Victoria Van Dyke

Victoria Van Dyke is a lesbian feminist artist living in Canada who uses mostly photography and collage in her works.

Born in 1976, Van Dyke was raped when she was eleven years old by her foster father and foster brother. The burden of her traumatic memories has caused her to create what some might call highly disturbing art pieces. She frequently discusses the idea of cannibalism, and has openly claimed that she herself was a cannibal. She commonly uses cannibalism as a metaphor for evil within modern society, such as businessmen eating each other and eating the poor in order to make themselves fat/rich. She often titles her work with numbers and uses models, claiming she dislikes her own body.

She spent over three years in a mental asylum, where she placed herself voluntarily. She was finally released in the Spring of 2005. She currently lives in Toronto, Canada. Most recently, she made the news for chopping off her little toe, putting it in a jar and offering it to a gallery as a work of art. The gallery - which preferred to be unnamed - refused, and called the police.

She combines religion, violence, guns, sexuality and humour in images (sometimes with text) in order to poke fun at society, society's obsession with sex, and the patriarchal treatment of young underage women as sex objects.

 The artist admits a strong thirst to eat the flesh of humans, but objects to the immorality of killing.

Pablo Picasso

Pablo (Ruiz y) Picasso
Birth Year : 1881
Death Year : 1973
Country : Spain

Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born in Malaga, Spain. The son of a Basque art teacher, Picasso showed a very early talent for drawing. He was fourteen when the family moved to Barcelona where his father was a professor at the School of Art. Two years later Picasso had his first exhibition of rather somber, quite classical paintings. Between 1900 and 1904 he made three trips to Paris where he studied the works of the Impressionists and of Cezanne. In 1904 he settled in France, where he has remained all his life. From 1901 onwards, Picasso's work may be divided into periods, each showing different influences and personal interests. From 1901 to 1904, the Blue Period, his paintings were melancholy in mood and subject matter, flat of form and strong contour, nearly monochromatic, and of intense blue. In some of these works, the Mannerist influence of El Greco is easily visible. The Rose Period (1905-06) offers the same flat forms but with a softer contour, a more romantic mood, and a delicate ink tonality that is often used with the blue of the earlier works. In 1906 Picasso met Matisse, with whom he shared an interest in the works of Gauguin and Cezanne. At the time he also was influenced by African primitive carvings, the result was the masterpiece Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, a huge painting of five nudes and a small still life, angularly distorted, with strong, barbaric forms that seem flat but are actually so shaded as to be three-dimensional. Called Cubism by the critics, its translucent, blocky planes led to the Analytical Cubism practiced by Braque and Picasso from 1909 to 1911 in which familiar objects such as glasses and pitchers were broken down into geometric planes. From about 1912 to 1915, the collage or paste-up method of Synthetic Cubism was developed in which bits of cloth or paper were used to build up an image. From 1915 until 1936, Picasso painted in various Cubist manners, experimented with Surrealism, and entered his classical (sometimes called white) period in the early 1920's, producing works that are sculpturesque and yet tender in mood. In the 1930's he was working in a Cubist style that is metamorphic in its visual approach. The tragic masterpiece Guernica (1937) is painted in this style. It is a work of monumental grandeur with a tragic, almost vocal effect upon the viewer. The double portraits that first appeared in 1938 are a further evolution of this metamorphic style. In 1948 Picasso returned to themes of women, children, animals, and birds, painting in various manners synthesizing all of his previous styles. He has also produced lithographs and etchings on classical and literary subjects, sculpture, murals, jewelry, and ceramic works. Picasso's palette is varied, but he may, at times, limit himself to tones of gray and black, as in Guernica, or to a favorite combination of black, white, and shades of ochre. Picasso exhibits in his work both an attachment to the past and an innovating spirit, a spontaneity and a sense of justice. His enormous talent, imagination, and vitality add up to an artistic temperament that can be called genius. Picasso's influence upon modern art has been immeasurable.

Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock
Birth Year : 1912
Death Year : 1956
Country : US

Jackson Pollock, who was born in Cody, Wyoming, lived in Arizona and California until 1929. He took his first lessons in art at the Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles. Pollock came to New York to study at the Art Students League and worked under Thomas Hart Benton during the years 1929 to 1931. He began his career as an artist during the depression years and worked for the Federal Arts Project in New York from 1938 to 1942. He then moved to Huntington, Long Island. Pollock's early painting was expressionistically realistic and then surrealistic in style. However, by the early 1940's his work had become completely abstract expressionist in character with no figuration at all. This was an expression of the isolation of the painter in the modern world: painting itself is the subject matter of these works, a concept that must be accepted by the viewer before he can begin to understand or appreciate this highly intellectual form of art. In 1951-52 Pollock reintroduced the semblance of anatomical imagery into his abstract work. Pollock's art was a violent, romantic revolt in which the artist himself was irrevocably involved, for he was completely committed to the act of painting in itself, to the possibilities inherent in paint, and to the results of the interactions between himself and his medium. When he flung his paint at the canvas, he energetically directed it, fought with it, and either won or lost the battle. The result is a painting that moves dynamically in all directions, from the inner to the outer surface. A freedom of expression resulted that revolutionized mid-twentieth-century art both in the United States and in Europe, creating a new expansion and a new impetus for the solution, through art, of modern man's struggle in the modern world. Pollock's career was tragically cut short by his death in an automobile accident.

Grant Wood

Grant Wood

Birth Year : 1892
Death Year : 1942
Country : US

Grant Wood, an American painter, was a leader in the art movement known as Regionalism, which also included the artist Thomas Hart Benton. Wood was born in Iowa and lived mainly in Cedar Rapids. He visited Europe repeatedly from an early age and studied at the Academie Julian in Paris in 1933. Still, he was mainly self-taught as an artist: he worked as a camouflage painter during World War One, an interior decorator, and a metalworker. His early paintings were strongly influenced by French Impressionism. In 1928, having been commissioned to make stained-glass windows for the Cedar Rapids Veterans Memorial Building, he traveled to Munich to supervise the windows' production; there he encountered early Dutch painting, and was inspired to give up Impressionism in favor of his characteristic mature style. Under the influence of Memling and other early Netherlandish masters, Wood began painting with close attention to sharp, crisp detail. In the Regionalist aesthetic, the everyday lives of working people are the highest subjects of art; modern ideas of abstraction are often considered elitist and decadent. Wood therefore mainly depicted scenes of everyday Midwestern life in a fresh and sometimes stark manner. His best-known work, American Gothic (1930), won a bronze medal at an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, but it caused controversy among some of the very people it was intended to depict, who interpreted the painting as broad, insensitive caricature. In the decades since, however, the work has become one of the most enduring images in American art. Wood painted many landscapes, as well as other scenes and portraits, including The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere (1931) and a genuinely satirical work, Daughters of the Revolution (1932). He supervised Federal Art Projects in Iowa and was assistant professor of fine arts at the University of Iowa.

Edgar Degas

Edgar Degas
Birth Year : 1834
Death Year : 1917
Country : France

Edgar Degas, an Impressionist more interested in movement than in color, was born in Paris, the son of a banker who wished him to go into business. Degas, therefore, did not begin to study art until he was twenty-one. He studied the work of Clouet and Poussin at the Louvre, and after a year, he went to Italy and studied the art of the Middle Ages and of the Renaissance. His greatest early admiration was for Ingres and until he met Manet and the Impressionists, Degas painted quite classical historical works. Once Degas joined the Impressionists, Degas changed his subject matter, painting racetrack scenes sketched from life and finished in his studio, theatrical and ballet scenes, and many pictures of women. He worked in many different mediums and concentrated upon the portrayal of movement that hints toward the action immediately preceding and immediately following that of the moment captured by his rapid pencil or brush.

His skill as a draughtsman was extraordinary and his paintings have the feeling of immediacy that is usually associated with the camera. Degas also discarded classical rules of composition and frequently used an oblique angle with light coming from below to create a new type of theatrically focused space. In his oils, he applied his color in translucent cross-hatching and for his pastels used a technique in which color was applied in many successive layers, each layer except the last fixed to give a powdery, soft effect that was particularly effective in his ballet scenes. Stories of Degas' sharp tongue and crustiness abound-he was a solitary misogynist-but his personality is of little importance in comparison to his art. His hundreds of dancers-in oils, pastels, tempera, gouache, charcoal, pencil and bronze-are revelations of human movement; his horses seem alive; and his studies of women at work, bathing, or in cafes, have a sense of reality that is both emotional and intellectual.