Jane Perkins, an artist based in the UK, brings a new element of fun and life to her artwork by incorporating found material, beads and buttons of bright colours to recreate artwork by masters of the past. Perkins asserts on her website that she enjoys art which is fun and unexpected, and that is certainly what her artwork conveys. 

My personal favourite is her recreation of Gustav Klimt's The Kiss and Monet's waterlilies.

There are so many more on her website so check it out!

Alana Dee Haynes

Alana - who calls herself Dee - combines photography with drawing, creating beautiful images. The majority of Dee's work concentrates on human flesh, and she adds her personal touches through drawing, almost like tattoos, to the print. The effect is really quite impressive.

Check out more of Dee's artwork

Meghan Howland

Meghan is a young artist, born in 1985, living and working in Portland, Maine. She studied painting at the New Hampshire Institute of Art, and studied in Italy for a year also. Meghan's close detail of figures clothes and hair is outstanding, but most interestingly she focuses many of her paintings around the obstruction of the face, most commonly birds with outstretched wings.

Meghan kindly sent me her statement:

"Meghan Howland is an emerging artist living and working in Portland, Maine. Her work offers a unique range of styles and observations, while often personal in their meaning, ventures to examine larger cultural and emotional issues.  Through a haze of oil paint, and sometimes animals, we are confronted by situations that are at once disarmingly beautiful, yet are infused with an implied sense of yearning, loss, or disaster. In recent work, subjects are bathed in nature in a subtly unnatural way. Naive to or unaffected by what is happening around them, figures are often used to explore issues of fragility, identity, and our individual understandings of nature within our own personal, somewhat obscure relationship to it." 

www.meghanhowland.com

Picasso's Blue Period

In the spring of 1901, Picasso learnt about the suicide of friend and fellow painter Carlos Casagemas, and fell into deep depression. These blue paintings are a representation of Picasso's melancholy and sombre mood throughout the years 1901-4, his mood dominating his paintings. Picasso's Blue Period was followed in 1904 by his Rose Period, when his mood improved and this reflected in the pink, red tones of his paintings.

La Vie (1903)

Casagemas in his Coffin (1901)

Portrait of Jamie Sabartes (1901)

The Old Guitarist (1903)

The Rose Period (The Actor - 1901)

The Styles of Henri Matisse

Henri Matisse was one of my favourite artists when I was in 6th form and had left the safety net of realistic art. One of the leading figures of modern art despite starting off fairly safe and realistic, Matisse experimented with Fauvism, Divisionism, Collage and Interior Design.

Fauvism:

From the French 'Fauve' - meaning 'wild beast', the movement lasted from 1904 till 1908, Matisse being one of the leading figures. Inspired by Impressionism, Fauvism uses the same style of bright and expressive colours, yet differs because the colours of the painting have no regards to the natural colours, whereas Impressionist art still suggests the original colour. Matisse and other artists who made art within the movement are regarded as 'Fauves' because Louis Vauxcelles, a critic of the time, commented on an exhibition of Fauve work as 'Donatello parmi les fauves!' (Donatello among the wild beasts!), referring to the Renaissance type sculpture in the room of the exhibition. The movement faced harsh criticism, but today it is what Matisse is most known for!

Woman with a Hat (1905)

Portrait of Madame Matisse (1906)

Blue Nude (1907)

Divisionism:

Also a Neo-Impressionist movement, the style of Divisionism involves not painting by mixing colours, but instead implying tones by separating colour and applying paint with dots and stripes. The movement began with Georges Seurat, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884-6), and the style was used in the late 19th and early 20th century by prominent artists such as Robert Delaunay, Vincent van Gogh and Matisse.

A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884-6) - Georges Seurat

Les toits de Collioure (1905) - Matisse

Self Portrait with a Felt Hat (1888) - Van Gogh

Collage:

In the 1940s Matisse was diagnosed with cancer and had to start using a wheelchair. Despite being incredibly ill, Matisse found a new lease of life through paper cut outs. His paper cut outs, often on an enormous scale, were made using the scissors freehand to make shapes. After cutting the shapes, Matisse would pin the paper to the walls of his studio and arrange the forms into an arrangement Matisse found most appropriate. In 1947, Matisse published a book Jazz full of his paper cut outs.

Blue Nude (1952)

The Fall of Icarus (1943)

The Snail (1953)

La Gerbe (1953)

Interior Design:

In 1947, Matisse was asked by Sister Jacques-Marie to design the interior of the Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence, a church in the French riviera. The end project is very obviously Matisse, the figures and the stain glass very similar to his paper cut outs. Possibly one of the biggest jobs of Matisse's life, the design took 4 years to complete, and Matisse died a few years after its completion.

Matisse and Sister Jacques-Marie

Alyssa Monks

Alyssa Monks is a realist painter from New Jersey. She has studied art in Florence, Italy and New York City, USA, as well as also teaching in New York. Monks uses natural filters such as glass, water and steam to distort the shapes of the body in her paintings. Her most recent artworks involve painting the figure behind a shower screen, the steam distorting the body. Her works are extremely detailed and exact, heres a statement from Monks:

"When I began painting the human body, I was obsessed with it and needed to create as much realism as possible. I chased realism until it began to unravel and deconstruct itself,” Alyssa states, “I am exploring the possibility and potential where representational painting and abstraction meet - if both can coexist in the same moment."

Check Alyssa's website for more!