Vincent Van Gogh

Vincent Willem Van Gogh was born on the 30th of march 1853 and died July the 29th 1890, after years of painful anxiety and frequent bouts of mental illness. He died aged 37 from a gunshot wound, generally accepted to be self-inflicted (although no gun was ever found).As a child Vincent was serious, silent, and thoughtful. In 1860 he attended the Zundert village school, where the single Catholic teacher taught around 200 pupils, Vincent and his sister Anna a year later left the Zundert village school and was home schooled by a governess until October 1864. Then Vincent was sent to Jan Provily's boarding school about 20 miles away. He was distressed to leave his family.

Began to draw as a child but did not begin painting until his late twenties. In July 1869 his uncle Cent helped him to obtain a position with the art dealer Goupil and Cie in The Hague, After his training Goupil transferred him to London, Vincent spent most of his adulthood working for a firm of art dealers, travelling from Hague, London, and Paris. In London Van Gogh did some unpaid work as a supply teacher in a small boarding school.

In March 1886, he moved to Paris and discovered the French Impressionist.

Later he moved to France and was Influenced by the strong sunlight he found there. His work grew brighter in colour and he developed the unique and recognizable style. Vincent was a post-impressionist painter of Dutch origin whose work was notable for its rough beauty, emotional honesty and bold colour. His work had a far reaching influence on the 20th century 

Jenny Saville

Jenny Saville was born in Cambridge in 1970, she is a contemporary British painter. Saville attended Lilley and Stone School now known as The Grove School Specialist Science College, im Newark Nottinghamshire. Later in life she went on to gain her Degree at Glasgow School of Art she attended from 1988-1992, and was then awarded a six month scholarship to the University of Cincinnati. She partially credits Pablo Picasso an artist from the cubist movement, because she sees him as a painter that made subjects as if " they were solidly there.....not fleeting."

Charles Saatchi, purchased her senior show. He offered Saville an 18 months contracts, supporting her while she created new works that were to be exhibited in the Saachi Gallery in London. Saville is primarily known for her large scale painted depictions of naked women. Saville works and lives in Oxford, England. Her paintings mainly consist of nude women , her feminist matter of obese and sometimes faceless women with vast bodies, was influence by her trip to America. It was while she was studying at the university of Chincinnati in ohio that Saville's fascination with the workings of the human body began to influence or be shown in her art work. Most of her work features distorted flesh, high-caliber brush strokes and patches of oil color.

i like this particular piece of Jenny Saville's work because it reaches out to single mums and people that grew up with only one parent even with multiple siblings. this is also the same reason that it catches me because my mum is a single parent just like Jenny Saville's mum was aswell so i can understand and relate to why she would do a painting like this because in a way her mother is her main inspiration for this particular painting. I also like the composition and the stance of the woman in the painting, she has her head held high and you can just see all the pride that she has at that glorious moment of birth.

Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon was born at a nursing home in Adelaide on the 28th of October in 1909 and he died on the 28th of April in 1992. Francis bacon was raised by the family nanny, Jessie Lightfoot, a woman from Cornwall, known by Francis as "Nanny Lightfoot" who continued to play a key role in Francis's development as an artist even after his exile by Captain Bacon.Francis drifted through rented homes in England, accompanied by his nanny Miss Lightfoot. On returning to Ireland after the world war 1, Bacon was sent to live with his maternal grandmother and step-grandfather, Winfred and Kerry Supple. whilst residing with his grandparents Francis spent 18 months boarding at Dean Close School, Cheltenham, from the third term of 1924 until April 1926. This was only brush with formal education as he quit the school before he could be expelled. Later on that year Francis was thrown out of Straffan Lodge following an incident in which his father found him admiring himself in front of the mirror draped in his mothers underwear, Francis had a difficult relationship with his father once admitting to being sexually attracted to him.

Francis went through many jobs, he started working for a telephone company where he met his  patron lover Eric Hall, he was shortly sacked from this telephoning answering position at a shop selling womans clothing. Francis was then made redundant with an allowance of £3 a week from his mothers trust fund, living on his instincts drifting, when Francis was broke he found that by expedient the of rent dodging and petty theft, he could manage a reasonable economy.Francis then met a lady named Yvonne Bocquentin, a pianist and connoisseur at the opening of an art exhibition. Bacon lived for three months with Madame Bocquentin and her family at their house near Chantilly. His visit to a exhibition in 1927 exhibition of 106 paintings by Picasso at the Galerie Paul Rosenberg in Paris, aroused his artistic interest, he took the train to Paris five more times that week to see shows and art exhibitions.

Queensberry Mews, was of Bacon's carpet rugs and furniture which were influenced by the paintings and tapestries of Jean Lurcat. Bacon visited Paris where he bought a secondhand book on disease of the mouth containing high quality hand-colored plates of both open mouths and oral interiors, which haunted and obsessed him for the remainder of his life.Bacon began painting during his early 20s and worked only sporadically until his mid-30s, he drifted and earned his living as and interior decorator and designer of furniture and rugs. he is an Irish- born British painter who liked to paint the human body (figurative painter), known for his bold, graphic and emotionally raw imagery.

I chose to look at Francis Bacon because throughout a series of images or surreal paintings that he does he has the same level of compassion in all of them. I especially love how personal his portraits became shortly after his lover George Dyer committed suicide. I also love the shapes that he uses when he is drawing the human figure.

Chuck Close

Artist career

Charles Thomas “Chuck Close” was born in Monroe, Washington on July the 5^th 1940, Chuck Close lives and works to this day on the south shore of Long Island. He attended Everett Community College in 1958-1960, and then in 1962 got his B.A. from the University of Washington. In 1961 he won a scholarship to the Yale Summer School of music, After Yale he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna for a short while. When close returned to the US he worked at the University of Massachusetts as an Art Teacher.

Close is an American painter and photographer who later in his life had a catastrophic spinal artery collapse in 1988 which left him paralyzed, he continues to paint and produce work that remains sought after by museums and collectors, Close also suffers from prosopagnosia which means he was born with the inability to recognize faces, by painting portraits helps him to develop the ability to remember faces. Chuck Close has said himself “I was not conscious of making a decision to paint portraits because I have a difficulty of recognizing faces.” This tells us that he was fully aware of the disadvantage that his disability gave him but did not let that stop him from what he wants to do.

Chuck close describes an encounter he has with a Jackson Pollock painting when he was at a museum with him mum at the age of 11 and he says “I went to the Seattle Art Museum with my mother for the first time when I was 11. I saw this Jackson Pollock drip painting with aluminium paint, tar, gravel and all that stuff. I was absolutely outraged, disturbed. It was so far removed from what I thought art was. However, within 2 or 3 days, I was dripping paint all over my old paintings. In a way I’ve been chasing that experience ever since.” The fact that he went away and incorporated some of Jackson Pollock’s techniques into his own work tells us that this was his influence for his abstract paintings.

Chuck Close is a Photorealist; his works are generally larger than life and highly focused. One demonstration of the way photography was considered a part of the art world was the photorealist painting in the late 1960s and the early 1970s. Photorealism is also known by the names super-realism or hyper-realism. Chuck Close often worked from photographic stills to create his portrait paintings. The aim of this movement was to incorporate photography into the art world which they was successful at doing, his work developed throughout his life because he managed to merge both his paintings and his photographs together.

I have chosen to look into chuck close because I like the techniques and the method that he uses to do his portrait paintings. I like the grid method that his uses to start off his portrait then I also like the bright colours and swirl technique that he uses to paint inside the grid. My work and chuck closes work are very different not only in the method but in the final outcome my work is either block colours or tonal his work is very colourful and that’s just something that I don’t do in my own portrait paintings, I like for my naturalistic whereas he likes that non-naturalistic abstract look in his portraits. From looking at this artist I would like to learn the swirl technique with all the different colours that he uses when he paints his portraits