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I was recently asked to describe one of my mindful practices and after some thought, I realised that one of my greatest pleasures in life is strolling around an art gallery. Having travelled the world for the past 40 years, I have been fortunate enough to visit some of the great galleries off the world.
My love of art came about when i met a very inspiring artist in the 1990s. She introduced me to abstract art and I have been captivated by it, ever since. It is often seen as a luxury but, just like exercise and meditation, researchers are coming to believe it’s fundamental to our mental and physical wellbeing, and as a Health Coach, I find it aligns perfectly with my ethos.
Recent research by the Mental Health Foundation that suggests that art helps boost confidence, making us feel more engaged and resilient. It can also alleviate anxiety, depression and stress.
The mixture of a quiet, calm atmosphere, alongside stimulating ideas makes galleries and museums unique. They are de-stressing environments and give us a sense of purpose and control.
In recent years, neuroscience has even used MRI technology to allow us to see how art changes our brains and how it can positively influence our health, wellbeing and feeling of community.
As a mindful exercise I decided to list my favourite artists, using the knowledge I have accrued from visiting art galleries, and reading books on the subject over the years.
Below, I have chronicled thirty of my favourite artists. Some are on my list, as they are indisputable titans of their craft, even though I don't necessary like their work, others are incredible geniuses whose work I admire greatly.
So let's dive in...........
1 Joan Miro (1893 ~ 1983)
He was a Catalan painter who combined abstract art with Surrealist fantasy. He suffered from debilitating bouts of depression during his life and this was reflected in his paintings.
He was notable for his interest in the subconscious mind, which was reflected in his childlike recreations.
He was also known for sabotaging his work, and these shocking paintings are found in the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona.
Untitled 1964
Plume de paon - Joan Miró
Oda a Joan Miro
2 Henri Matisse (1869 ~ 1954)
Matisse was one of the heroic figures of Modernism, and produced compositions that were both disciplined and fully of vitality. His palette was supremely sensual and expressive. His famous work The Snail was painted in 1953 and I love how colourful and vibrant this piece is. At first it looks a mish mash of squares. But look more closely and the concentric pattern formed by the coloured shapes echoes the spiral pattern found in the snail's shell.
He was 84 when he painted this and mostly bed-ridden but with the help of assistants, he completed this massive masterpiece that stands at almost 3 square metres.
It can be viewed in The Tate.
The Snail
Infusion of Light
3 Claude Monet (1840 ~ 1926)
One of the most iconic and recognisable painters of all time. During his long career, he was the most consistent and prolific practitioner of impressionism's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein air (outdoor) landscape painting. The Impressionist movement was one of the important art movements of the late 19th century.
I chose ‘Impression Sunrise', as sunrise is my favourite time of day. It was created from a scene in the port of Le Havre, Monet’s birthplace. He depicts a mist, which provides a hazy background to the piece. The orange and yellow hues contrast with the dark vessels. The smaller boats in the foreground appear to be propelled by the movement of the water. The brushstrokes show various colours sparkling on the sea.
Throughout his long career, Monet depicted the landscape and leisure activities of Paris and its environs as well as the Normandy coast. He developed a unique style that captured a way to perceive nature, on canvas.
Impression Sunrise
The Modern Garden
Villas at Bordighera
4 Piet Mondrian (1872 ~ 1944)
Mondrian was a Dutch painter who was an important leader in the development of modern abstract art.
His early paintings were traditional landscapes. But his most iconic works used the simplest combinations of straight lines and right angles. Radically simplifying the elements of his paintings to reflect what he saw as the spiritual order underlying the visible world, he created a clear, aesthetic language within his canvases.
His use of asymmetrical balance and simplified pictorial images were crucial in the development of modern art, and his iconic abstract works remain influential in design and is familiar in popular culture to this day.
5 John Constable 1776 ~ 1837
One of Britain’s greatest landscape painters, he devoted his career to capturing nature on his canvases. His most famous painting was the Hay Wain which has been reproduced countless times, although he sold few paintings in his lifetime.
He was born in Suffolk and spent much of his life painting pastoral scenes in his birth county as well as Wiltshire, Dorset and Hampstead, London. At the time, bucolic scenes were not as highly regarded as paintings of historic scenes, which were viewed as the pinnacle of artistic achievement.
This stormy painting entitled Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows is thought to reflect his worries about the effect of political reform on the Anglian Church. The storm may also represent Constable's grief following the death of his wife, Maria.
Wivenhoe Park
6 Bridget Riley (1931 ~)
The British painter explored many styles in her early years but is best know for optical art (Op-art). Her early forays were in black and white, but she later introduced colour into her works, experimenting with the relationships between different hues.
This work, entitled The Ivy Painting, was commissioned in 1998 for the celebrity hot spot The Ivy restaurant in London and the colours are still used in the decor of the many Ivy restaurants across the UK, today. The Ivy Painting is one of her “zig” paintings, characterised by planes, divided vertically and diagonally by bold colours.
The title of this work Nataraja is a term from Hindu mythology and refers to the God Shiva who is 'Lord of the Dance', and often depicted as a cosmic dancer with many arms.
Bridget Riley was inspired to create this work by a trip to India she took in 1981. The movements of the dance and the many arms are created in this piece by the use of vertical bands of colour that are cut across by diagonals.
7 Marc Chagall (1887 ~ 1985)
Born in Belarus he was a Russian-French-Jewish artist of international repute who was one of the most influential modernist artists of the 20th Century, not only famed for his paintings, but also ceramics and stained glass.
In Sunset from Nice, Chagall depicts the varied vegetation of the Cote d’ Azur, from the palm trees along the lower margin, to the vibrant bouquet of flowers, to the tree branch in the upper left corner. The vegetation inspires a sense of continual growth and prosperity, which is further echoed by the form of the couple. The scene is permeated by the radiating warmth of the invisible sun which is reflected in the waters of the bay.
Chagall's work shows a masterful understanding of colour, and a deep emotional resonance, which is perhaps why his work is still so popular today.
I particularly love this painting as I have stood and overlooked this bay in the very spot Chagall painted this in 1967 (the year I was born).
Baie des Anges:Nice
Paris Par la Fenêtre
8 Paul Cézanne (1839 ~ 1906)
Cezanne was a French artist who had an immense influence on modern art. Despite the fact that he painted conventional and well-known subjects such as fruit, still lifes, portraits, and landscapes, the French painter is known for his innovative style. He challenged how those subjects were traditionally depicted and emphasised his own sensations, visual experiences, and perception in his work. His subjective paintings can teach us a lot about the way we see and perceive the world around us.
He was the artists artist. Admired by the greats such as Picasso and Matisse.
In 2022 Tate Modern did a chronological exhibition of his work and these two pieces were my favourites.
Still Life Post, Bottle, Cup and Fruit, is reflective of Cézanne’s most recognisable paintings of elegantly arranged apples. In this work, he emphasised shading, leaving certain areas of canvas exposed where light bounced off a curtain or a jug.
L’Estaque with Red Roofs shows a stunning view of the Gulf of Marseille, the vividly blue ocean providing a backdrop to the clusters of sun dappled buildings in the coastal town.
Still Life Post, Bottle, Cup and Fruit
L’Estaque with Red Roofs
9 Mark Rothko (1903 ~ 1970)
Rothko's work is characterised by rigorous attention to elements such as colour, shape, balance, depth, composition, and scale; yet, he refused to consider his paintings solely in these terms.
His classic paintings of the 1950s featured expanding dimensions and an increasingly simplified use of form, brilliant hues, and broad, thin washes of colour.
In his large, floating rectangles of colour, which seem to engulf the spectator, he explored with a rare mastery of nuance, the expressive potential of colour contrasts and modulations.
In Untitled (Red), 1956, its brilliant colour chords envelops the viewer’s senses. Rothko’s overlapping blocks of pigment seem to oscillate in constant motion, and the predominant hue – red – stirs the emotions.
Untitled (Red), 1956
No 1 Royal Red and Blue
10 David Hockney (1937 ~ )
He is one of the most popular and influential British artists of the twentieth century and a major contributor to the Pop Art movement in the 1960s. Even into his 80’s he continues to change his style and ways of working, embracing new technologies along the way.
He is best known for his serial paintings of swimming pools, portraits of friends, and verdant landscapes. His oeuvre ranges from photography and opera posters, to Cubist-inspired abstractions and plein-air paintings of the Yorkshire countryside. Often returning to a theme many times, he explores the ways one can see an image or a space.
He has produced some of the most vividly recognisable works of the twentieth century.
The paintings featured are ‘Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire’ and ‘The Bigger Splash’ which is part of his iconic California swimming pool series.
11 Gustav Klimt (1862 ~ 1918)
He was an Austrian symbolist painter and one of the most prominent members of the Vienna Secession movement. Klimt's primary subject was the female body and his work was often distinguished by elegant gold or coloured decoration, spirals and swirls, and phallic shapes, used to conceal the more erotic representations.
He embedded allusions to sexuality and the human psyche in the rich, lavishly decorated figures and patterns that populated his canvases, murals, and mosaics. Often, their messages—of pleasure, sexual liberation, and human suffering—were only thinly veiled. His more risqué pieces, depicting voluptuous nudes and piles of entwined bodies, scandalised the Viennese establishment.
However his work was hugely admired by many. His artist peers were similarly enthralled with his style, recognising Klimt’s groundbreaking injection of sexuality, atmosphere, and expression into figurative painting.
His best known work is The Kiss which portrays two figures melting into each other in a hungry embrace. He binds their bodies together in the same cloth: a shimmering gold tapestry whose pattern references both intimacy and anatomy. The side covering the man is decorated with is erect rectangles, while the woman’s is swathed with concentric circles. By interweaving its subjects with flowers and divinity, it communicates that the act of a kiss is not as something to be hidden, but something that should be open and is totally natural.
12 Salvador Dalí (1904 ~ 1989)
He was among the most versatile and prolific artists of the 20th century most well-known for his influence on the Surrealist movement. This was an art movement where painters featured dream-like scenes and showed situations that would be bizarre or impossible in real life. Dali’s work had a dream-like quality to it. He painted melting clocks and floating eyes, clouds that look like faces and rocks that look like bodies.
Dalí was renowned for his flamboyant personality and role of mischievous provocateur as much as for his undeniable technical virtuosity, and he courted controversy throughout his career.
I struggle to find a piece of Dali's work that I enjoy, but that is the nature of art. Some of it stirs emotion, others leave it cold. But there is no right or wrong, it is just each person’s individual reaction to it, and that is why I am so continually mesmerised by it.
Archeological Reminiscence of Millet's Angelus
13 Wassily Kandinsky (1866 ~ 1944)
He was a Russian painter and art theorist and is generally credited as one of the pioneers of abstraction in western art. Born in Moscow, he spent his childhood in Odesa, however he settled in France, where he remained until his death.
He exploited the interrelation between colour and form to create an aesthetic experience that engaged the sight, sound, and emotions of the public.
The Russian hierophant of abstraction believed that eschewing representational artistry, offered the possibility of transcendental - out of body- expression. He felt that copying from nature interfered with this process. Highly inspired to create art that communicated a universal sense of spirituality, he innovated a pictorial language that only loosely related to the outside world, but gave an insight into the artist's inner experience.
I love both of these painting and as they exude energy, movement and playfulness.
Yellow, Red, Blue
Black Lines
14 Vincent Van Gogh (1853 ~ 1890)
The Dutch painter is undoubtedly one of the most famous and influential figures in the history of Western art. He created over 2,000 works in a decade, including 860 oil paintings in the last two years of his tragically short life.
His work has such incredible energy and vitality. Seeing it in the flesh, is even more impressive. It is characterised by bold, symbolic colours, accompanied by dramatic and highly expressive brushwork using a technique known as impasto - where the surface of a painting is heavily built up with paint layers.
Like so many painters he spent this final years in France, He settled in Arles where he was captivated by the clarity of light and the vibrant colours of Provençe.
The traumas of his life, documented in his letters, have tended to dominate and distort modern perceptions of his art, and he took his life at the age of 37. He was characterised as mad at the time, but today we would recognise that he suffered bouts of severe depression. It is sad that for many years the former was the narrative. What we should focus on is the fact that his legacy to the art world is extraordinary.
I have chosen Starry Night, and Olive Tree both of which I took when I visited the MoMA, New York. They are breathtaking pieces, illustrating why Van Gogh is so highly regarded.
Olive Tree
Starry Night
Day 15 Jackson Pollock (1912 ~ 1956)
Jackson Pollock produced work that was seen as incredibly challenging, at the time. He was an alcoholic and this dominated his adult life. It also ended his life tragically early, as he crashed his car while driving under the influence, at the age of 44. He suffered from depression, was a recluse and had a volatile personality too. Who knows what the outcome may have been if there was more help around for those who struggled with alcohol all those years ago.
Within the world of art, he remains a polarising figure, and the oft used criticism ‘my 5 year old could have done that’ levelled at abstract artists, is never more true when it comes to Pollock’s work. However his work, Number 17a sold for $200,000,000, and is the 5th most expensive piece of art ever sold.
He was an American painter and instrumental in the abstract expressionist movement. His drip technique comprised of him pouring or splashing paint onto a flat surface, enabling him to view and paint his canvases from all angles. His action painting covered the entire canvas and he often used the force of his whole body to paint, often dancing while doing so. This extreme form of abstraction divided the critics: some praised the immediacy of the creation, while others derided the random effects.
Pollock's greatness lies in developing one of the most radical abstract styles in the history of modern art, detaching line from colour, redefining the categories of drawing and painting, and finding new means to describe pictorial space.
Convergence
No 34
16 Rene Magritte (1898 ~ 1967)
René Magritte was a Belgium born painter. He suffered personal tragedy at a young age, when his mother drowned herself and that is likely to have influenced his later work.
He became a leading figure in the visual Surrealist movement and produced a body of work that rendered commonplace things strange. He incorporated objects into unfamiliar or unusual scenes, and deliberately mislabelled them, thereby elevating the ordinary. By using pictorial and linguistic puzzles, Magritte made the familiar disturbing and strange, posing questions about the nature of representation and reality.
Magritte’s approach was, what is concealed is more important than what is open to be viewed. This was true both of his own fears and of his manner of depicting the mysterious. By wrapping a body in linen or concealing heads under hoods, he wasn’t hiding things, he was symbolising alienation.
I first became aware of Magritte when I watched the amazing Thomas Crown Affair (the Pierce Brosnan version). It is one of my all time favourite films and The Son of Man makes a prominent appearance. It is perhaps his best-known piece and is a self-portrait.
Personal Values
17 Francis Bacon (1909 ~ 1992)
Bacon was an Irish painter best know for his raw and disturbing imagery. He rejected the preferred artistic style of abstraction, in favour of a distinctive and disturbing realism. Growing up, Bacon had a difficult and ambivalent relationship with his parents – especially his father, who struggled with his son’s emerging homosexuality. It contributed to a troubled childhood.
This may explain why he focussed on the brutality of fact and used biomorphism to showcase his craft, cementing his reputation as being a uniquely bleak chronicler of the human condition.
He gave to the twentieth century a visual repertoire of screaming popes, deformed heads, distended bodies and crucifixions, symbolising a universal if often inscrutable anxiety.
Despite his bleak formative years, he was reputed to be charismatic, articulate and well-read and spent his middle-age eating, drinking and gambling in London, generally living a hedonistic lifestyle.
However when his partner committed suicide his art became even more introverted and sombre and Bacon himself, largely distanced himself from his social circle.
Since his death, Bacon's reputation has grown steadily, and his work is among the most acclaimed, expensive and sought-after on the art market.
As I have previously mentioned, I am not only going to focus on art that I personally like and enjoy. To me, part of the appreciation of art is to try to understand why some artists are so revered, when their work seems pretty….awful.
I would liken Bacon’s work to the horror movie genre in the cinema. It is designed to disturb and shock. He seeks to illicit a visceral response. Just as I would never watch a horror film, I understand some people do. In the same way I would never want a Bacon hanging in my kitchen. It’s all part of life’s rich tapestry and acceptance of other people.
Self Portrait
Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion
Head VI
18 Paul Gauguin (1891 ~ 1903)
Gauguin was an important figure in the Symbolist movement as a painter, sculptor, printmaker and ceramist. His work influenced the likes of Picasso and Matisse. However he did not achieve great acclaim until after his death.
Gauguin experimented with new colour theories and semi-decorative approaches to painting. He famously worked one summer in an intensely colourful style alongside, Van Gogh, but the partnership did not endure and not long after that, he turned his back entirely on Western society, seeing it as stifling and stultifying.
He left his wife and four children and began travelling regularly to the south Pacific in the early 1890s, where he developed a new style that married everyday observation with mystical symbolism, a style strongly influenced by the popular, so-called primitive arts of Africa, Asia, and French Polynesia. Gauguin's rejection of his European family, society, and the Paris art world for a life apart, in the land of an exotic ‘other’ world has come to serve as a romantic example of the artist-as-wandering-mystic.
Seeking the kind of direct relationship to the natural world that he witnessed in various communities of French Polynesia and other non-western cultures, Gauguin treated his painting as a philosophical meditation on the ultimate meaning of human existence, as well as the possibility of religious fulfilment and answers on how to live closer to nature.
There was a growing fascination in the West for an insight into less industrially-developed cultures, and the notion that non-Western people might be more genuinely spiritual, or more in touch with the elemental forces of the cosmos, than their comparatively "artificial" European and American counterparts.
Gauguin's name and work became synonymous with the idea of ultimate artistic freedom, or the complete liberation of the creative individual from one's original cultural moorings. However the spotlight has recently been turned on his relationships with teenage girls which has somewhat tainted his legacy.
Landscape with Peacocks
Mountains in Tahiti
Tahitian woman with a flower.
19 Patrick Heron (1920 ~ 1999)
Heron was a giant of British Modernism and his work made me fall in love with abstract art, and encouraged by my wonderful friend (and ex mother-in-law) I developed an appreciation and understanding, of this genre of work.
Patrick Heron belonged to a hugely influential group of artist at the St Ives School, which included Barbara Hepworth, Sir Terry Frost, and Ben Nicholson.
West Cornwall’s special quality of light has drawn painters to St Ives since the beginning of the nineteenth century and the extension of the railways in the late 19th Century further eased access to the remote town, making it an even more appealing as a destination for artists.
Following the Second World War, an established group of painters, sculptors and potters moved to St Ives and the town quickly grew a reputation as a centre for avant-grade artists. and soon established the town as an important artistic centre for the avant-garde and the St Ives School was established in the 1950. As a legacy of this cultural phenomenon the Tate established its second regional gallery in the town and it opened in 1993.
Heron's work is most noted for his exploration and use of colour and light. Over the years looked he sought to examine the idea of making all areas of the painting of equal importance.
The dazzling vibrancy of his work is what I love the most and maybe one day I will be lucky enough to have a piece of his work hanging on my wall.
Interlocking Scarlett and Pink in Deep Green
January 1973: 9
Interlocking Scarlett and Pink in Deep Green
Azalea Garden
20 Alberto Giacometti 1901 ~ 1966
Giacometti was one of the most important sculptors of the 20th century, and perhaps one of the most recognised too. His work was particularly influenced by artistic styles such as Cubism and Surrealism. Philosophical questions about the human condition as well as existential debates, played a significant role in his work.
Around 1935 he gave up on his Surrealist influences to pursue a more deepened analysis of figurative compositions. He is well know for depicting slender, elegiac forms that emphasised the relationship between the body and gravity.
He devoted much of his career to the struggle between matter and meaning, engaging in an extended exploration of how to reduce the figure’s mass as far as possible while imbuing it with essential force. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that Giacometti’s depictions of humanity are “always mediating between nothingness and being,” his sculptures evoking the emotional intensity of the void.
His critical nature led to self-doubt about his own work and his self-perceived inability to do justice to his own artistic vision. His insecurities nevertheless remained a powerful motivating artistic force.
His sculptures though are quite mesmerising and are well worth seeing in a gallery, here is the Walking Man which is in the Guggenheim, Bilbao.
Walking Man
Caroline
22 JMW Turner (1775 ~ 1851)
Joseph Mallord William Turner was an English painter, one of the greatest figures in the history of landscape painting. Unlike many of the great painters, his talent was recognised at a very young age, and he even earned money as a child, colouring prints. He enrolled at the Royal Academy Schools and studied there for six years.
His first exhibition was at the age of 15 and he toured Britain sketching and producing many drawings, that would form the basis of his later oil paintings. In his late 20s his career started to flourish, and he was renowned for being hardworking, a good businessman and frugal by nature.
He pioneered the use of light, colour and atmosphere in painting, which later influenced Impressionism and was fond of depicting the power of nature in a dramatic way.
He focused heavily on natural phenomena and catastrophes, including fire, rain, storms, fog, sunlight and the power of the sea as well as shipwrecks. His pictures often incorporated references to literature, mythology and historical events. Tennyson called him ‘The Shakespeare of landscape.’ Turner’s late works reflected profound changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution.
East Cowes Castle
Modern Italy: The Pifferari
T
The ‘Fighting Téméraire’ Tugged to Her Last Berth to Be Broken Up
22 - Howard Hodgkin (1932 ~ 2017)
Immersion in sheer colour bliss, is how the work of Sir Howard Hodgkin was described in his obituary in the Guardian in 2017. Renowned for his vivid, gestural abstractions which pushed the boundaries of painting, often quite literally—the artist became well known for brushstrokes that trailed off the edges of the wooden supports he used instead of traditional canvases. The results blurred the distinction between painting and frame and undermined traditional notions of the picture plane.
Hodgkin’s compositions incorporated both geometric fields and more fluid pools of paint. He embraced time as a compositional element, his work is testament to his immersion. He was the personification of a broad-brush artist, using wide pigment-loaded strokes to accentuate his lush colour pallets.
He had a privileged upbringing and was able to escape the bombing of London, during World War II and live in New York where he visited the Museum of Modern Art and was inspired by the works of Matisse and Picasso. He was sent to Elton, but ran away and ended up studying at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts and the Bath Academy of Art.
His work has been exhibited around the globe and in 1984, he represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale. Hodgkin’s work has sold for seven figures at auction and belongs in the collections of the British Museum, MOMA and the Tate. He also designed the architectural façade for the British Council’s offices in New Delhi.
Goodbye to the Bay of Naples
Escape into Life
Knitting Pattern
Artificial Flower
23 Andy Warhol (1928 ~ 1987)
He was an American visual artist, film director, producer, and leading figure in the pop art movement. His works explored the relationship between artistic expression, advertising, and celebrity culture that flourished in the 1960s. His work spanned a variety of media, including painting, photography and sculpture.
After exhibiting his work in several galleries in the late 1950s, he began to receive recognition as an influential and controversial artist. His New York studio, The Factory, became a well-known gathering place that brought together distinguished intellectuals, drag queens, playwrights, Bohemian street people, Hollywood celebrities, and wealthy patrons. He promoted a collection of personalities known as Warhol superstars, and is credited with inspiring the widely used expression ‘15 minutes of fame’.
In the late 1950s, Warhol began devoting more attention to painting, and in 1961, he debuted the concept of "pop art"—paintings that focused on mass-produced commercial goods. In 1962, he exhibited the now-iconic paintings of Campbell's soup cans. These small canvas works of everyday consumer products created a major stir in the art world, bringing both Warhol and pop art into the national spotlight for the first time.
Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom
Audrey Hepburn
Marilyn Monroe
The Campbell Soup Can
24 Damien Hirst (1965 ~)
Damien Hirst is an English artist who dominated the art scene in the UK during the 1990s. Death is a central theme of his works. He became famous for a series of artworks in which dead animals (including a shark, a sheep, and a cow) were preserved in formaldehyde.
His wide-ranging practice includes installation, sculpture, painting and drawing. Consistently challenging the boundaries between art, science and religion, his visceral, visually arresting work has made him a leading artist of his generation.
Hirst explores the tensions and uncertainties at the core of human experience. Love, desire, belief and the struggle of living with the knowledge of death are all investigated, often in unconventional and unexpected ways.
He created an instillation for the now defunct Tramshed in London, in which a whole Hereford cow and cockerel was preserved in formaldehyde in a steel and glass tank, in the middle of the restaurant.
Entitled “Cock and Bull,” the showpiece towered four meters above diners. Sadly the restaurant was badly hit by the pandemic and closed in 2021.
I need You to Be
Cock and Bull
Fruitful
Beautiful Belief in Artistic Freedom Morphing Into Hot Hungry Feral Sexual Being Here Now, Painting.
25 Willem de Kooning (1904 ~ 1997)
Willem de Kooning was a Dutch American abstract expressionist artist. He was born in Rotterdam and moved to the United States in 1926. In the years after World War II, he joined a group of artists that became known as the New York School featuring amongst others, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko.
Although often cited as the originator of Action Painting, an abstract and intuitive form of expression, he most often worked from figures and the landscape. He was famous for his Women series, integrating the female form with aggressive paint application, bold colours, and sweeping strokes.
These controversial portraits were criticised for their vulgar carnality and garish colours. The women look mutilated, with eviscerated body parts, and huge terrified eyes. It is thought that this was influenced by experiences of Amsterdam and visiting the Red Light District as a child.
Although he came to embody the popular image of the macho, hard-drinking artist, he approached his art with careful thought and was considered one of the most knowledgeable among the New York School. He possessed great facility, having been formally trained as a young man, and while he looked to the Modern masters like Picasso, Matisse and Miró, he equally admired the likes of Rubens and Rembrandt.
Police Gazette
Composition
Interchange
Woman and Bicycle.
26 Terry Frost (1915 ~ 2003)
Sir Terence Frost RA was a leading exponent of abstract art, and a hugely recognised figure within the British art establishment. He was renowned for his use of the Cornish light, and his distinctive use of colour and shape. He was best known for his geometric abstractions. Overlapping half-circles, rectangles, and squares of bright colours, his work conveying his enthusiasm for perceptual phenomena.
Born in Leamington Spa, in the UK, he did not become an artist until he was in his 30s. He served as a commandos during World War II and was captured and sent to a prisoner of war camp in Germany. This lead to a chance meeting with a British painter, Adrian Heath, who inspired him to paint. After the war he went to various UK based art schools, and had several exhibitions in St Ives, before working with Barbara Hepworth, the renowned sculptor. He spent much of his life teaching art at various universities in England and was knighted in 1998.
In his simple and poetic forms, bright and exhilarating colours spark off each other like electric charges, radiating energy outwards.
Blue Love Tree
Spanish Dreams
Life is just a Bowl of Cherries
Red on Yellow Rhythm.
27 - Pablo Picasso (1881 ~ 1973)
Were to start with the most dubious of characters, of the many dubious characters the art world spawned over the centuries.
Picasso was known as the founder of Cubism and had a profound influence on the formation of 20th-century Avant-garde art and his works can be found in many notable modern art collections around the world.
Personally I have always been fascinated by his work. I am repelled and drawn to it in equal measures. I have visited galleries devoted solely to his work in Antibes and Barcelona as well as seeing it in the MoMA, NY, the NGV in Melbourne and The Norton Museum in West Palm Beach. He is one of the most revered and recognisable artists in the world, but he was also one of the most complex and is now recognised as a misogynistic tyrant.
His appeal is that of a picaresque who left a trail of destruction in his wake: abandonments, betrayals, suicides. He was portrayed at the time as the Andalucían macho man, the charismatic manipulator, the sociopath and the narcissist who preyed on young girls. The uncomfortable truth was he laid women to waste, and fed his art with their bodies, turned lovers into parodic and pneumatic toys and caricatures of suffering. If it wasn’t for the fact he was a genius artist, he would have been regarded as a man, who treated women appallingly.
However all this aside, taking him purely on his work, he was a true genius and has impacted the development of modern and contemporary art with unparalleled magnitude. His prolific output includes over 20,000 different media.
2023 is the 50th anniversary of his death and the Guardian wrote about the problematic narrative around one of the greatest artistic geniuses of all time. There have been moves in some quarters to cancel him.
Love him or loathe him, he is hard to ignore.
Figures by the Sea
Three Women
Femme a la Montre
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
Day 28 Victor Vasarely (1906 - 1997)
Here is another of my all time favourite artists. Vasarely was a Hungarian born artist, who was known as the creator of the Op Art movement, but he also practiced many other of art forms. He initially studied medicine before deciding his passion was art, but his background meant that he had a deep interest in science and much of his inspiration come from biology and astronomy.
He experimented with a range of styles, but found his niche in geometric abstraction inspired by the likes of Piet Mondrian. The works for which he is best known, utilise the principle of optical illusions, filtered through simple forms.
In 1965 Vasarely held an exhibition at the MoMA in New York, alongside other Op Art luminaries such as Bridget Riley. It was a stunning success and he was crowned the ‘father of Op Art’. The reaction of the public to the exhibition was euphoric and for the next few years Op Art spread to advertising, packaging, fashion and design. It gave Vasarely the status of an international art celebrity and cemented his reputation, resulting in him being invited to show at numerous major galleries and museums around the world.
In 1973, he was commissioned to produce a sculpture for the French ski resort of Flaine and produced Les Trois Hexagones Polychromes in homage to the Bauhaus architectural style of the resort, utilising the three primary colours. He used multiple squares to give the impression of seeing cubes inside cubes, but this is only an illusion of depth on a two-dimensional surface. It still sits on top of the shopping centre and this is me in front of it, in 2012 when I went skiing there.
On a visit to Monaco in 2017 with my son Lex, we came across this stunning roof top mosaic and were thrilled that it turned out to be another work by Vaserely. Unbelievably it was entitled Hexa Grace (almost my son’s name)! in homage to Princess Grace. It was commissioned in 1979 by Prince Rainier III and comprises 24,000 blocks of Volvic lava moulded together to create a stunning mosaic.
I was lucky enough to receive a signed Vasarely exhibition poster print as a gift some years ago, and it is one of my most treasured pieces.
29 Stephen Lees
My last two artists are personal favourites. Neither are widely recognised but both produce work that bring me great pleasure.
Stephen works with acrylic on canvas and works from his studio, Gallery on the Cobbles, in Lymington. He takes inspiration from all around him to produce contemporary interpretations of British seascapes, landscapes and abstract paintings, which are characterised by a vivid use of colour & richly textured acrylics.
His style is unique and and distinctive and, together with his particular subject matter, produces artwork which is not only affordable but highly appealing.
30 Carole Ann Grace
Finally I wanted to feature my inspiring friend. Carole introduced me to the joys of abstract art in the 1990’s and through her I developed my passion for this particular genre of art.
Now in her mid 70’s she has devoted her life to painting. For many years she taught art classes at a college in Kings Lynn, as well as at her studio in Snettisham. In the early 00s her and her husband David (who is also an artist and sculptor) moved to Cornwall and she continued with her teaching and painting, at home in the St Ives School environment with like-minded artists.
She even tried to teach me and her grandson Lex with mixed results, but it was great to give it a try.
Here are some of her beautiful paintings. To me they are as impressive as the work of some of the great masters I have featured here.
Ultimately art is about how it makes you feel, your reaction to it. There is no right or wrong. Whether it be a Monet masterpiece or a painting by the local artist, if it evokes a response and you never tire of looking at it, then it has done it's job.
If you want to enjoy art, there are local galleries and museums around the country and often they are free of charge. Make it a goal to seek out art once a month as part of your mindfulness practice, it will benefit your wellbeing and you will more than likely learn something as in the process.
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