Luc Tuymans is a wonderful contemporary artist born in Mortsel, Belgium in the year 1958. Tuymans makes references to international events that have been on the news and in the papers. He works with oils on canvas with references to photographs.
As for paint quality and color, his work is very dull and greyed out, it reminds me of the way watercolor sometimes looks brilliant when fresh, then the paint dries and sometimes the color goes away.
For his collegiate education Tuymans attended the National School for the Visual Arts in Brussels and the Koninkliijke Academy in Antwerp. He was studying the fine arts at these colleges that switched his major to art history finishing up at Vriije University in Brussels.
price range information: The artist has broken the one million dollar mark at auction with a the sale of Mwana Kitoka for $1.4 million. Below is this painting:
His wife is an artist from Venezuela named Carla Arocha. Below an example of her work, she works mainly in acrylics as in this example:
In this clip from the Tate Shots series we visit the artist in his hometown of Antwerp, Belgium:
In this clip we visit a gallery show from 2008 with the great James Kalm:
Here with the great James Kalm we visit a show featuring Luc Tuymans that took place in 2013:
ROA is an up and coming street artist from Ghent, Belgium born in 1975. He is best known for making works in black and white that include wildlife. This artist is the Bob Kuhn of the street art world. Some great mixed media works are done with spray paint on pochoir. ROA also has worked with gouache.
The artist burst upon the national scene when a recording studio hired him to paint the outside of their locale with a rabbit. The neighbors were unhappy, but in the end ROA piece was able to keep its original location.
Some works are as large as two stories.
In this clip the artist paints a large bird.
A great underground movie featuring the work of ROA. A wall containing a zoo!
Here we visit the artist working at http://www.aviary.com producing one of the birds the artist is known for.
In addition to these works the artist has also done gallery shows. No price range is available for a certain medium and I am unable to form a pricing schedule.
ROA is an artist in very high demand. He has worked in Chicago, Illinois, San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Johannesburg, South Africa.
Love the street movement! Don’t fight it, embrace it! See it not only as a form of art, but also journalism. Artists used to be revered for their creativity and ideas.
Rene Magritte was born in Belgium in the year 1898. He went on to become a master at Surrealist painting. I am sure you are familiar with some of his images even if you didn’t know he was the artist. Most everyone has seen the image with a man in a suit who has a green apple as a substitute for a face.
Magritte’s father was a tailor. His mother took her own life when Magritte was a young teen. His mother fought depression her adult life and tried on many occasions to take her own life. For a brief period his father even locked her in her own room. This is supposedly the idea behind a theme of a woman appearing wrapped or draped in a cloth. When her body was found the face was slightly covered by her dress.
Magritte began taking drawing lessons at the age of twelve.
He would join the armed forces, get married, have an exhibition that received awful reviews, and then relocate to Paris where he became involved in the Surrealist style of painting.
He worked in the advertising industry for others and then with his own firm he set up with his brother.
He had two successful exhibitions in the States in the 1930s.
Whilst starting off his young career he lived rent free at the house of James Edwards. Edwards was a well known Surrealist painter.
He was most popular during the 1960s in the art world.
Matisse passed away in 1967 at the age of 68 from pancreatic cancer. He was living in Brussels, Belgium at the time.
Here we see a wonderful collection of artworks by Magritte set to music.
If you enjoy this artist be sure and check out some other Surrealist painters I have profiled such a Salvador Dali, who was obsessed with painting time and clocks. He did many drawings, paintings, and sculptures with this as his theme. The Surrealist painters are all incredible draughtsman as you must be to incorporate items that aren’t usually seen side by side.
Here we have a clip from the series of Andy Warhol screen tests featuring Salvador Dali, I wanted to make sure you remembered his face and his flamboyant personality.
And an example of one of his signature time paintings.
Other than Dali my other favorite Surrealist painter is Hughie Lee Smith. Smith was one of few African-American artists working in the genre. I enjoy looking at his works because like Magritte and Dali they explore the universal themes such as the passage of time. Below is a fantastic example of Hughie Lee Smith’s style of Surrealist painting.
I was able to find a piece dealing with time made by Magritte. Its titled Time Tranfixed.
Price range information: Lithographs range from $3,ooo to $20,000. Etchings range from $1500 to $5,000 for most works. Watercolors start at $2,000. Bronzes range from $5,000 to $10,000.
One last thing to remember about the Surrealist artists, is that Dali has the coolest house I have ever seen! Here is a clip about it.
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