* This is a Gif created out of 81 images of paintings by the 20 artists I have used within my research. These are faded using the opacity tool in Photoshop to create a chronological visual timeline of the birth order of these artists.
These paintings are not in order of conception but in order of the birth of the artist.
* This is an interactive data driven document which I created to express my selected data in a chart style format. This scrollable, zoomable and colour coded graph is an example of what can be achieved using JavaScript to represent data. This graph was created to allow the viewer to see visually when each artist was born and when they died using chronological values. The first dot represents the birth, and the second is the death, while zooming you may notice that they merge if the birth and death are relatively close together.
This chart allows you to stretch time, and to visually examine the length of time these artists were on the planet collectively or singularly.
*One of the most interesting pieces of data I receive from his pie chart is that the two most recent artists; Basquiat & Haring have the shortest life span of all less, then a 3rd of Michelangelo who lived over 500 years before them. Dose this suggest the lifestyle of an artist has changed since the Renaissance. The artists in the Renaissance were like kings upon men, so perhaps they have maintained a healthy lifestyle. Notoriously Basquiat was a heavy drug user which, was the death of him, where Haring died of Aids. These lifestyles of a New York artist in the 80's show a contrast to the lifestyle of the Italian artists in the Renaissance.
* Visually from this “Gif“ to the left, you can see that realism within art slowly deteriorates over time, (with the exception of Lucian Freud, who’s work has gone into uncomplimentary likeness.) This is not necessarily a bad thing, it just explains that the values of art have changed over time, maybe expression and individuality have progressively became more important then depicting reality, or in the case of the religious painters, what they believed to be reality. Warhol in comparison to Michelangelo is like a polar opposite; Andy has gone for simplicity of minimum layers and bright un-natural colours using screen-printing, to rapidly replicate his work. Where Michelangelo was achieving what the equivalent of what the purpose of todays cameras was 500 years ago, but only with the exclusivity of one individual copy.
Willem de Kooning is the longest living artist in this list, living almost 93 years, active throughout almost all of the 20th century.
It is common knowledge that art changed drastically in the impressionist era of Monet & Renoir where the impressionist’s moment rebelled against the Academie des Beaux-Arts in Paris, that believed art should follow strict rules. Did this shockwave continue shaking today to the point where contemporary conceptual artists can get away with practically claiming anything as art, as long as it can be justified within their conceptual values?