I'd like to share an amazing artist with you all. His name is Andre Kohn. (Feel free to skip over my rant and go straight to the links to more of his art.)

"Shopping, Rain or Shine" Oil painting Source: [link]
Why am I bringing him up? He's not a dA artist or anything... but he is amazing. His art is stunning. For my art class I am required to do a journal visit, and his art is on display at the Howard/Mandville Gallery in Kirkland, WA. I think I pretty much fell in love with his art.
He's an oil painter, mainly. I don't know much about oil painting, only that it takes a really long time to dry, and that my grandma, who's a watercolour artist, is interested in trying it. I mainly work with acrylic paints myself, and sometimes watercolours, but all the oil paintings I saw today made me really want to try oil painting some time.
I think what I liked most about Kohn's paintings was the energy. You can see the paintings online and the energy might be impressive, but in person they were amazing. Most of the paintings have a color scheme based off mainly sepia tones with bold use of red. The ones I liked most have a strong contrast of light and dark and a wonderful sense of depth created by the shadows and lights. He effectively paints people in natural poses, often from behind, and makes good use of one of my favorite objects, the umbrella(I.E. the painting "Shopping, Rain or Shine"). To the Southwest Art Magazine in Sept. 2006, he said, "I look for the extraordinary in the ordinary. That's the essence of my work. It's easy to find the extraordinary in the exceptional, the unusual. But to find it in the every day, to see the poetry in a person's body at any moment, that's much harder. That's what I'm trying to do in every sketch, every canvas." His paintings of people are not posed portraits, they are images that capture simple beauty. To me, the way his textured style captures the everyday is much more beautiful way than a standard photo-realism portrait, no matter the skill level there.
Untitled Oil Painting Source [link]
His attitude of art is something I agree with--"I believe in happy accidents," he said, along with "If one of the brush strokes slides away from me, I let it." (quotes again taken from Southwest Art Magazine) I often find that some of my most exciting moments in creating art are when I've had one of those 'happy accidents'--i.e. putting down what should be the wrong color and finding out that it brings something new to the picture. I think it's that he allows for the 'mistakes' in his art to happen that his paintings end up with so much energy.
"Desde el Alma" (From the Soul) Oil Painting Source: [link]
I think I may have spent ten~twenty minutes standing in front of "Desde el Alma" and "Shopping, Rain or Shine," looking between them to try and figure out what about them I loved so much. Another of his pieces, "Intern," right next to them, gave me a clue--looking at it I saw not as much of the dark contrast that I see in the other two. It is also a beautiful piece, but the lesser contrast to me gives it a lesser 'spectrum' and a lesser appeal. "Intern" Oil Painting Source: [link]
Unfortunately the two of his paintings that impressed me most--"Rainy Day in Montparnesse" and "Vacation" are not online--or at least not where I've been able to find them--but on his website [link] and on the Howard/Mandville website [link] you can see some of his other works.

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