Matthew Barney - César

Matthew Barney is an American Artist that works to combine performance and film with sculpture and drawing. He began with an exploration of improvement with restraint, purposefully restraining himself in an attempt to force himself on to new frontiers with his drawings. I found out about him through his marriage to Bjork but find his work to be pushing boundaries in the visual art world.

Drawing Restraint 

The CREMASTER Cycle

River of Fundament

Chris Schoonover

Chris Schoonover is an American photographer living in the New Jeresy area. He only started taking photographs recently but has attracted a lot of attention. In fact, he bought his first camera in 2013. He comes from a design backround and I beleive that is relevant in his photographs. He has done a lot of work with fashion and portrait photography. Personally, I like the colors in his photographs and how each of his photographs are really differant. He just captures really visually appealing moments that, to me, seem like could be a still from a 20th century movie with a very complex and emotional plot line.

Stephen Wiltshire

Autistic black man living in London

Has an incredible photographic memory

Draws skylines from memory with incredible detail

Ray Collins

Ray Collins is an Australian photographer who focuses on taking pictures of waves and the ocean, but also photographs people and other subject matter. When photographing waves, he uses a really fast shutter speed and manages to make them look like mountains in some cases, tunnels in others. I like how he plays around with light and perspective in his work because it allows a simple thing like a wave crashing into shore seem like an event and something monumental. In reality, the wave crashing takes very little time yet, for one moment, the wave he's depicting is still. 

"Ray feels more at home floating in saltwater with his camera than anywhere on land. Freezing the ephemeral relationship between water and light is what drives and inspires him to clamber out of bed in the dark each morning to celebrate the sun rising over the sea."

“I’ve had a few instances where I’ve been concerned for my well-being and general safety. Just miscalculating and underestimating the power of a wave.”--Ray Collins

"But there are moments  when it all comes together, and they are moments that propel me."--Ray Collins

Ray is alive, well, hip, and cool. He also has an instagram cool things happen if you click it.

(List of things he has (from his site): "Ray has been the recipient of the prestigious 'Follow The Light Grant' (2009), placed 1st, 2nd & 3rd in the ‘Australian Surf Photo of the Year' (2012), Semi Finalist in the 'Moran Portraiture Prize' (2012) named ’Emerging Sport Photographer of the Year’ (Capture Professional Photography Magazine 2013) Runner Up ‘Ocean Geographic - Pictures of the year’ (2013), Placed 1st in the 'California Academy Of Sciences - Big Picture Awards'  (2014), Portfolio Of The Year 'The Inertia' (2014), 'Overall Winner' and 'Best of Show' in 'The Ocean Art Photo Competition' (2015), Shortlisted Finalist of The Terry Oneill Photography Award (2015), 1st Place ‘Australian Surf Photo of the Year' (2015), 'Juror's Award' - 'The Center for Fine Art Photography - USA' (2015), Shortlisted Finalist for the prestigious 'Smithsonian - Annual Photo Contest' (2015). Winner 'American Aperture Awards' - Landscape/Seascape/Nature (2015).

Ray's work has been featured by Wired, Yahoo, CNN, ABC (USA), ESPN, Huffington Post & BuzzFeed and can regularly be found in Art, Lifestyle, Sport and Photography Magazines around the world, his Seascapes have been exhibited in galleries and museums throughout The United States, Europe, The UK and Australia.") http://raycollinsphoto.com/

Egon Shciele

Egon Shciele was an Asutrian painter in the early 20th century. He mostly did figures, much of which are self portraits. I do a lot of figure drawings and I really like his interpretation of the human body. I think a really natural tendency that you have to unlearn when you first start drawing figures is to try and make them as uniform to what you know to be a human body as you can and to try and draw what you think you see rather than what you actually see. With Schiele's work he doesn't smooth over the imperfections of the models but rather accentuates them and as a result the figures really intensify. As a side note I also really like the fact that in many of his pantings the figures look dead inside, or like dolls (haven't quite intellectualized why I like that part of his pantings yet). Another noteworthy aspect of his pieces is the sexuality he depicts in them. Considering he only lived from 1890 to 1918, that was some pretty risqué stuff to paint about.