The lives and art of famous artists can serve as inspiration and a starting point for many art projects.  The following is a list of some of the artists in grade 1 through 6 that students have studied.  I have also included a brief biographical sketch of each artist.

 William Turner  1775-1851
 English painter, began as a watercolorist, and is known for his airy and atmospheric paintings of mountains, the sea, famous cities, and historic events.  

 David Hockney  l937-
 Contemporary British artist affiliated with the pop and surrealist art movements.  His l960’s paintings of California poolside environs and landscapes are American classics.  His canvasses have a make believe-naïve quality, which contrasts with an extremely refined painting technique.

Georges Roualt  l871-l958
 French painter and engraver.  Famous for his paintings of clowns and religious subject matter.  Influenced by stained glass in cathedral windows, he outlined the subjects in his paintings with large black paint strokes.  

 Paul Klee  l879-l940
 German Swiss painter. He was born into a musical family, and vacillated between music and painting.  Took part in the famous Blue Rider exhibition in l911 with Macke, Kandinsky and Marc.  Traveling to North Africa in l914, he was exposed to brilliant color and mosaics.  He began dividing up the space of his canvases into small, geometric shapes.  

Claude Monet  l840-l926
French Impressionist painter.  He committed himself to landscape over other genres of painting and to working in the open air over other methods.   

Impressionism is a technique that captures the effect of light out of doors.  From a distance tints and colors within single areas tend to disappear as individual strokes.  The eye mixes them, thus creating more sparkle and softening of form and shape.

 The Water Lily paintings were the most famous and last motif for his work.  

 Henri Matisse  l869-l954
 French painter.  Matisse had originally studied law then moved to Paris to study with the French painter Gustave Moreau.  His colors became increasingly brighter and he was considered the master of Fauvism.  At the end of his life he worked by using large cutout qouaches.  

Tom Wesselman  l931-
 American Pop artist, famous for collages of paint, printed matter and fabric combined in manner which is a symbolic, celebration of the good life in America.  His subject matter is commonplace, but Wesselman uses it in a highly sophisticated and personal manner.

Chuck Close  1940
 Contemporary American Artist, famous for his oversized, closely cropped images of the human face.  Each portrait takes up to a year to complete and commands fees of  $400,000.  The thousands of squares that make up these portraits are small op-art paintings; circles, loops, swirls and x’s, executed in intense color.  

 John James Audubon  1785-l851

 Considered the father of American ornithology.  He was the first artist to take birds out of the glass case and give them the appearance of life.  A set of Audubon’s Birds of America, bound in four “double elephant folio” volumes and numbering 435 color plates, cost  $1,000.00 in l827.