Avigdor Arikha is a painter born of German speaking Jewish parents in 1929 and grew up in Ukraine. He began painting as an abstract artist in the late 1950's but moved onto drawing things from life in 1965 after believing the abstract era was over. He confined his work to drawings and prints until 1973 when he began painting again. He is now known as "perhaps the best painter from life in the last decades of the 20th century". Amazingly the majority of his paintings would be started and completed in a single sitting. His work consisted of still lifes, portraits, nudes and landscapes. I particularly like his portraits and still lifes. He combines both realism and abstract into his paintings; the images appear very realistic, but are made to look very expressive with the use of abstracted colour and tone creating an image with depth and emotion.
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