Favourite Painters/Artists.
 

The great H.R. Giger definitely springs to mind. I love the fact that most of his works are devoid of colour yet are still incredibly vivid and sometimes strangely erotic:

http://beinart.org/artists/hr-giger/...hr-giger-7.jpg

http://www.linesandcolors.com/images.../giger_450.jpg

I would love to go to the Giger museum some time. His imagination is astonishing.

Monet is another favourite. Cliched I know but I love his work for the exact opposite reasons to liking Giger. His pictures are bright, colourful and evocative:

http://arttoheartweb.com/images/Clau...ly%20Pond2.jpg

http://www2.murrieta.k12.ca.us/tovas...ges/monet5.jpg

Did Giger make Jonathan Davis' microphone stand? Pretty sure he did... and it's awesome.

I love Edvard Munch:
http://lovesucksmovie.files.wordpres...8/04/munch.jpg
(he is also the artist of famous Scream painting)

And Rozi Demant:
http://ursispaltenstein.ch/blog/imag...ozi_demant.jpg

And Alex Grey:
http://members.cox.net/cbshard/wonde...lex%20Grey.jpg

And so many more.

I don't know if he did the microphone stand but has done plenty of sculptures in his time. I like that Rozi Demant piece.

Dali has to be my favorite.

http://openesf.net/projects/esf-acti...ld-new-man.jpg

Also love de Chirico, Miro, Ernst, Magritte, Kandinsky, Giger, Escher, Bacon, Van Gogh, Kirchner, Chagall, Monet, Manet, Hopper, Wyeth and too many others to count.

My favorite styles are surrealism, expressionism and impressionism.

I'm not too picky when it comes to art, I like just about everything. Except most modern art, stuff like concept art, abstract expressionism, De Stijl and most (not all) pop art, which I despise.

I have a soft spot for proggy album cover designers like Boris Vallejo and especially Rodney Matthews:

http://www.metallibrary.ru/bands/dis...87_mirador.jpg

Alphonse Mucha:
http://www.arthistoryguide.com/images/27.jpg

Salvador Dali:
http://api.ning.com/files/o76sJE0a7J...ali20hello.jpg

Zdzislaw Beksinski:
http://www.majic12.com/lj_ZdzislawBeksinski035.jpg

Bacon and Escher are awesome. I think my favorite of the surrealists is probably Roberto Matta though, his paintings are stunning. Also, I can understand a dislike for modern art (especially from you) but even abstract expressionism? De Kooning is great, for one.

matta:

http://www.steamshovelpress.com/imag...tatheearth.jpg

excavation

http://www.theslideprojector.com/ima...excavation.jpg

Yeah Matta is awesome.

I can't stand De Kooning, not only because his work isn't even remotely aesthetically pleasing and looks like something anyone could do, but it's just plain ugly and sexist, I will never understand the hype.

Conceptual art is the worst kind of art imaginable, find a dead shark, nail it to the wall, and tada, it's art.

With the exception of Kandinsky, I don't get abstract expressionism at all, I downright loath Pollack.

Pop art I'm divided on, I hate a lot of it, especially Warhol. But I like Lowbrow art out of the newer movements.

This was originally going to be the cover of Alice Cooper's debut album.

Yeah you told me about that before.

For me there's just as much appeal in subverting aesthetic standards as in perfecting them. Dali is great because he does both, but I have much love for Duchamp as well. It's also worth pointing out that some conceptual art is really really funny or a complete mindfuck. I saw one conceptual art piece that had a bunch of rats in a 3D transparent maze--each wall of the maze had a tv facing the rats showing them the maze set up and themselves. Then outside the set-up there was a guy banging something with a baseball bat. The pointlessness becomes the point and life is implicated. Maybe conceptual art is only worthwhile on LSD. Whatever. I think the liberation of art is wonderful.

http://imagecache2.allposters.com/im...61-Posters.jpg

I like Francis Bacon a lot, who someone else already mentioned. Also...

I'm a pretty big fan of Chuck Close. Unfortunately looking at a JPG online really doesn't do his work any justice. His paintings are huge and much more impressive in person. Anyway, here's one example:

http://i81.photobucket.com/albums/j2...uckClose05.jpg

I also love Joseph Stella. One of the neat things about him was his style constantly changed so his output was extremely diverse. Here's my favorite painting by him, Brooklyn Bridge:

http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/art...ridge-1941.jpg

Goya, was also pretty amazing and I frequently find his paintings sort of frightening:

http://www.independent.co.uk/multime...oya_23768t.jpg

Duchamp was the shiznit. Nude Descending a Staircase is a classic:

http://www.people.ku.edu/~brister/im...o-2-1912-2.jpg

Well that one looks really cool, who is that?

The thing with a lot of modern art, especially concept art and pop art, is that it's not meant to be aesthetically pleasing, it just has some kind of statement, and if that statement is lost on you, the art becomes completely worthless. I find most of the statements in modern art to be painfully obvious or it dosen't make any kind of sense whatsoever. Most of all it dosen't require any skill of any kind, just an idea.

"Hey let's take a photograpth of Marilyn Monroe and invert the colors"

"Brilliant"

You may not like the concept, but silkscreening does take skill.

I know what you mean. But I do find some of the ideas pretty interesting, especially in the way they weave a narrative of the artist continually reenvisioning his role in the 20th century with the advent of mechanical reproduction. With Warhol that struggle becomes self-aware and even self-parodying, which is what makes him so infuriating and immediately iconic. In any case, that painting is by Sam Francis, he does a lot of really intense abstract expressionism.

Ok, fair enough.

I hope you don't think I'm dismissing all modern art or pop art, I agree that theres some amazing stuff that came out of those movements, I just have a strong distaste for most of it.

Op art and photorealism are great, lowbrow too.

With too much modern art though, it's not about the imagery or the detail, just the context behind it. But in that sense, you can look at a piece of pop art, say to yourself "well that's clever" and then you have no reason to ever look at it again because it's so simplistic that theres nothing left to observe. I think art that's easy to make and easy to "get" is also easy to forget. Art should tell a story, not just an idea, it should take you to a certain place, that's what I get from surrealism, expressionism, impressionism and realism. When I look at a Malevich painting of a brown square, I see nothing but a brown square, and I don't get it, and even if I did, it wouldn't matter.

Oh yeah, and I forgot to mention Roger Dean, another big favorite of mine.

Just to throw someone a bit older into the mix, Bruegel was a really amazing renaissance painter. I love his crowd scenes like the one below. Apparently everything that's going on in the painting relate to common Flemmish folk expressions of the time. I can't say I get any of it on that level, but there's such an obvious sense of humor at work that I can't help but enjoy it. Just look at all the bizarre crap going on here. The ass that's sticking out of the tower window in the background makes me laugh every time.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...l_Proverbs.jpg

Frank Auerbach

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:A...d_of_Julia.jpg

Yeah, I like Bosch a lot too. He was a huge influence on Bruegel.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...tinasworld.jpg

i've always loved this one by andrew wyeth,......i cant quite put my finger one it,...but there's just something about it that i cant spot looking at,.....i dunno,....

I agree. That's a good one.

I don't know if anyone kows of him outside of the U.K but Banksy is a graffiti artist whose pictures literally appear overnight but councils let the pictures stay due to the quirky appeal. No one knows who he is either but I do like his work:

http://larryfire.files.wordpress.com...sy20again1.jpg

I saw this in nearby Bristol when I went to see ministry a couple of months back:
http://emgfo.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/banksy2.jpg

http://dev.null.org/scrapbook/2005/0805_banksy.jpg

http://blog.nerdplusart.com/wp-conte.../07/banksy.jpg

Yeah I seen his website, guy's awesome.

Yeah that's a beautiful painting. The girl in the painting was a girl with polio.

I know it is pretty cliche but I love Van Gogh here is a pic of a painting of his I took in Kansas City...

My guitar teacher has that painting on his wall.

Ah man I love this piece. I just finished studying it for a whole year as a part of my Arts degree.

Boring cubism that someone might pretend to like, so they can seem awesome.

There's nothing wrong with cubism. It revolutionized perspective.

Um... I have no need to pretend. I just like it.

I like cubism.

Picasso is overrated sure, he's still great though, most people know him for his cubist style paintings, but his early work was the best IMO.

http://www.theartcounselor.com/image...Guitar300.jfif
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...A0_la_pipe.jpg
http://www.join2day.net/abc/P/picasso/picasso8.JPG
http://www.join2day.net/abc/P/picasso/picasso237.JPG

escher:
http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y17...nkie33/bou.jpg

van gogh:
http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y17...Gogh_002-1.jpg

matejko:
http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y17...pernicus-C.jpg

My Uncle. Here's a local church he worked on, pretty much everything you see was made by him.

http://i187.photobucket.com/albums/x...83/mainorg.jpg

http://i187.photobucket.com/albums/x...h83/sidmai.jpg

Wow, he did a fantastic job.

I'll be sure to pass on the word. He lives out in Arizona and actually ran into a bit of controversy. He does mostly abstract stuff and one of his pieces, a snake-lady with exposed breasts, was on display at the state capitol building and some teachers complained while their students were on a field trip and it got all escalated and the news was interviewing him and stuff. Pretty funny. If you've ever seen a "Build-A-Bear" shop, his company does all of the stuff in those.

This is really cool.

Studio Productions Inc. / Fully-Realized Experience Design

That's his company if you guys wanna check out all of the stuff that they do.

Jacques-Louis David was fucking brilliant as well.
he's easily the best neoclassical artist.

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y17...t_by_David.jpg

I really love this stuff.

Zdzisław Beksiński

http://i181.photobucket.com/albums/x..._beksinski.jpg

http://www.viren.ca/images/zdzislaw_beksinski_005.jpg

http://www.gnosis.art.pl/iluminatorn...ski_1980_2.jpg

http://best383.com/galeria/beks27.jpg

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