Great Contemporary Painters and Their Books

Working from images that catch his eye or film stills Doig obsessively works and reworks compositions creating new worlds that are oddly unsettling and familiar to spiral into.

Working from current political affairs or news articles Richter creates contemporary striking paintings that demand the attention and answers of his country men

Kimimnik draws inspiration from old masters and fairytales. She makes direct parallels dragging in todays celebs into her pantomime-esque fantasies.
Below is Paris Hilton as the spoilt Queen Marie Antoinette and Leo Dicaprio as Swan Lakes Prince.

Peyton is best known for her stylized and idealized portraits of her close friends, pop celebrities, and European monarchy.

A photographer, not painter but has inspired pretty much every painting I've ever done.

Each image looks staged and posed ready for action. The unnatural lighting and saturated colours adds to the sinister and foreboding sense of what is about to be played out.

It takes more than a few minutes to realise the Shaw's images are paintings and not photos.
Working from his memories of growing up on a council estate he works with the idea of deserted corners of our everyday surroundings and the stories they hold for each of us.

Dumas again often works from newspaper articles that attract her attention, focusing on sections of an image, she crops them to add a new and uncertain meaning to images that take a while to recover.

Ideas of beauty, repulsion, family, relationships, honesty dreams and reality drive Freuds workings.

Laura Owens creates fantasy scenes and unatural creature to posses them in paintings which sway between that of decrotive wrapping paper and deeply impastoed velvet worlds.

Beuys stated‘I wanted to isolate myself, insulate myself, see nothing of America other than the coyote.’
The title of the work is filled with irony. Beuys opposed American military actions in Vietnam, and his work as an artist was a challenge to the hegemony of American art.

A figurative paintings who's work is much larger than life size. They are strongly pigmented and give a highly sensual impression of the surface of the skin as well as the mass of the body. She sometimes adds marks onto the body, such as white "target" rings.

This is a FANTASTIC book filled with all the worlds best contemporay artists.

If your interested in the art world around us now, but want to ensure your looking at the quality stuff, not 'something a monkey could knock up' then this book is a great spring board to buff up your knowledge and insight.

Whatever and whoever you are looking for, you're sure to find it in here.