An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only. The term is often used in the entertainment business, especially in a business context, for musicians and other performers (less often for actors). "Artiste" (the French for artist) is a variant used in English only in this context. Use of the term to describe writers, for example, is certainly valid, but less common, and mostly restricted to contexts like criticism.
Wiktionary defines the noun 'artist' (Singular: artist; Plural: artists) as follows:
The Oxford English Dictionary defines the older broad meanings of the term "artist":
A definition of Artist from Princeton.edu: creative person (a person whose creative work shows sensitivity and imagination).
Although the Greek word "techně" is often mistranslated as "art," it actually implies mastery of any sort of craft. The Latin-derived form of the word is "tecnicus", from which the English words technique, technology, technical are derived.
Vincent Deighan (born 1968), better known by the pen name Frank Quitely, is a Scottish comic book artist. He is best known for his frequent collaborations with Grant Morrison on titles such as New X-Men, We3, All-Star Superman, and Batman and Robin, as well as his work with Mark Millar on The Authority.
Quitely first worked upon the Scottish underground comics title Electric Soup in 1990. He wrote and drew The Greens, a parody of The Broons strip published by D.C. Thompson. It was in working on this book that he adopted the pseudonym of Frank Quitely (a spoonerism of "quite frankly"), as he did not want his family to know it was his work, worried that they may have found it upsetting.
Initially Electric Soup was only distributed locally in Glasgow, then it was picked up by John Brown Publishing for widespread national UK distribution. This brought Quitely's work to the attention of Judge Dredd Megazine editor David Bishop. He was given work on Shimura, written by Robbie Morrison, and Missionary Man, by Gordon Rennie, quickly rising to prominence and being voted among the fans' favourite five artists in an end-of-year survey. By 1994 he had started work in various stories in Paradox Press's series of The Big Book of graphic novels, as well as work for Dark Horse Presents for Dark Horse Comics.
Norman Ackroyd, CBE, R.A. (born 1938 in Leeds, Yorkshire) is an English artist known primarily for his aquatints. He is based in London.
Ackroyd attended Leeds College of Art from 1957–61 and the Royal College of Art, London from 1961–64, where he studied under Julian Trevelyan. Subsequently he lived for several years in the United States. He was elected to the Royal Academy of Art in 1988 and appointed Professor of Etching, University of the Arts, in 1994. He was elected Senior Fellow of the Royal College of Art in 2000, and in 2007 was made CBE for services to Engraving and Printing.
Ackroyd's works from the 1960s show his interest in both Pop Art, particularly artist Jasper Johns, and Minimalism. His complex compositions from that period often integrate pre-existing imagery such as newspaper clippings.
Gradually Ackroyd abandons the language of Pop Art; for a time his compositions simplify and grow more abstract, sometimes geometric. In time they depict or suggest naturalistic elements, e.g., hills, clouds, rainbows. Even when depicting rainbows, Ackroyd uses colour only very sparingly. He moves away from stencils and photographic transfers to pure aquatint, beginning the plate sometimes out in the landscape. His mature work can be reminiscent of J.M.W. Turner's, albeit without the benefit of colour.
Jack Vettriano OBE born Jack Hoggan (born 17 November 1951), is a Scottish painter.
Jack Vettriano grew up in the industrial seaside town of Methil, Fife. He left school at 16 and later became an apprentice mining engineer. Vettriano did not take up painting as a hobby until the 1970s, when a girlfriend bought him a set of watercolours for his 21st birthday. His earliest paintings, under his birth name "Jack Hoggan", were copies or pastiches of impressionist paintings – his first painting was a copy of Monet's Poppy Fields.[1] Much of his influence came from studying paintings at the Kirkcaldy Museum and Art Gallery in neighbouring Kirkcaldy. In 1984, Vettriano first submitted his work to the Shell-sponsored art exhibition in the museum. In 1987, he left his wife of eight years, Gail, and stepdaughter, and his job in educational research, and moved to Edinburgh. There, he adopted his mother's maiden name, gave away his suits to a neighbour and started dressing as an Edwardian dandy – "brogues, braces, long hair; the only thing missing was the cane." He applied to study Fine Art at the University of Edinburgh, but his portfolio was rejected.