Vincent Van Gogh

Vincent Willem van Gogh (30 March 1853 – 29 July 1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist artist.[1] His paintings and drawings include some of the world's best known, most popular and most expensive pieces.

Van Gogh spent his early adult life working for a firm of art dealers. After a brief spell as a teacher, he became a missionary worker in a very poor mining region. He did not embark upon a career as an artist until 1880. Initially, van Gogh worked only with sombre colours, until he encountered Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism in Paris. He incorporated their brighter colours and style of painting into a uniquely recognizable style, which was fully developed during the time he spent at Arles, France. He produced more than 2,000 works, including around 900 paintings and 1,100 drawings and sketches, during the last ten years of his life. Most of his best-known works were produced in the final two years of his life, during which time he cut off part of his left ear following a breakdown in his friendship with Paul Gauguin. After this he suffered recurrent bouts of mental illness, which led to his suicide.

Wassily Kandinsky

Wassily Kandinsky was a Russian painter, printmaker and art theorist. One of the most famous 20th-century artists, he is credited with painting the first modern abstract works.
Born in Moscow, Kandinsky spent his childhood in Odessa. As a young man he enrolled at the University of Moscow and chose to study law and economics. Quite successful in his profession—he was offered a professorship (chair of Roman Law) at the University of Dorpat—he started painting studies (life-drawing, sketching and anatomy) at the age of 30.
In 1896 he settled in Munich and studied first in the private school of Anton Ažbe and then at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich. He went back to Moscow in 1914 after World War I started. He was unsympathetic to the official theories on art in Moscow and returned to Germany in 1921. There he taught at the Bauhaus school of art and architecture from 1922 until the Nazis closed it in 1933. He then moved to France where he lived the rest of his life, and became a French citizen in 1939. He died at Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1944.

Alfred Gockel

Alfred Gockel was born in the coal mining town of Lüdinghausen, Germany. Gockel's first work was published when the artist was only eight years old. At 16 he began to work in the coal mines, and planned on one day becoming an engineer. When the mining industry experienced a downturn, many of the town's inhabitants were left without jobs. The struggle that Gockel felt at this time continues to affect his artwork today.

“I like to touch the viewer's soul with my vibrant colors,” Gockel has said. “Often in my paintings I use elements that reflect my challenging past, when as a boy I worked in the coal mines. But my purpose is to express my joy in life, and to show that we can overcome many obstacles through the expressions of life's beauties.”