Michel Delacroix

Restaurant in Paris. Oil on canvas, 33, 5x24 cm.

20th century

Lively Paris street. 1973. Oil on canvas. 54 x 73cm Hiro Yamagata was born near Kyoto, Japan, went to Paris to study art, and considers himself an American artist. In his Los Angeles studio, Yamagata paints minutely detailed scenes of Paris streets, cafes and parks. He captures the essence of the naif style by presenting life in simple terms, and the world in the happiest light. His creative synthesis of photorealist and neo-folk techniques has won countless admirers and collectors. Yamagata's vision is unequivocally cheerful and his imagery is endlessly inventive. He works from a palette of over 100 shades of acrylic paints, and renders in exacting detail with brushes with as small as two hairs. Serigraphs of some of Yamagata's most popular paintings...

Love song Dandelion. 2005, oil on canvas, 100x130 cm Kristīne Luīze Avotiņa is a young and bright personality whose talent is appreciated not only in Latvia, but also in other parts of the world. Her deep inner experiences and feelings of the soul are not hidden from the eyes of the audience, but are openly and engagingly narrated: about relationships, man and woman, passion, emotions, about experience and connection with nature. Characters live in Kristine's compositional solutions, where figurative painting and ornament appear. When painting large-format works, she masters the entire format, composition and color of the work, as well as linear drawing. Kristīne herself emphasizes: "Relationships between nature and people - it has always been a relevant topic in my painting. The more I work on it, the more interesting it seems to me. It is infinite and unending. With paint I refresh the beauty of nature and love on the canvas and I want to show that nature and love are equal in their beauty. In my works, I always want to show that nature is beautiful and worthy of admiration - a newly blooming water lily, falling leaves from golden trees, a pink sunset sky... This could go on forever..." Education: 2009 – 2010 Studies in „Escola Massana”, Painting Department, Barcelona, Spain 2003 - 2009 Studies in Painting Department, Latvian Academy of Arts, Riga, Latvia 2003 – „Jaņa Rozentāla Riga Art College”, graduation work in photo design. 1999 - 2003 „Jaņa Rozentāla Riga Art College”, Riga, Latvia 1990 - 1999 „Riga French Lycee”, Riga, Latvia Solo exhibitions: 2010 – „1000 and 1 night” Barcelona painting exhibition, exhibition hall „DFAB”, Riga, Latvia 2010 – „Alma” Barcelona drawing...

Six O-Clock, c. 1942, oil on canvas, 30 x 20 inches, signed and titled several times verso of frame and stretcher (perhaps by another hand), marked “Rehn” several times on frame (for the Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries in New York City, who represented Craig at the time); Exhibited: 1) 18th Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Oil Paintings from March 21 to May 2, 1943 at The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. #87, original price $450 (per catalog) (exhibition label verso), 2) Craig’s one-man show at the Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries, New York City, from October 26 to November 14, 1942, #10 (original price listed as $350); and 3) Exhibition of thirty paintings sponsored by the Harrisburg Art Association at the State Museum of Pennsylvania in Harrisburg in March, 1944 (concerning this exhibit, Penelope Redd of The Evening News (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania) wrote: “Other paintings that have overtones of superrealism inherent in the subjects include Tom Craig’s California nocturne, ‘Six O’Clock,’ two figures moving through the twilight . . . .” March 6, 1944, p. 13); another label verso from The Museum of Art of Toledo (Ohio): original frame: Provenance includes George Stern Gallery, Los Angeles, CA About the Painting Long before Chris Burden’s iconic installation outside of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Urban Light, another artist, Tom Craig, made Southern California streetlights the subject of one of his early 1940s paintings. Consisting of dozens of recycled streetlights from the 1920s and 1930s forming a classical colonnade at the museum’s entrance, Burden’s Urban Light has become a symbol of Los Angeles. For Burden, the streetlights represent what constitutes an advanced society, something “safe after dark and beautiful to behold.” It seems that Craig is playing on the same theme in Six O-Clock. Although we see two hunched figures trudging along the sidewalk at the end of a long day, the real stars of this painting are the streetlights which brighten the twilight and silhouette another iconic symbol of Los Angeles, the palm trees in the distance. Mountains in the background and the distant view of a suburban neighborhood join the streetlights and palm trees as classic subject matter for a California Scene painting, but Craig gives us a twist by depicting the scene not as a sun-drenched natural expanse. Rather, Craig uses thin layers of oil paint, mimicking the watercolor technique for which he is most famous, to show us the twinkling beauty of manmade light and the safety it affords. Although Southern California is a land of natural wonders, the interventions of humanity are already everywhere in Los Angeles and as one critic noted, the resulting painting has an air of “superrealism.” About the Artist Thomas Theodore Craig was a well-known fixture in the Southern California art scene. He was born in Upland California. Craig graduated with a degree in botany from Pomona College and studied painting at Pamona and the Chouinard Art School with Stanton MacDonald-Wright and Barse Miller among others. He became close friends with fellow artist Milford Zornes...

Dai Xiangwen was born in Hunan in 1991 and graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts of Jianghan University, He is a member of China Artists Association, China Designers Association, a painter of Li Keran...