Elizabeth Peyton

Elizabeth Peyton was born in 1965 in Connecticut. She began drawing at an early age. She studied art in the 80's and then rose in fame in the mid-90's. She is a portrait artist. She dabbles in many mediums and like to experiment with processes and papers. Often, her small-scale portraits are in oil and have glazes and washes applied to them. She has worked in most types of prints. She currently lives and works in New York City. She likes to paint friends, lovers, and celebrities. Her popularity has grown steadily in the last 20 years and her paintings can sell well above .5 million dollars at auction. Her portraits aren't photorealistic likenesses, but because of the features and mannerisms that she chooses to emphasize, they are extremely successful in being a likeness of someone.

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George Tooker

Self Portrait, 1996 George Tooker was talented from a young age and was privileged enough to be able to start taking art lessons from a famous artist, Malcolm Fraser, at the age of 7. He was born on Long Island in 1920. Twenty two years later he had graduated from Harvard with a graduate degree in English literature. His studies into the renaissance and medieval painting seems to have deeply influenced his artwork. He served for a short period of time in the Marines and when he came home after an injury, he delved back into the world of art, meeting many people who would be influential in the path of the rest of his life. Particularly, Jared and Margaret French and Paul Cadmus who mentored him and helped him to find his style that he was known for, which can be termed as magic realism (he never really liked this term). He had other friends who encouraged him to travel. He spent 6 months traveling Europe, visiting museums, historical sites, and churches. Once again, these frie...

Kerry James Marshall

Kerry James Marshall, Detail of Souvenir IV, 1998 Kerry James Marshall grew up at the exact time and places that is took to create himself as an artist. He was born in Birmingham, AL in 1955 and grew up in Watts- the projects outside of LA. He now lives and works in Chicago. He is the voice of confrontation. He confronts us with the ideas that maybe we don't think about or possible don't want to think about. His work looks at slavery, marginalization, misconception, and discrimination in the black community. He makes no apologies that his work is meant to be “unequivocally, emphatically black.” His art is also very reminiscent of folk art - with a contemporary edge. In 1978 he graduated from Otis College of Art and Design and he has taught at the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His style is unique and his figures are essentially the color black - which is a signature of his work. His art takes you somewhere, a place where you are forced t...

Tony Sweat

I had a religion professor at BYU whose undergraduate degree was fine arts, his focus was painting. He wanted to do this as his life's work, but he soon found that his life was being directed in a different path and he went back to school to become a seminary teacher and then a professor at BYU. Luckily for us, he didn't stop painting. His art began to focus on church history. One of my favorite pieces that he has done is of the prophet Jospeh Smith and a one of the people who scribed for him in a room doing the translation of the Book of Mormon. This picture is significant because it is really the only historically accurate artistic interpretation of how most of the Book of Mormon was translated. The Gift and Power of God, by Tony Sweat Tony uses models for his painting and I believe he uses them both in live sessions and from photographs he's taken from the live sessions. His work is often narrative and fills an important nitsch in the Mormon art world: As close as p...

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