Fashion/Personality

Iris Apfel

She (born August 29, 1921) is an American interior designer and fashion icon who has studied art history at New York University and attended art school at the University of Wisconsin. In 1948, she married Carl Apfel. Two years later they launched the textile firm Old World Weavers and ran it until they retired in 1992. During this time, Iris Apfel took part in several design restoration projects, including work at the White House for nine presidents: Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Reagan, and Clinton.

In 2005, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City premiered an exhibition about Apfel titled Rara Avis (Rare Bird): The Irreverent Iris Apfel. The exhibit's success prompted a traveling version of the exhibit, which included stops at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida, the Nassau County Museum in Nassau County, New York, and the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts.

Here is a quotation from our fashion Icon regarding accessories : “For me the key to personal style lies in accessories. My friends tell me that my oversized glasses and my pairs of bracelets have become my unwritten signature. I have amassed an enormous ‘collection’ of bags, belts, bangles and beads without which I would be lost. One can change the entire look of an outfit by substituting one accessory for another. I love objects from different worlds, different eras, combined my way. Never uptight, achieving – hopefully – a kind of throwaway chic.” Iris Apfel.

Apfel still consults and lectures about style and other fashion topics.

Fine Art (Painting)

Dexter Dalwood

He is an artist based in London and has shown work internationally in many important exhibitions including the 2002 Sydney Biennial, “Hollywood is a Verb” at Gagosian Gallery in New York, the 19th John Moore’s Painting Prize at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, “Die Young Stay Pretty” at the ICA London.
He makes paintings of famous places he’s never seen. Offering plausible suggestions of those iconic haunts lingering invisibly in collective consciousness, Dalwood pictures his own documentation of history.

McCarthy’s living room, Kurt Cobain’s greenhouse, or Jackie O’s yacht are depicted with uncanny believability; not as real occupied places, but our media-constructed fantasies of them. Devoid of any bric-a-brac signs of human life, Dexter Dalwood pictures these lairs of rumour with Hello! magazine cleanliness; show homes of glamour, dark theme-park panoramas of gossip tourism.

Through painting, he masters the strategies of propaganda dissemination and the superfluous nature of information currency in a mass media age. Working in the traditional genre of historical painting, Dexter Dalwood presents the makings of our sociological zeitgeist as an elevated hierarchy of lasting cultural significance.

Mixed Media Relief Art

Gregory Euclide

He is an American contemporary artist and teacher who currently lives and works outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota. His work are mixed media landscape paintings that explore ideas surrounding nature and the human experience, while void of the human figure. His sculptural paintings juxtapose natural occurring, organic matter with artificial, man-made materials. The artist collects found objects, interesting plant material and incorporates such materials into multi-dimensional objects made from crumpled paper, on which might be elaborate and detailed drawings or paintings.

http://www.gregoryeuclide.com/

Photography

Dina Goldstein

 Dina Goldstein, Canadian photographer, tells everyday life with a bit of black humor after the sentence “happily ever after” in her “Fallen Princesses” set.
“Fallen Princesses” project was thought up while Dina Goldstein was observing how little girls assimilate Disney fairy tales where there’s always a happy ending to story of a lower class girl saved by a prince.

http://www.fallenprincesses.com/

Fine Art (Dreams and Reality)

National Museum of Singapore

This rare exhibition Dreams and Reality at National Museum of Singapore featured over 140 Salon, Realists, Impressionists and Post-Impressionists paintings, photographs and drawings from the mid-19th century to the early 20th century collected by Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Of special mention would be the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist work with their rendition of soft pastel colours and plein air lighting effects. Aside popular work by great masters such as Cezanne, Manet, Seurat, Renoir and Van Gogh, great work by lesser-known artists such as Henri de Toulouse Lautrec, Frederic Bazille, Maurice Denis, Marie Braquemond are featured as well.  

http://www.nationalmuseum.sg/ExhibitionDetail.aspx?id=65&cat=2

Furniture Design

Khai Liew

An Australia-based expert in furniture design, he drew his inspiration from Dutch, Chinese and Japanese aesthetics. All his products are masterly crafted by skilled artisans.

http://www.khailiewdesign.com/khailiew.htm

Illustrator

Edward Gorey

Edward St. John Gorey (February 22, 1925 – April 15, 2000) was an American writer and artist noted for his macabre illustrated books.

His books can be found in the humor and cartoon sections of major bookstores, but books like The Object Lesson have earned serious critical respect as works of surrealist art. His experimentations — creating books that were wordless, books that were literally matchbox-sized, pop-up books, books entirely populated by inanimate objects.

As Gorey told Richard Dyer of The Boston Globe, "Ideally, if anything [was] any good, it would be indescribable." Gorey classified his own work as literary nonsense, the genre made most famous by Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear.