Artists & their work

1. Study an artist systematically: style, subject, media, technique and context

   Every artist study answers the same five questions. Style: what makes their work recognisably theirs? Subject: what do they choose to depict? Media: what materials do they use? Technique: how exactly do they handle those materials? Context: when and where did they work, and what shaped them? Answer all five and you understand an artist well enough to learn from them.

2. Know Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance masters

   Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) embodies the Renaissance: painter of the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, and a relentless observer whose notebooks mix anatomy, engineering and art. His sfumato technique - softly blurred edges with no hard lines - gives his faces their lifelike glow. His habit of studying everything from muscles to water flow is a model for how observation feeds art.

3. Know Claude Monet and Impressionist light

   Monet (1840–1926) painted the same subjects - haystacks, Rouen Cathedral, his water-lily pond at Giverny - again and again at different times of day, chasing how light changes everything. His broken brushstrokes of unmixed colour blend in the viewer's eye rather than on the canvas. Studying his series paintings shows how one subject can sustain a whole body of work.

4. Know Vincent van Gogh and expressive colour

   Van Gogh (1853–1890) made around 900 paintings in a single decade, including The Starry Night and the Sunflowers. His thick impasto brushstrokes swirl with energy, and his colour is emotional rather than realistic - chosen for feeling, not accuracy. He sold very little in his lifetime yet became one of the most loved artists in history: proof that dedication to a personal vision matters.

5. Know Pablo Picasso and constant reinvention

   Picasso (1881–1973) reinvented himself continually: the melancholy Blue Period, the Rose Period, the invention of Cubism with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, and Guernica - his monumental protest against the bombing of a Basque town. He mastered traditional drawing young, then spent a lifetime breaking its rules on purpose. His career shows that a style is something an artist builds, tests and rebuilds.

6. Know Georgia O'Keeffe and Frida Kahlo

   O'Keeffe (1887–1986) painted flowers magnified until they became near-abstract, and the bleached bones and desert landscapes of New Mexico - bold, simplified forms in luminous colour. Kahlo (1907–1954) turned her own life, pain and Mexican identity into vivid symbolic self-portraits, which make up about a third of her work. Both built unmistakable personal languages from what they knew most deeply.

7. Know Hokusai and Yayoi Kusama

   Hokusai (1760–1849) made the ukiyo-e woodblock series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, including The Great Wave off Kanagawa - perhaps the most reproduced image in art - and his flowing line and flat colour changed European art when his prints reached Paris. Kusama (born 1929) covers paintings, sculptures and whole mirrored rooms in polka dots and infinity nets. Two Japanese artists, two centuries apart, both instantly recognisable.

8. Know Andy Warhol, Bridget Riley and David Hockney

   Warhol (1928–1987) screen-printed Campbell's soup cans and Marilyn Monroe, treating fame and consumer goods as subjects for art and making repetition itself the point. Riley (born 1931) leads Op Art: precise black-and-white and colour patterns that seem to ripple and vibrate. Hockney (born 1937) moves from the swimming-pool paintings of 1960s California to Yorkshire landscapes painted on an iPad - always embracing new tools.

9. Know Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Wassily Kandinsky

   Moore (1898–1986) and Hepworth (1903–1975) led British modern sculpture: Moore's monumental reclining figures with pierced hollows, Hepworth's smooth abstract forms often strung with taut wires - both letting the material and the hole shape the work as much as the solid. Kandinsky (1866–1944) is widely credited with the first fully abstract paintings, composing colour and shape like music. Together they show abstraction working in both two and three dimensions.

10. Connect artist research to your own work

    An artist study earns its place when it changes what you make next. Copying a passage of an artist's work teaches you their technique from the inside; then take one element - Van Gogh's mark-making, Riley's pattern, Kahlo's symbolism - and apply it to your own subject. Always record the connection in your sketchbook: "influenced by X, I tried Y" is exactly the development examiners look for.

More Contexts & analysis topics

• Art movements & periods
• Critical analysis & the AOs
• The formal elements
• Media & techniques

Keep reading

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• What are the GCSE Art & Design grade boundaries?
• The GCSE Art & Design syllabus, explained