5 Artists I Would Use In My Classroom

5 Artists I Would Use In My Classroom

1. Vincent Van Gogh (30 March 1853 – 29 July 1890)
He was a Dutch Post-Impressionist artist. His paintings and drawings include some of the world's best known, most popular and most expensive pieces. Van Gogh spent his early life working for a firm of art dealers and after a brief spell as a teacher, became a missionary worker in a very poor mining region. He did not embark upon a career as an artist until 1880. Initially he only worked with somber colours, until an encounter in Paris with Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism, whose brighter colours and style of painting he developed into a uniquely recognizable style, which was fully developed during time spent at Arles, France. He produced more than 2,000 works, including around 900 paintings and 1100 drawings and sketches, during the last ten years of his life. Most of his best-known works were produced in the final two years of his life, during which time he cut off part of his left ear following a breakdown in his friendship with Paul Gauguin. After this he suffered recurrent bouts of mental illness, and committed suicide. The central figure in Vincent van Gogh's life was his brother Theo, who continually and selflessly provided financial support. Their lifelong friendship is documented in numerous letters they exchanged from August 1872 onwards. Van Gogh is a pioneer of what came to be known as Expressionism and had an enormous influence on 20th century art, especially on the Fauves and German Expressionists.

2. Pablo Picasso (October 25, 1881 – April 8, 1973)
He was a Spanish painter and sculptor. His full name was Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Clito Ruiz y Picasso. One of the most recognized figures in 20th century art, he is best known as the co-founder, along with Georges Braque, of cubism. Pablo Picasso was born in Málaga, Spain, the first child of José Ruiz y Blasco and María Picasso y López. He was christened with the names Pablo, Diego, José, Francisco de Paula, Juan Nepomuceno, Maria de los Remedios, and Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad. Picasso's father was Jose Ruíz, a painter whose specialty was the naturalistic depiction of birds and who for most of his life was also a professor of art at the School of Crafts and a curator of a local museum. The young Picasso showed a passion and a skill for drawing from an early age; according to his mother, his first word was "piz," a shortening of lápiz, the Spanish word for pencil. It was from his father that Picasso had his first formal academic art training, such as figure drawing and painting in oil. Although Picasso attended art schools throughout his childhood, often those where his father taught, he never finished his college-level course of study at the Academy of Arts (Academia de San Fernando) in Madrid, leaving after less than a year.

3. Jacob Lawrence (September 7, 1917 - June 9, 2000)
He was an African American painter; he was married to fellow artist Gwendolyn Knight. Lawrence is probably among the best-known twentieth century African American painters, a distinction also shared by Romare Bearden. Lawrence's Migration Series made him nationally famous when it was featured in a 1941 issue of Fortune Magazine. The series depicts the great move north of blacks in the Depression years. Born in 1917 in Atlantic City, New Jersey, Lawrence was thirteen when he moved with his mother, sister and brother to New York City, where she enrolled him in classes at an arts and crafts settlement house in Harlem. After dropping out of high school at sixteen, Lawrence worked in a laundry and a printing plant and attended classes at the Harlem Art Workshop, taught by his mentor, the African American artist Charles Alston. Lawrence married Gwendolyn Knight as a young man after receiving a job with the Works Progress Administration where he studied under such notable Harlem Renaissance artists as Charles Alston and Henry Bannarn in the Alston-Bannarn workshop. He finally settled in Seattle, Washington and became an art professor at the University of Washington where some of his works are now displayed in the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering and in Meany Hall for the Performing Arts. The piece in the main lobby of Meany Hall entitled "Theatre" was commissioned for the hall in 1985. In 1998 he received Washington State's highest honor, The Washington Medal of Merit.

4. Leonardo Da Vinci (April 15, 1452 – May 2, 1519)
He was an Italian polymath: scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, painter, sculptor, architect, musician, and writer. Born the illegitimate son of a notary, Messer Piero, and a peasant woman, Caterina, Leonardo had no surname in the modern sense, "da Vinci" simply meaning "of Vinci": his full birth name was "Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci", meaning "Leonardo, son of (Mes)ser Piero from Vinci." Leonardo has often been described as the archetype of the "Renaissance man", a man whose seemingly infinite curiosity was equalled only by his powers of invention. He is widely considered to be one of the greatest painters of all time and perhaps the most diversely talented person ever to have lived.It is primarily as a painter that Leonardo was and is renowned. Two of his works, the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper occupy unique positions as the most famous, the most reproduced and most imitated portrait and religious painting of all time. Their fame is approached only by Michelangelo's Creation of Adam. Leonardo's drawing of the Vitruvian Man is also iconic.As an engineer, Leonardo conceived ideas vastly ahead of his own time, conceptually inventing a helicopter, a tank, the use of concentrated solar power, a calculator, a rudimentary theory of plate tectonics, the double hull, and many others. Relatively few of his designs were constructed or were feasible during his lifetime. Some of his smaller inventions such as an automated bobbin winder and a machine for testing the tensile strength of wire entered the world of manufacturing unheralded. He greatly advanced the state of knowledge in the fields of anatomy, civil engineering, optics, and the study of water. Of his works, perhaps 15 paintings survive, together with his notebooks, which contain drawings, scientific diagrams, and notes.


5. Claude Monet (November 14, 1840 – December 5, 1926)
He was a founder of French impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting.The term Impressionism is derived from the title of his painting Impression, Sunrise. Monet was born on November 14, 1840 on the fifth floor of 45 rue Laffitte, in the ninth arrondissement of Paris.He was the second son of Claude-Adolphe and Louise-Justine Aubrée Monet, both of them second-generation Parisians. On May 20, 1841, he was baptized in the local parish church, Notre-Dame-de-Lorette as Oscar-Claude. In 1845, his family moved to Le Havre in Normandy. His father wanted him to go into the family grocery store business, but Claude Monet wanted to become an artist. His mother was a singer. On the first of April 1851, Monet entered the Le Havre secondary school of the arts. He first became known locally for his charcoal caricatures, which he would sell for ten to twenty francs. Monet also undertook his first drawing lessons from Jacques-François Ochard, a former student of Jacques-Louis David. On the beaches of Normandy in about 1856/1857 he met fellow artist Eugène Boudin who became his mentor and taught him to use oil paints. Boudin taught Monet "en plein air" (outdoor) techniques for painting. On 28 January 1857 his mother died. He was 16 years old when he left school, and went to live with his widowed childless aunt, Marie-Jeanne Lecadre.