ARTIST OF THE DAY: ENNIO MORRICONE (10 November 1928 – 6 July 2020)

ARTIST OF THE DAY:  ENNIO MORRICONE (10 November 1928 – 6 July 2020)

Ennio Morricone was born in Rome on 10 November 1928. His long artistic career includes a wide range of composition genres, from absolute concert music to applied music, working as orchestrator, conductor and composer for theatre, radio and cinema. In 1946, Ennio received his trumpet diploma and in 1954 he received his diploma in Composition at the Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia under the guidance of Goffredo Petrassi. He wrote his first concert works at the end of the 1950s, then worked as arranger for RAI (the Italian broadcasting company) and RCA-Italy. He started his career as a film music composer in 1961 with the film Il Federale directed by Luciano Salce. World fame followed through the Sergio Leone westerns: A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (1966), Once Upon a Time in The West (1968) and A Fistful of Dynamite (1971).

ARTIST OF THE DAY: PAUL KLEE

ARTIST OF THE DAY: PAUL KLEE

Paul Klee (18 December 1879 - 29 June 1940) was born in Munchenbuchsee, Switzerland, and is considered both a German and a Swiss painter. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. He was also a student of orientalism. Klee was a natural draftsman who experimented with and eventually mastered colour theory, and wrote extensively about it; his lectures Writings on Form and Design Theory (Schriften zur Form und Gestaltungslehre), published in English as the Paul Klee Notebooks, are considered so important for modern art that they are compared to the importance that Leonardo da Vinci's A Treatise on Painting had for Renaissance. He and his colleague, the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, both taught at the German Bauhaus school of art, design and architecture. His works reflect his dry humor and his sometimes childlike perspective, his personal moods and beliefs, and his musicality.

ARTIST OF THE DAY: Alexander McQueen

ARTIST OF THE DAY: Alexander McQueen

Lee Alexander McQueen, CBE (17 March 1969 – 11 February 2010) was a British fashion designer and couturier.[2] He worked as chief designer at Givenchy from 1996 to 2001, and founded his own Alexander McQueen label in 1992. His achievements in fashion earned him four British Designer of the Year awards (1996, 1997, 2001 and 2003), as well as the CFDA's International Designer of the Year award in 2003. McQueen died by suicide in 2010, at the age of 40, at his home in Mayfair, London.

ARTIST OF THE DAY: AMY SILLMAN

ARTIST OF THE DAY:  AMY SILLMAN

In her relentless dedication to the exploration of non-figurative painting, Amy Sillman has aligned herself closely with such canonical modernists as Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock, and Joan Mitchell. Working in gestural and abstract style, Sillman describes her art as the result of a “physical thinking process” and an extension of her inner dialogue. Her compositions often feature broad swathes of color contrasted against sharp linear elements, the latter both defining space and lending her pictures a bold, expressive character. She applies paint in varying consistencies and textures to create a multi-faceted painted surface, yielding an impasto comparable to that of Willem de Kooning and Arshile Gorky. Sillman also creates prints and works on paper and occasionally experiments with representation, drawing figures into sparse color fields.