[Artist Statement]

I love to explore. Art is a place that is meant to be looked at, and I want to give people fresh eyes on old ideas. Nursery rhymes that have been repeated since childhood are familiar, but my pieces put a spin on the traditional expectations of Little Red Riding Hood and the Brothers Grimm. I am making accustomed characters new again, and am reintroducing more mature themes to stories that we've heard our entire lives.

[Art and Fear]

These two are, unfortunately, synonymous. I am always afraid to create, for fear of treading untouchable waters or dabbling in the taboo and stepping on toes. I am afraid that I am never good enough, or that my abilities lack.

Mini Landscape

Hey folks!

Thanks for being such awesome people who give an honest critique! As per Ridl's request though, I am asking for something a little different than a typical comment. Just be totally honest in what you say about my art, and that's really all that I want to see. I don't like it sugar coated, and would love to know what needs to be improved on. I'm new to coloring with traditional techniques, and would like some feedback from people who have more experience. Just give it to me straight, and I promise that there will be no tears from my end.

Thanks so much,
-Sammy

One Day - [Keys]

Concentration 2

Concentration 1

After [Temporality]

Henri de Toulouse-Lutrec

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was born on November 24, 1864, in southern France. Son and heir of Comte Alphonse-Charles de Toulouse, he was the last in the line of an aristocratic family that dated back a thousand years. Today, the family estate houses the Musée Toulouse-Lautrec. As a child, Henri was weak and often sick. But by the time he was ten years old he had begun to draw and paint.

At age twelve Toulouse-Lautrec broke his left leg and at fourteen his right leg. The bones did not heal properly, and his legs ceased to grow. He reached maturity with a body trunk of normal size but with abnormally short legs. He was only 4 1/2 feet (1.5 meters) tall.

Deprived of the physical life that a normal body would have permitted, Toulouse-Lautrec lived completely for his art. He dwelt in the Monmarte Center of Paris, the center of the cabaret entertainment and bohemian life that he loved to depict in his work. Dance halls and nightclubs, racetracks, prostitutes - all these were memorialized on canvas or made into lithographs.

Toulouse-Lautrec was very much an active part of this community. He would sit at a crowded nightclub table, laughing and drinking, meanwhile making swift sketches. The next morning in his studio he would expand the sketches into brightly colored paintings.

In order to join in the Montmartre life - as well as to fortify himself against the crowd's ridicule of his appearance - Toulouse-Lautrec began to drink heavily. By the 1890s the drinking was affecting his health. He was confined first to a sanatorium and then to his mother's care at home, but he could not stay away from alcohol. Toulouse-Lautrec died on September 9, 1901, at the family chateau of Malrome.