Jenny Saville is an English painter. She gained her degree at Glasgow School of Art. She is influenced by large women, plastic surgery, and the transformation of men into women and vice versa.
Jenny Saville: " I want people to know what it is they're looking at. But at the same time, the closer they get to the painting, it's like going back into childhood. And it's like an abstract piece-- it becomes the landscape of the brush marks rather than just sort of an intellectual landscape."
Jenny Saville on her approach to the process of painting: : "I tend to think about each section of a painting in terms of musical passages. I work on areas like one meter by one meter, so I'll think, I've got to get across the nose or the stomach of the pig or whatever; how am I going to play it? So I mix up all the colors and think of them as if they were tones. And then I think, How am I going to play that brush mark? Am I going to play it hard, next to some fiddly brush marks? I think of it like that."
Jean- Michel Basquiat was an American artist, gaining popularity first as a graffiti artist in NYC, then became popluar for his Neo-expressionist art. He was friends and worked with Andy Warhol.
Basquiat used painterly gestures on canvas, often depicting skeletal figures and mask-like faces that expressed his obsession with mortality. Other frequently depicted imagery such as automobiles, buildings, police, children's sidewalk games, and graffiti came from his experience painting on the city streets. A middle period from late 1982 to 1985 featured multi-panel paintings and individual canvases with exposed stretcher bars, the surface dense with writing, collage, and unrelated imagery.
These works reveal a strong interest in Basquiat's black identity and his identification with historical and contemporary black figures and events.
Ernest Ruckle is an American artist known for his elaborately structured paintings.This specific painting is called "The EuroDisney Triptych"
Ruckles work process: "The EuroDisney Triptych was painted on Strathmore illustration board, using ink and a mixture of Winsor and Newton watercolors and Liquitex acrylic medium, which also served as the final varnish. The painting is an elaborate comment on the juggernaut of American popluar culture that's homogenizing the world. The EuroDisney theme park is the perfect symbol of this phenomenon. The painting shows the park being destroyed by a huge crowd of violent demonstrators. The structure of the painting is like that of a comic strip, moving chronologically from left to right, the action becoming more and more violent. The style reflects this change and turns gradually from a 1930 newpaper-cartoon style on the left to a more realistic style in the center to the expressionist- cubist style on the right. The demonstrators bring with them signs, floats, and giant ballons that grotesquely parody the Disney images. Ultimately, the demonstrators prove themselves more imaginative and relevant than the designers of the park. The theme of the painting is not an attack on Disney. Instead, it's a challenge to Europe and the rest of the world, not to put up barriers to keep out American popular culture, but to create and update their own."
