Artists
Kit Williams
Kit Williams has worked as a figurative painter for the last 45 years and along the way has published four books.
He uses traditional oil-painting techniques, fashioning first a wooden panel covered in linen and oil jesso. He uses many layers of opaque and transparent Dutch oil paint to create the highly luminous images for which he has become known.
Kit likes to maintain complete control of every aspect of the pictures from beginning to end, physically making everything from the dresses that the models wear, to creating the sets and props, the photography, and often delighting in making ingenious mechanisms adding another dimension to the work. He has always made his own frames and from the beginning they were seldom rectangular. His marquetry techniques enable him to make pictures of any shape he wishes and allow elements of the picture to continue into the frame.
Salvador Dali
Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dali I Domenech was born at 8:45 on the morning of May 11, 1904 in the small agricultural town of Figueres, Spain. Figueres is located in the foothills of the Pyrenees, only sixteen miles from the French border in the principality of Catalonia. The son of a prosperous notary, Dali spent his boyhood in Figueres and at the family’s summer home in the coastal fishing village of Cadaques where his parents built his first studio. As an adult, he made his home with his wife Gala in nearby Port Lligat. Many of his paintings reflect his love of this area of Spain.
M.C Escher
Maurits Cornelis Escher (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈmʌurɪts kɔrˈneːlɪs ˈɛsxər]; 17 June 1898 – 27 March 1972), or commonly M. C. Escher, was a Dutch graphic artist who made mathematically inspired woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints.
His work features mathematical objects and operations including impossible objects, explorations of infinity, reflection, symmetry, perspective, truncated and stellated polyhedra, hyperbolic geometry, and tessellations. Although Escher believed he had no mathematical ability, he interacted with the mathematicians George Pólya, Roger Penrose, Harold Coxeter and crystallographerFriedrich Haag, and conducted his own research into tessellation.
Early in his career, he drew inspiration from nature, making studies of insects, landscapes, and plants such as lichens, all of which he used as details in his artworks. He traveled in Italy and Spain, sketching buildings, townscapes, architecture and the tilings of the Alhambra and the Mezquita of Cordoba, and became steadily more interested in their mathematical structure.
Escher's art became well known among scientists and mathematicians, and in popular culture, especially after it was featured by Martin Gardner in his April 1966 Mathematical Games column in Scientific American. Apart from being used in a variety of technical papers, his work has appeared on the covers of many books and albums. He was one of the major inspirations of Douglas Hofstadter's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach.
Despite wide popular interest, Escher was for long somewhat neglected in the art world; even in his native Netherlands, he was 70 before a retrospective exhibition was held. In the twenty-first century, he became more widely appreciated, with exhibitions across the world.