Jackson Pollock

          Jackson Pollock studied art in California (along with two of his five brothers) He took his studying very seriously and focused for a while on anatomical drawings. He later moved to New York where he worked for several years (1938-1943) for the Federal Arts Project. The FAP was the visual arts arm of the Great Depression Era’s New Deal. Its primary goal was to employ out of work artists. These artists were hired primarily to create art for public spaces. FAP artists are reputed to have created more than 200,000 works of art from posters to murals, some of which stand as the most significant pieces of public art in the USA. Jackson Pollock was one of these artists.

          Jackson was attending Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles when he was encouraged to pursue his interest in art. His oldest brother, Charles, went to New York to study with painter Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League. He suggested that Jackson join him and, in 1930, Pollock moved east and enrolled in Benton’s class. He studied Old Master paintings and mural paintings. He also posed for his teacher’s 1930 murals at the New School for Social Research. Also at work at this time was Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco. He was also exposed to David Alfaro Siquieros. Their experimental techniques and large scale art had a lasting impact on Pollock.

          Around this time, Pollock was invited to participate in a group exhibition. Here, is where he met his future wife Lee Krasner. His work also came to the attention of Peggy Guggenheim, the wealthy New York heiress whose money built the Guggenheim Museum. She became his dealer and patron, introducing his work to audiences. In November 1943, she gave him a solo exhibition and a contract guaranteeing him one-hundred fifty dollars a month for a year.

          In 1945, Guggenheim lent Pollock the down payment on a small house in The Springs on East Hampton, Long Island. He married fellow artist Lee Krasner. They lived together on a small homestead in The Springs near East Hampton. It is possible to visit the Pollock-Krasner House and Studio Center. In the studio you are provided with special padded slippers and you can walk across the paint laden floor, the very spot where many of Jackson Pollock’s masterpieces were created. He and his wife lived there till their deaths and their house is now the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center.

          Here he began creating his characteristic large scale artwork. His work was praised and dismissed at the same time. But he was gaining significant attention with a number of one-person exhibitions. While he was widely known in the New York art world, the rest of the world was introduced to him in August of 1949, when Life magazine did a piece on him.

          Pollock is one of those artists that makes you question the very definition of art. By creating this form of art-making we call Action Painting, Pollock clears a path for other artists using a more athletic aproach to art-making. I think pollock has influenced many well known artists as well as married the act of art-making with body movements or actions.

Ushio Shinohara

          Ushio Shinohara (born 1932, Tokyo), nicknamed “Gyu-chan”, is a Japanese Neo-Dadaist artist. His excited, bright, oversized work has exhibited at prestigious institutions internationally, including the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Guggenheim Museum Soho, New York; the Japan Society, New York; The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; Leo Castelli Gallery, New York; Galerie Oko, Berlin; The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles; and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Seoul, among others.

          A photographer named Tomatsu Shomei was one of his strongest influences on his art. Tomatsu Shomei was a Japanese photographer who studied at school called Aichi University. He took photos for Japanese photography magazines that were controversial and showed what was happening in the now. He is a photographer that is still celebrated in the Japanese culture and still works today. Shomei, the Japanese photographer, brought Japanese fears to life with the photos he took many of them taken after the Second World War.

          Shinohara demonstrates the same high-energy approach in every medium he employs. His sculptures, paintings, drawings, and sculptures depicting unique representations of everyday scenes from the eclectic urban landscape of New York City and the beaches of Bermuda and Miami. Working primarily in acrylic gouache and colored ink, with some collage elements, Shinohara’s cartoon-like compositions are infused with primary colors, a humorous spirit, and a violent painterly touch. The complexity of movement and impulsive nature that characterize Shinohara’s visual language reflect his unyielding creative energy.

          What should be admired about Shinohara is his work ethic and raw passion for creating art. He lives and breathes art making by either creating cardboard sculptures or with his style of action painting where he uses boxing gloves with sponges on them covered in paint to beat the paint onto the canvas. Much like Pollock Ushio uses the full motion of his body to create these works.

Yinka Shinobare

          Yinka Shonibare MBE RA was born in London and moved to Lagos, Nigeria at the age of three. He returned to London to study Fine Art first at Byam Shaw College of Art (now Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design) and then at Goldsmiths College, where he received his MFA, graduating as part of the ‘Young British Artists’ generation. He currently lives and works in the East End of London.

Over the past decade, Shonibare has become well known for his exploration of colonialism and post-colonialism within the contemporary context of globalisation. Shonibare’s work explores these issues, alongside those of race and class, through the media of painting, sculpture, photography and, more recently, film and performance. 

            Using this wide range of media, Shonibare examines in particular the construction of identity and tangled interrelationship between Africa and Europe and their respective economic and political histories. Mixing Western art history and literature, he asks what constitutes our collective contemporary identity today. Having described himself as a ‘post-colonial’ hybrid, Shonibare questions the meaning of cultural and national definitions.

          I personally admire Shinobare's cultural background and how it influences his work. He utilizes African textiles in the piece above to make a statement about african culture and prosperous European trade. He also employs history by making the figures headless like french monarchs once were when decapitated in the 1800s. He also shows no signs of identity within these figures such a faces or skin color, rather, he uses grey and tans.

Kehinde Wiley

          Kehinde Wiley masterfully borrows the language of Old Master portraiture to reframe art historical tropes of subject matter, power, and recognition in the context of race. His large-scale figurative paintings are equally as grand, ornate, and rich in symbolism as traditional portraiture; however, Wiley subverts the canon by depicting male protagonists of African descent, a demographic that has been virtually omitted from the Western painting tradition throughout the centuries.

          Wiley's models typically wear everyday contemporary clothing—sweatshirts, jeans, sports jerseys—while enacting traditional roles seen in canonical portraiture such as the gallant equestrian or the stoic Christ figure. The artist initially approached young men on the streets of Harlem and convinced them to pose for him in his studio and recreate classical portraits. His approach has now expanded to embrace models (not all of them black) in cities around the world, from Jerusalem to Mumbai and Rio de Janeiro, as part of his ongoing World Stage series.

         Kehinde Wiley's work displays a firm need to express african culture while employing it into classical paintings with dominant white subjects. His work is inspirational as it speaks to black culture and how it has been clouded in the art world of the past.

Fracois Truffaut

            After directing the shorts Une Visite (1954) and Les Miston (1957), Truffaut received widespread recognition for his feature-length big-screen debut, The 400 Blows, an iconic 1959 semi-autobiographical work that followed the travails of youngster Antoine Doinel, played by actor Jean-Pierre Léaud, who would continue the role in future Truffaut films. Truffaut won the Cannes Best Director prize for Blows, receiving a screenwriting Academy Award nomination as well and more importantly becoming a key figure in his country's Nouvelle Vague, or New Wave, movement of moviemaking.

             Truffaut followed up with 1960's Shoot the Piano Player and 1962's Jules and Jim, with the latter often considered a defining work that chronicled the story of two men and a woman caught in a layered romantic triangle.

            Truffaut developed a reputation for having an on-screen sensitivity to women, children and relationships' intricacies not often seen from male directors. Some of his additional work over the ensuing decade includedFahrenheit 451—an English-language 1966 adaptation of the Ray Bradbury dystopic novel—as well as The Wild Child (1970) and Two English Girls(1971).

          I personally find Truffaut's style of film making to be very bold at the time he was making films like The 400 Blows. This film definately would have inspired directors such as Wes Anderson.

          

Wes Anderson

          Wesley Wales Anderson was born in Houston, Texas. His mother, Texas Ann (Burroughs), is an archaeologist turned real estate agent, and his father, Melver Leonard Anderson, worked in advertising and PR. He has two brothers, Eric and Mel. Anderson's parents divorced when he was a young child, an event that he described as the most crucial event of his brothers and his growing up. During childhood, Anderson also began writing plays and making super-8 movies. He was educated at Westchester High School and then St. John's, a private prep school in Houston, Texas, which was later to prove an inspiration for the film Rushmore (1998).

          Wes Anderson is a personal favorite of mine. His work transends reality with a keen eye for color theory and strict camera angles that provide the viewer with a profound sense of space although most of the time the space is altered by the camera. Up above is a model of the grand budapest hotel that at first seems undoubtably real and tricks the audience. His signature techniques have been said to have been inspired by Fracois Trufaut, an earlier film director.

Damien Hirst

          A successful and controversial artist, Damien Hirst was born in Bristol, England, on June 7, 1965. He emerged as a leading figure in the Young British Artists (YBA) movement in the late 1980s and 1990s. His works, which include dead animal displays and spin-art paintings, have sold for exceptionally high prices. Hirst is one of the wealthiest artists living today.


            Hirst participated in a show at the Saatchi Gallery the following year. There he displayed "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living," a 14-foot-long glass tank with a shark preserved in formaldehyde. The shark had been bought from an Australian fisherman. (MORE INFO)

            In 1991, Hirst had his first solo exhibition at the Woodstock Street Gallery in London. He also participated in the Young British Artists. Hirst continued to set the art world on fire with his work at the 1993 Venice Bienniale, a renowned international art exhibition. There he showed "Mother and Child Divided," an installation piece that featured a bisected cow and her calf displayed in four vitrines, or glass cases, filled with formaldehyde. With his controversial and sometimes gruesome works, Hirst soon became one of the best known artists in Britain. He won the prestigious Turner Prize in 1995. "It's amazing what you can do with an E in A-Level art, a twisted imagination and a chainsaw," Hirst said in his acceptance speech.

            Hirst is another artist who I feel capitalizes on expensive materials and the business of his work rather than the art of making itself. It is quite sad to say the least that artists with not dissaplinary talent are making millions more than artists who dedicate there whole life to one medium rather than focusing on the pricey materials of the work.