AWARD WINNING Lynette Yiadom-Boakye is a British painter and writer. She is best known for her portraits of fictitious subjects painted in muted colours. Her work has contributed to the renaissance in painting the Black figure.

Laura Phillips Anderson is an American avant-garde artist, composer, musician and film director whose work spans performance art, pop music, and multimedia projects.

Mark Rothko, born Markus Yakovlevich Rothkowitz, was an American painter of Latvian Jewish descent. Rothko did not personally subscribe to any art movement, but he is generally identified as an abstract expressionist.

British artist Tracey Emin (b.1963) is a member of the Young British Artists, best known for her evocative autobiographical installations and multimedia works. Born in London, Emin studied at the Maidstone College of Art and at the Royal College of Art in her home city. Alongside artist Sarah Lucas in 1993, Emin opened The Shop, where she and Lucas exhibited and sold their work. The next year, Emin held her first solo exhibition, brazenly titled My Major Retrospective, and exhibited her work over the next few years in a gallery called The Tracey Emin Museum.

Words to live by as spoken by the incomparable Martha Graham

Keep Your Eyes on Your Own Paper

In grade school, I remember my teacher passing out an assignment and telling each student to “keep your eyes on your own paper.”

Perhaps she was simply trying to teach 8-year-olds to not cheat, but hidden within that phrase is also a deeper message about what really matters. It doesn't make a difference what the person next to you writes down for his answer. This is your race to run. It's your assignment to complete. It's your answer to create. How your paper compares to someone else's is not the point. The point is to fill the paper with your work.

The same can be said of your work today. No matter what you spend your days doing, every morning you wake up and have a blank piece of paper to work with. You get to put your name at the top and fill it with your work.

If what you write on your paper doesn't meet someone else's expectations … it is no concern of yours. The way someone else perceives what you do is a result of their own experiences (which you can't control), their own tastes and preferences (which you can't predict), and their own expectations (which you don't set). If your choices don't match their expectations that is their concern, not yours.

Your concern is to do the work, not to judge it. Your concern is to fall in love with the process, not to grade the outcome. Keep your eyes on your own paper.

Pina Bausch was born 1940 in Solingen and died 2009 in Wuppertal. She received her dance training at the Folkwang School in Essen under Kurt Jooss, where she achieved technical excellence. Soon after the director of Wuppertal's theatres, Arno Wüstenhöfer, engaged her as choreographer, from autumn 1973, she renamed the ensemble the Tanztheater Wuppertal. Under this name, although controversial at the beginning, the company gradually achieved international recognition. Its combination of poetic and everyday elements influenced the international development of dance decisively. Awarded some of the greatest prizes and honours world-wide, Pina Bausch is one of the most significant choreographers of our time.

Cirque du Soleil is a Montreal-based entertainment company and the largest contemporary circus producer in the world. Located in the inner-city area of Saint-Michel, it was founded in Baie-Saint-Paul on 16 June 1984 by former street performers Guy Laliberté and Gilles Ste-Croix.

Nineteenth century Austrian painter Gustav Klimt is known for the highly decorative style of his works, his most famous being The Kiss.