist: Pierre-Auguste Renoir (French, 1841-1919)

Title: Seascape

Origin: France

Date: 1879

Medium: Oil on canvas

Inscriptions: Inscribed lower right: Renoir'79

Dimensions: 72.6 × 91.6 cm (28 1/2 × 36 in.)

Credit Line: The Art Institute of Chicago, Potter Palmer Collection

Reference Number: 1922.438

Henri Lamy, 1985 | Abstract painter

Henri Lamy is a French figurative painter, being used to paint, thanks to his father, when he was a kid, Henri admires Pollock «drip painting» technique (that consists in dropping paint from the palette knife he uses, straight to the canvas, or even throwing it).

Angelo Morbelli | Per 80 centesimi! 1895

L’opera di Angelo Morbelli, uno dei capolavori del Museo Borgogna, venne acquistata nel 1912 alla Mostra d’Arte della campagna irrigua tenutasi a Vercelli, a pochi anni dall'apertura al pubblico del Museo.

Il dipinto, firmato e datato 1895, ha avuto una lunga e tormentata elaborazione, come testimonia la corrispondenza fra l’artista e il collega Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo: iniziato nel 1893, venne ripreso prima di essere esposto nel 1895 alla Biennale di Venezia.

La tela assume un ruolo importante per la collezione, non solo per l’appartenenza alla corrente pittorica del Divisionismo, ma soprattutto per il soggetto fortemente connesso al territorio vercellese.

Djordje Prudnikoff in Italy

At the International competition for new ideas in furniture design, in 1968 in Italy, Djordje Prudnikoff (1939-2017) was granted a reward and 3 months scholarship by the company called Sormani from Milan for perfecting himself in furniture design.

During and after his studies he was mostly occupied with creations in the field of applied arts and took part in projects for furniture and applied pottery for several well-known Italian enterprises.

His work were selected for the ITALIAN DESIGN exhibitions in many European metropolises, and that was the time when Italian design was considered one of the best in the world.

Vincent Van Gogh | Portraits

Vincent van Gogh🎨 lived during the Impressionist era. With the development of photography, painters and artists turned to conveying the feeling and ideas behind people, places, and things rather than trying to imitate their physical forms.

Impressionist artists did this by emphasizing certain hues, using vigorous brushstrokes, and paying attention to highlighting.

Vincent van Gogh implemented this ideology to pursue his goal of depicting his own feelings toward and involvement with his subjects.

Van Gogh's portraiture focuses on color and brushstrokes to demonstrate their inner qualities and van Gogh's own relationship with them.

Vincent van Gogh painted portraits throughout his career from 1881-1890.