Favorite Artists

These are my favorite artists, each for a different reason:

Nick Bantock    “The threads of circumstance that lead to tomorrow are so tenuous that all the fussing and worrying about decisions is futile compared to the pure randomness of existence.”

Shirle Bedient

Mike Bell      Northumbrian (Northern England) artist

Lee Bontecou

Gerald Brommer “Don’t carpet your rut.”

Louise Cadillac   “The two most fertile sources of ideas are the painting on which I’m working, and a kind of self-hypnosis or day-dreaming.”

Chuck Close    “The advice I like to give young artists, or really anyone who will listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration.  Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work.  If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work.  All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself.  Things occur to you.  If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens.  But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction.  Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive.  You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.”

Virginia Cobb    Her book DISCOVERING THE INNER EYE: EXPERIMENTS IN WATER MEDIA is a        must-read.

Joseph Cornell    (12/24/1903 – 12/29/1972)   “Beauty should be shared for it enhances our joys. To explore its mystery is to venture towards the sublime.”

Michael DeMeng

Richard Diebenkorn (4/22/1922-3/30/1993)     “I don’t go to the studio with the idea of “saying” something.  What I do is face the blank canvas and put a few marks on it that start me on some sort of dialogue.”

Erika Dodge

Bruce Dorfman

M.C. Escher  (6/17/1898-3/27/1972)

Lyonel Feininger  (7/17/1871-1/13/1956)

Gunther Gerzso (6/17/15-2/21/2000)   “I discovered that it was really interesting to add lines to a painting.”

Andy Goldsworthy

Peder Hegland (potter)

Friedensreich Hundertwasser  (12/15/1928 – 2/19/2000)   “Everything is so infinitely simple, so infinitely beautiful.”

Janet Jones    “Rather than collecting beautiful materials for collage and mixed media, I look for those that have survived against all odds​.  I take pleasure in giving these humble materials the loving presentation they deserve.

Cordula Kagemann

Gustav Klimt  (7/14/1862-2/6/1918)

Debbie Lyddon     Debbie Lyddon is an artist and maker based in Surrey and Norfolk, UK. Her creative practice explores landscape and place and includes mixed media cloths, sculpture, installation and drawing. Her inspiration comes from experiencing and paying attention to her surroundings.

Tom Maakestad

Charles Rennie Mackintosh  (6/7/1868-12/10/1928)    “There is hope in the honest error, none in the icy perfection of the mere stylist.”

Dan Mondloch  Minnesota watermedia artist

George Morrison (1919-4/17/2000)

Alphonse Mucha  (7/24/1860 – 7/14/1939)

Louise Nevelson (7/23/1899-4/17/1988)     “From earliest, earliest childhood I knew I was going to be an artist.  I felt like an artist. So I have that blessing, and there was never a time that I questioned it or doubted it.”

Ronnie Offen

Deanna Persson

Pablo Picasso  (10/25/1881 – 4/8/1973)   “If you know exactly what you are going to do, what’s the good of doing it? Since you know, the exercise is pointless. It is better to do something else.”

Stephen Quiller

Larry Rivers   (8/17/1923-8/14/2002)

Danny Saathoff

Katherine Salverda

Kurt Schwitters (6/20/1887-1/8/1948)

Sam Spiczka     “When I look at a natural creation, be it a bone, shell or tree, I am struck by

the anomalies and variations found in an object that appears symmetrical at

first glance.  The perfection that life aspires to is forced to adapt into a

more irregular and complex form when it encounters an indifferent environment.

Yet the ideal still lies just below the surface.  It is a whisper only our mind

can hear.  My sculpture is inspired by this conflict between an ideal state and

an imperfect reality.  In it can be found both the chaos of growth and the

geometry of perfection.”

Shona Wilson  Australian artist