25 Authors and Their Favorite Artists
25 Authors and Their Favorite Artists
Wendy Wax
I’m especially fond of contemporary art and am drawn to the work of Klimt, Klee, Miro’, Van Gogh and Matisse, as well as abstract expressionists like Willem de Koonig, Lee Krasner, and Jackson Pollock.
Amanda Quick
Gabriele at Murphyties.com. She's a Pacific Northwest artist who makes spectacular silk scarves -- wearable art. I own a dozen.
Julia Kelly
Degas. His paintings of ballerinas were my favorites when I was a little girl.
Gregory Sterner
Allie Brosh: No one I know of can do so much with so little and achieve such side splittingly hilarious results. She is remarkably talented and funny.
Tessa Arlen
It is hard to choose a favorite because there are so many I love. But I really enjoy 18th century Japanese watercolors and woodcut prints. The detail, the balance and the delicacy are enchanting—with stories you can get lost in. Utagawa Hiroshige’s prints of tiny figures battling the elements of rain, snow or hail to the safety of a tiny village in a mountain valley draw me in to contemplate the struggle of these featureless little beings surviving in nature.
Camille di Maio
I love the mother and child paintings of Mary Cassatt. So imagine my delight when I was researching my book The Way of Beauty about Penn Station in New York and learned that it was the brain child of Alexander Cassatt - her brother!
Irene Sardanis
Frida Kahlo. No matter how many of Frida’s paintings I’ve seen, I am in awe of her truth and authenticity on canvas. As an avid reader, I value the raw, honest writing of an author. Well, that’s Frida as a painter. There she is without hiding, in flaming technicolor without frills or fancy strokes. I bow to her as an artist, as a courageous woman. Que mujer. What a dame.
Georgie Blalock
I love Jacques-Louis David, especially his portrait of Napoleon Bonaparte’s nieces at the Getty Museum.
Sadie Hoagland
I love James Rosenquist, his bright paintings seem so emblematic of America to me, in all its history and obsessions. I also love Kara Walker, for the same reasons. Though the experience of looking at each one is wildly different.
Jane Bernstein
I’m drawn to Vermeer and Rembrandt and other painters from that era. I love the scenes of everyday life and depictions of ordinary Dutch people in and out of their houses.
And Picasso, every period.
Gavin Edwards
I'm still getting my head around Christian Marclay's magnificent 24-hour movie The Clock, a collage of clips from other movies where at all moments, the time you are looking at on-screen is the time in the real world.
Deborah Crombie
I have always loved Renoir, but I recently saw the exhibition of his late paintings at the Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth and was blown away. The paintings were breathtaking.
Bella Ellis
Van Gogh - there is nothing more moving and glorious than getting to stand in front of Starry Night.
John Marrs
There’s no one artist I choose to seek out, although I love visiting galleries. My favourites are CLEARING in New York and Museum für Gegenwart in Berlin, places where you can immerse yourself and fall in love with works even if you don’t necessarily understand them.
Natasha Lester
I’m going to stretch the definition of artist into photography and choose Louise Dahl-Wolfe, a brilliant fashion photographer during the 1930s-1950s.
Vanessa Westermann
Peter Lindbergh. I visited the From Fashion To Reality exhibition in the Kunsthalle Munich, while living in Germany, and was captivated by the way he used fashion photography as a medium for storytelling.
Elizabeth Ames
I’m continually inspired by Alice Neel’s portraits and the photography of Gregory Crewdson. I also love the work of the painter Alexander BG Nolan. And I follow so many amazing illustrators on Instagram—Women Who Draw is a great resource for people seeking more visual inspiration.
Lauren North
Banksy
Katherine Center
I think maybe Maud Lewis, the Canadian folk artist who sold paintings by by the side of the road from her one-room house. She had a hard life in many ways—poverty and many health challenges, including rheumatoid arthritis that severely limited her mobility—but she painted for joy on anything she could find, including her own windows and walls and front door. I’m so inspired by how she used art to create happiness in her life—and I adore the look and feel of the paintings themselves. There’s a very gripping movie about her life called Maudie that’s worth a watch.
Alicia Dill
My favorite living artist is my baby sister, Chelsea Dill. She’s a teacher and a sergeant in the Army and still finds time to slay that canvas as a finger painter.
Summer Heacock
It feels cliché, but Van Gogh. I could stare at his work for days and never stop finding new facets of the paintings. His paintings look the way my brain feels.
Lauren Mechling
Three-way tie: Alice Neel, Edward Hopper, and Pierre Bonnard. Weird for a comic writer, but I’m a sucker for melancholia when it comes to art.
Jeanne Mackin
Matisse. He was completely an artist of his times, full of life and jazz and bright newness. The colors…oh, the colors!
Natalie Murray
Michelangelo for his statue of David. I once stood in the Accademia Gallery in Florence, fighting not to fall in love with a sculpture. Not for its physical beauty so much as the expression Michelangelo carved into the face of a man who had just killed his enemy. Michelangelo’s David looks not triumphant, but… sad. This broke my heart, in a crazily good way. I also adore Henri Matisse for his mastery of balance.
Roselle Lim
Elie Saab. Every one of his pieces is a wearable, walking fairytale.
Elizabeth Letts
Mary Cassatt
