Dragons, 2022
Curator : Heidi Leigh
Picture courtesy of the artist
Wayne ANDERSON
“Dragons and otherworldly creatures offer the opportunity for me to let my imagination run riot as there are no rules or restrictions”.
As a child Wayne Anderson was encouraged to pursue his artistic dream by his parents, who recognized their boy’s god-given talent. In 1961 at the age of fifteen, he enrolled in Leicester College of Art to polish his already formidable talent for “making pictures.” There he refined his academic skills, and before graduation young Anderson achieved recognition and awards. His illustration career began and blossomed in one of London’s seediest neighborhoods, and within a few short years he and his new bride moved out to the country where Anderson has remained, working and raising four children with his wife Jenny.
In 1969 Wayne Anderson rendered his first color commission in color crayon pencils, which he has used primarily for virtually all of his color work since, pushing the boundaries of the medium far beyond normal expectations. The difficulty with this technique is that it is incredibly labor intensive. On the bright side, a lifetime of devotion has enabled Anderson to master the medium, and he does enjoy the simplicity of his materials, needing little more than a piece of paper and his tray of pencils to bring an idea to life. Wayne has given shape to the fantasies of millions of children with his unique creatures and funny-looking surrealistic fairy tale characters that are instantly recognizable as his work.
Over the decades, Wayne Anderson has become most renowned for fantasy books and using his playful imagination to create fantastic imagery. He has brought countless dragons and other creatures to life through more than 160 books he has written and/or illustrated over the last fifty five years. More than fifty of his books have been published in multiple languages and published around the world. Wayne Anderson is one of the most honored living illustrators in the world.
Throughout his career, Anderson has loaned his work to numerous museums for exhibition purposes, and since2011he had gallery exhibitions around the world. His fine art is mixed media- including watercolours, acrylic and colored pencils and graphite His first one man show was a retrospective in the prison gallery of Chateau Belcastel entitled Dragons in the Dungeon. A limited-edition serigraph entitled The Dragon of Belcastel was commissioned, and it has since remained on exhibition as part of the castle’s permanent collection.
Picture courtesy of the artist
Tim CANTOR
“Painting (and writing) is like oxygen for me-It’s a need and a love - and it’s all that I know.”
Tim Cantor is a California native, born in 1969. A prodigy whose career blossomed at an early age, Tim began painting with oil at age five. At fifteen, one of his oil paintings was acquired for the permanent collection of the White House. Today he is well known for his work with the popular rock band Imagine Dragons. He toured with them for more than a year as their Artistic Director, creating set designs, music videos and original paintings for Smoke + Mirrors.
Tim is nocturnal, and prefers to paint during the stillness and silence of the night, alone with the imagination that comes to life in his work. Inspired by his waking dreams, the Artist blurs the line between dark and light, leaving the viewer to his or her own impression, and oftentimes reeling with the inability to look away…
At first glance the paintings of Tim Cantor seem reminiscent of a Dutch golden age masterpiece, but Tim’s subject matter inevitably makes a departure from what is quintessentially classic. His work is much more personal; Tim paints what he both fears and reveres. Known as a classic contemporary surrealist, the paintings of Tim Cantor are instantly recognizable because of his mastery in portraiture, light and detail. Furthermore, intricate and very interesting wind-up devices and gizmos installed on some of his subjects make them his own creatures.
The art of Tim Cantor is a unique experience. The Artist writes captivating poetry that accompanies each painting; words with layers of dark complexity that demand to be read and chewed on is a terrible distraction from the fragile beauty found in each of the paintings.
Tim is a multi-dimensional artist whose work is inseparable from poetry. The Artist is compelled to present both components simultaneously to the viewer, without intending to embellish his paintings, and surely not to explain them, but simply because he perceives his artistry and poetry as inexplicably entwined. And Tim’s provocative prose may in fact, ignite the heartbeats of his exquisite frankensteins.
Tim currently lives and works in Amsterdam with his beautiful wife and muse, Amy, and their Sphynx cat. Amy manages a gallery dedicated to Tim’s work in Amsterdam and also San Diego, California.
Daniel MErriam, the path of least resistance
Daniel MERRIAM
“There is no greater amusement park than the imagination itself-“
Born in 1963 in a rural town in Maine, Daniel Merriam taught himself to paint at a very young age, and today he is renowned as one of the world's best watercolorists.Daniel Merriam emerged on the art scene in his early 20's, and has since captured the hearts and curiosity of collectors worldwide. The hallmark of Merriam’s work is his boundless imagination that manifests a painterly world that is both fantastic and rooted in the beauty of the Victorian age. He is a dreamer who has always been compelled and dedicated to sharing his unique vision. Daniel Merriam's paintings are dreams in full color that invite the viewer to immerse themselves into a world where reality and fantasy collide in an explosion of beauty, shapes and symbolism.
Daniel Merriam’s paintings hung next to those of Salvador Dali for the first time in a surrealist exhibition entitled Venus and the Female Intuition, which traveled to museums throughout Denmark, Sweden, France and the United States in 2007 and 2008. Today, artwork by Daniel Merriam and his published limited-edition prints and books are included in many important private collections and museums world-wide.
In 2008 Daniel Merriam came to France for the first time, where he lived and worked as an artist-in -residence at the Château of Belcastel. Inspired by the local history and landscapes, Daniel returned again in 2009 and 2010. After dreaming of a white lady, he painted a portrait of Madame Blanche, the legendary phantom who resides in this chateau.
Painter, architect, sculptor, and poet, this modern day renaissance man enjoys a reputation as a master magical surrealist painter whose work has been lauded and exhibited around the globe. Daniel Merriam lives in San Francisco with Yulia, his wife and muse and their twins, born on 12/12/2012.
Heidi TAILLEFER
“My work is formed out of a process of free associative thinking, inspired mostly by life events and the emotions that are born from them”.
At the age of eight, Heidi Taillefer began painting and taking classes at the La Palette art school in Beaconsfield, Quebec, and by the early ’90s she began working as a commercial illustrator in tandem with her fine art projects. By 2004 she devoted herself full time to fine art, and within a few years her paintings were exhibited internationally in both gallery and museum venues.
Heidi Taillefer’s work is the bold and fanciful vision of unfettered genius. Gifted with a very high aptitude for spatial relationships, she has the ability to visualize complex imagery and rotate it in her mind’s eye. The free association thinking that she does gives rise to such an overwhelming number of creative ideas that she becomes exhausted, inevitably falling into a lucid dream state, where images unfold gently, with clarity, like a conceptual vision.
As a young artist Heidi gained international acclaim by creating all of the promotional artwork for the renowned Cirque de Solie troupe. She successfully created a brand that conveyed extraordinary creativity to the world.
A contemporary surrealist whose work highlights “bio-mechanical” constructions, Heidi Taillefer infuses primordial aspects of the human condition into hybridized creatures. In doing so, she portrays the inescapable nature of our being, despite our increasing merger with technology. Her collective body of work consists of fiercely imaginative subject matter that is often influenced by mythologies throughout different eras and cultures. With a design sensibility that often includes the beauty of Victorian romanticism, Heidi attempts to marry primordial human essence with the explosive expansion of the machine. Through her imagery, the Artist redefines what it means to be human.
Heidi Taillefer’s website
Antoine VERDIER
“My art strives to express overwhelming contemporary anxiety that humanity risks obliteration by the enormous wave of modern technology. Consequently, my work represents the advent of the robotic ‘post-human’ – the passing of one world to another”.
Antoine Verdier is a musician, muralist, painter and professor of art at the University of Montpellier, who remains dedicated to pursuing his own artistic career. To date, his work has been exhibited in France, Italy, China, New York, and Taiwan.
Antoine Verdier was a prodigy, and at the tender age of ten he knew that he would become an artist. Painting and draftsmanship came naturally to Antoine, and although he was inspired by the old masters and studied in Florence at the prestigious Angel Academy of art and the School of Visual Arts, he employed his technical virtuosity to discover his own unique voice in the chaotic contemporary world around him. Through his work, Antoine expresses his private fear of the confrontation between humanity and technology, and he is compelled to share his painterly, beautiful and disturbing vision of bio-hybrids with the viewer.
In rejecting the classic aesthetic, Antoine discovered that spark of brilliance. It takes critical observation to produce a multi-idea’d concept of form that conveys a convergence of concepts. His creatures are creatively crafted and engineered, then stitched together with balance and form to create invisible scars.
Antoine Verdier’s works make sense to a dancer's eyes; the Artist has studied movement and potential energy instead of assumed pose. His creatures are anatomically magnificent, coiled up with explosive energy, begging the viewer to reflect urgently and deeply about what our future will be. Through his work, the Artist demands to know- What will the relationship be between humans, animals and technology?
Kurt WENNER
“Opening our eyes to the genius of the natural world is vital, as we are unable to solve the problems at hand with the same thinking that created them".
American Artist Kurt Wenner has created and pursued an artistic career that is altogether unique. His first commission for a large-scale mural came at the age of 16. Shortly thereafter, he was recruited to work for NASA, where he drew future space projects and landscapes. In 1982 he moved to Italy to study works of the great masters. Inspired by their techniques on perspective, and his own architectural and design sensibilities, Kurt discovered that he could use perspective in a brand new way. He created 3-D pavement art, in a larger-than-life scale, using chalk on pavement.
With his expertise and inexhaustible imagination, Kurt soon became renowned for these extraordinary and sometimes monumental “depth-perception” murals. This path opened doors to an international career, and commissions for corporate and private clients, including Pope John Paul II and Oprah Winfrey. High profile public projects for the likes of the Smithsonian, Disney and Universal Studios were critically acclaimed and applauded around the globe. Kurt remains a prolific multimedia artist, and his body of work also includes oil and pastel paintings, drawings and illustrations, sculpture, architectural design, ceramic murals and illusion rooms.
With the heart of a great teacher, Kurt has given lectures and Masterclasses for nearly 40 years. He has taught at high-profile institutions, such as the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian, the Kennedy Center, Disney, and Warner Brothers Studios. Numerous theme parks around the globe have employed him as a consultant to teach engineers how to merge expertise in geometry and illusions, and make the ride experience better.
Kurt brought art to millions of students at a school residency program he created with the Music Center of Los Angeles. Kurt has also been an inspirational speaker at corporate and public events, and lectured at universities and cultural institutions across the globe. Kurt is particularly passionate about creativity and how it works. In 1991 he was honored with the Kennedy Center Medallion for his outstanding contribution to arts education.
Kurt Wenner’s pavement artwork is a full-blown experience for the viewer. The Artist's technical virtuosity enables him to render whatever his imagination can conceive, and with such a sense of depth and realism that the imagery often takes the viewer's breath away. Kurt's murals have been lauded as both astonishing and miraculous. The Artist understands principles of sacred geometry, as did the old masters. Carrying the torch of this knowledge, celebrating it and bringing into our contemporary world has long been Kurt’s purpose and passion.