ARTIST OF THE DAY: MARCO PEDUTO

ARTIST OF THE DAY: MARCO PEDUTO

Nasco a Milano nel 1992. Mi diplomo in grafica pubblicitaria e successivamente mi iscrivo all’Accademia Di Belle Arti di Brera, dove termino il corso triennale in Grafica d’Arte diplomandomi a pieni voti. Completo la mia formazione iscrivendomi al Biennio Specialistico di Pittura nella stessa accademia e completando gli studi nel Giugno del 2020. Dal 2016 collaboro con gallerie d’arte partecipando a mostre personali e collettive.

ARTIST OF THE DAY: Nicolas de Staël

ARTIST OF THE DAY:  Nicolas de Staël

Various reasons for his suicide have been suggested, including a bout of acute depression, insomnia, a failed romance, and the pressure that had come with success - he reportedly killed himself followed an unsuccessful meeting with an art critic. In a letter to his stepson, Antoine Tupal, de Staël wrote that "I don't know what I am going to do. Perhaps I have painted enough. I have achieved what I wanted. The children have what they need." By the end of his life, therefore, it is even possible that de Staël felt he had reached the apogee of his career, and that nothing remained for him to accomplish (though this contradicts the image of the masochistic perfectionist painted above). In any case, there is a sense of tragic poetry in the conclusion to his life, as he undoubtedly killed himself at the height of his creative powers.

ARTIST OF THE DAY: RALSTON CRAWFORD

ARTIST OF THE DAY:  RALSTON CRAWFORD

George Ralston Crawford, who created images of the American industrial landscape in a precisionist style, was born in St. Catharines, Ontario, near Niagara Falls, in 1906; his family moved to Buffalo, N.Y. in 1910. Crawford's interest in docks, shipyards, bridges, and grain elevators stems from a childhood spent traveling around the Great Lakes with his father and also from several years as a young sailor. In the mid-1920s Crawford turned to art, studying until 1932 at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pa., and the Hugh Breckenridge School, East Gloucester, Mass. His exposure to the precisionist art of Demuth and, especially, Sheeler while a student at the Barnes Foundation from 1927 to 1930, fueled his interest in industrial subjects. During the early 1930s, at a time when many American artists were turning away from the wave of modernism that had swept the country since the early teens, Crawford adopted a precisionist style, creating smoothly painted images of subjects specifically associated with America, such as skyscrapers, industrial structures, and machinery. His work was characterized by flat geometric planes, well defined, and illuminated by shafts of clear light and shadow.

ARTIST OF THE DAY: Maciej Świeszewski

ARTIST OF THE DAY: Maciej Świeszewski

Maciej Świeszewski - born in Sopot in 1950. Between 1969 and 1975 student of Faculty of Painting at High School of Art in Gdańsk in prof. Jacek Żuławski's class. The year of 1974 he spent in New York, experiencing and absorbing the atmosphere of development of the contemporary world art. He graduates the High School with magna cum laude in 1976. After that he starts working as an assistant first to prof. Maksymilian Kasprowicz, then to prof. Jerzy Zabłocki. In 1982 with a British Council scholarship he travels to London. The capital city of Great Britain becomes a source of deep experience both intelectual and artistic. He meets many esteemed artists of Polish Emigration and others, with Francis Bacon among them, as well. In 1984 he travels to Paris, where he works on the renovation of masterpieces of great French 19th century painters exhibited in Louvre. He meets great Polish artists, Józef Czapski and Jan Lebestein. In 1990 invited by Günter Grass, Maciej Świeszewski becomes a member of the Board of Daniel Chodowiecki Foundation in Akademie der Künste in Berlin. In years 1990-1993 he holds the position of a Dean of a Faculty of Painting and Graphics at Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk. In 1994 he gets a professorship. In 1997 he becomes a vicepresident of The Friends of Fine Arts Society Zachęta. Since 1999 he has been working in Programme Council at National Gallery of Fine Arts in Sopot. In 2000 he gets a title of full professor. All his life Maciej Świeszewski is bound with Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk. For many years he has been running the Department of Painting and his students keep getting international awards.

ARTIST OF THE DAY: JASPER JOHNS

ARTIST OF THE DAY: JASPER JOHNS

Jasper Johns was born in 1930 in Augusta, Georgia, and raised in South Carolina. He began drawing as a young child, and from the age of five knew he wanted to be an artist. For three semesters he attended the University of South Carolina at Columbia, where his art teachers urged him to move to New York, which he did in late 1948. There he saw numerous exhibitions and attended the Parsons School of Design for a semester. After serving two years in the army during the Korean War, stationed in South Carolina and Sendai, Japan, he returned to New York in 1953. He soon became friends with the artist Robert Rauschenberg (born 1925), also a Southerner, and with the composer John Cage and the choreographer Merce Cunningham.

ARTIST OF THE DAY: JACKSON POLLOCK

ARTIST OF THE DAY:  JACKSON POLLOCK

Paul Jackson Pollock was born on January 28, 1912, in Cody, Wyoming. He grew up in Arizona and California and in 1928 began to study painting at the Manual Arts High School, Los Angeles. In fall 1930 Pollock moved to New York and studied under Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League. Benton encouraged him throughout the succeeding decade. By the early 1930s Pollock knew and admired the murals of José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera. Although he traveled widely throughout the United States during the 1930s, much of Pollock’s time was spent in New York, where he settled permanently in 1934 and worked on the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project (1935–42) and in David Alfaro Siqueiros’s experimental workshop in New York (1936).