artist research page art

Visit Planning

• Plan Your Visit
• Event Calendar
• Current Exhibitions
• Family Activities
• Guidelines and Policies

Access Programs

• Accessibility
• Dementia Programs
• Verbal Description Tours

Explore Art and Artists

Collection highlights.

• Search Artworks
• New Acquisitions
• Search Artists
• Search Women Artists

Something Fun

• Which Artist Shares Your Birthday?

Exhibitions

• Upcoming Exhibitions
• Traveling Exhibitions
• Past Exhibitions

Art Conservation

• Lunder Conservation Center

Research Resources

• Research and Scholars Center
• Nam June Paik Archive Collection
• Photograph Study Collection
• National Art Inventories Databases
• Save Outdoor Sculpture!
• Researching Your Art

Publications

• American Art Journal
• Toward Equity in Publishing
• Catalogs and Books
• Scholarly Symposia
• Publication Prizes

Fellows and Interns

• Fellowship Programs
• List of Fellows and Scholars
• Internship Programs

Featured Resource

• Support the Museum
• Corporate Patrons
• Gift Planning
• Donating Artworks
• Join the Director's Circle
• Join SAAM Creatives

Become a member

How to Research an Artist or a Work of Art

Find articles, contemporary artists, gallery websites, keyword search tips.

• How to research a work of art

This guide walks you through the steps of researching an artist and of researching a work of art.

The following resources can provide lots of great biographical information on artists.  Check for bibliographies on articles.

In many databases you can narrow your search to certain "content types." Look for:

• Biographies
• Exhibition Catalogs
• Periodicals

Off-campus access is limited to SIA faculty, students, and staff, unless otherwise noted. 

The more traditional resources in this guide may not cover contemporary artists. A few suggestions are listed below for locating information on contemporary artists. Cleveland Institute of Art's Contemporary Artist Index is a database that lists over 31,000 artists appearing in more than 1,800 exhibition catalogs and art publications.

Gallery websites will often contain some basic information on the artists they represent. A simple Google search may lead you to an artist's gallery.

If not, try searching for the artist in the  ArtNet Artists A-Z list .  Artist information will often include a link to a list of dealers representing the artist as in the example below from ArtNet for the artist Rashaad Newsome

One of the dealers listed is Marlborough Gallery. If you go to the Marlborough Gallery website, you will find a lot of biographical information provided on the artist's page. 

Selected examples of subject search terms to use in databases and library catalogs. Terms can all be modified by place names, e.g., Expatriate artists -- United States . You may also search by the name of an artist, either as an author or as subject. 

• Next: How to research a work of art >>
• Last Updated: Feb 22, 2024 3:57 PM
• URL: https://sia.libguides.com/c.php?g=521226

• Institutional Portals
• Researchers

Research Catalogue

An international database for artistic research, recent activities >.

recent publications >

sar announcements >

• Icon Link Plus Icon

Research Art is Everywhere. But Some Artists Do It Better Than Others.

By Kavior Moon

Kavior Moon

Related Articles

In the global south, labeling a research project "art" can be a tool for evading censorship, when does artistic research become fake news forensic architecture keeps dodging the question.

How did this come to be? On the institutional front, art schools have been establishing programs and centers for “artistic research” and “research-creation,” particularly in Canada and across Europe, for more than 20 years. In 1997 the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki established an early notable doctoral program for artists; two decades later, PhD degrees in art are available in multiple countries. Globally renowned curators such as Catherine David, Okwui Enwezor, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, and Ute Meta Bauer made their careers organizing large-scale international exhibitions often laden with research-based art and organized within a curatorial framework predicated on theory. Now, there are professional artists with research-based practices teaching their students various research methodologies and encouraging the production of yet more research-based works.

The current trend has an even longer historical trajectory when related to artists and their motivations. One might find traces in the work of Leonardo da Vinci or 17th-century naturalists such as Maria Sibylla Merian. Hito Steyerl, a contemporary research artist par excellence, describes the formal and semiotic investigations of Soviet avant-garde circles in the 1920s as formative for research art today. In her 2010 essay “Aesthetics of Resistance? Artistic Research as Discipline and Conflict,” Steyerl discusses authors, photographers, and self-proclaimed “factographers”—including Dziga Vertov, Sergei Tretyakov, Lyubov Popova, and Aleksandr Rodchenko—whose epistemological debates centered on terms such as “fact,” “reality,” and “objectivity.” From Constructivism, in which artists were redefined as designers, technicians, and engineers engaged in developing new approaches to constructing forms, emerged the program of Productivism and the associated method called “factography.”

Factographers aimed to chronicle and analyze modern life, particularly through texts, photography, and film. They did not claim to portray reality objectively and impartially (as opposed to conventional documentary makers) but rather to actively transform reality through ideological acts of signification, through new modes of production and collective reception. As Steyerl reminds us, “fact comes from [the Latin] facere , to make or to do.”

Another pivotal moment in the historical development of research-based art came with the conceptual turn in art in the 1960s and ’70s, particularly with the emergence of institutional critique. Moving away from formalist painting and sculpture, Conceptual artists contended that the idea or concept of an artwork (not its physical form) was the art. Texts, diagrams, photographs, and other forms of matter-of-fact documentation feature heavily in the works of Conceptual artists Joseph Kosuth, the Art & Language group, Mel Bochner, Hanne Darboven, and Christine Kozlov, among others. From this point of view, art can be seen as a transmission of “information,” the term curator Kynaston McShine used to title his landmark Conceptual art survey at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1970.

WITH ARTISTS INCLINED TOWARD INSTITUTIONAL CRITIQUE like Hans Haacke, one begins to see research not just informing the work of art but becoming an essential part of its content. A significant early example is Haacke’s Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971 (1971), which was made using extensive information that Haacke found in the New York County Clerk’s records. The work is simply a presentation of facts: it comprises 142 photographs of building facades and empty lots, maps of the Lower East Side and Harlem indicating each property’s location, and texts and charts detailing information about transfer of ownership, land value, and mortgage lenders.

With prolonged viewing, one notices that the many corporations that owned the properties were actually run by notorious landlord Harry J. Shapolsky and his relatives and associates, who bought, sold, and mortgaged the properties within their own real estate group. The shell corporations effectively obscured the properties’ ownership ties to the Shapolsky family as well as the tax advantages these inside deals conferred. One of the city’s biggest slumlords at the time, Shapolsky had previously been indicted for bribing building inspectors and convicted of rent-gouging.

For institutional critique artists, research became a key means to investigate and expose various social systems and the sociopolitical context of the art world. In doing so, the aim was to show how what we consider “art” is not timeless but in fact socially constructed, powerfully conditioned by the conventions and normalizing practices of art institutions. Haacke’s Shapolsky et al. was one of the reasons the artist’s major solo show at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum that year was famously canceled after then director Thomas Messer accused Haacke of “muckraking,” calling his work “extra-artistic” and a potential “alien presence” within the museum.

Although Haacke clearly made visible the machinery behind one of the most lucrative real estate operations in New York, the more fundamental threat, art historian Rosalyn Deutsche has pointed out, was how his work would have framed a series of slum properties against the museum’s pristine space, revealing it as a highly controlled space of material privilege. Deutsche persuasively argues that Haacke’s work implicitly raises questions about how proprietorial interests shape not only urban space but cultural spaces as well—a line of inquiry that Haacke and other institutional critique artists would develop in subsequent research-based works.

THE LAST MOMENTOUS SHIFT in the 20th century occurred around the 1980s and ’90s, as more and more artists used research to inform their works reflecting feminism, postcolonialism, queerness, and other forms of identity politics. An early example is Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (1973–79), a six-part series that juxtaposes documentation of the artist’s experience as a new parent and the development of her son during the first six years of his life with research on the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan. A feminist critique of Conceptual art as well as Lacanian psychoanalysis, Post-Partum Document presents the mother-child relationship as an intersubjective exchange of signs between mother and child.

During these decades, artists often used archival materials or the form of the archive in their works, making research-based art to recuperate overlooked histories and marginalized figures or groups. In her landmark Import/Export Funk Office (1992–93), Renée Green presented books, magazines, photographs, cassette tapes, videotaped interviews, and other source materials taken from both her library and that of German cultural critic Diedrich Diederichsen, creating an extensive audiovisual archive of international hip-hop and African diasporic culture in the United States and Germany. Hal Foster termed this tendency “an archival impulse,” looking at the works of Tacita Dean, Sam Durant, and Thomas Hirschhorn.

Another artistic approach entails questioning the authority and authenticity of archives by pointing out their inherent biases. Between 1989 and 2004, Walid Raad developed a collection of both found and fabricated materials—documents, notebooks, photographs, news clippings, interview transcripts, and videos—related to the Lebanese Civil War (1975–91). His archival displays, presented under the guise of an imaginary foundation named “The Atlas Group,” blend fact and fiction to deconstruct the truth claims of documentary media, and bespeak distrust of official narratives, while also exploring the links between history, memory, trauma, and fantasy.

ONE CAN SEE a variety of research-based approaches in the practices of numerous artists today, applied with varying degrees of success. Some critics have voiced skepticism of much research-based art currently in vogue. In a 2019 lecture at the Kunsthalle Wien, Claire Bishop decried many research-based artworks as “information overload” and mere “aggregation” without hierarchy or narrative in ways that are symptomatic of our “browsing” habits in the internet age.

While a number of artists have used research as a crucial component in large-scale works—Steyerl in her immersive installations, Hirschhorn in his sprawling “monuments” to various critical theorists—others favor a more understated mode: pared-back, subtle, and visually economical. These artists often start by researching objects, ideas, events, or sites, and pair their installations with detailed supplemental texts that make one reconsider the presented materials in light of what can’t immediately be seen, often intangible issues of historical context, social injustice, and the law.

Maria Eichhorn, a second-generation institutional critique artist, bridges that now-established approach with the practices of younger research-based artists. For the 1997 edition of Skulptur Projekte Münster, she used the production fee she received to purchase a plot of land near the center of the show’s host city. Declaring the vacant lot a public sculpture, she titled her project Acquisition of a plot, Tibusstraße, corner of Breul, communal district of Münster, plot 5, drawing attention to the site’s recent history: years prior, residents had mobilized to stop the building of luxury condominiums there, and formed a tenants association to protect the availability of affordable housing.

Eichhorn exhibited a copy of the plot’s purchase contract and deed in the Landesmuseum, alongside a booklet detailing her research into the origins of cities in Europe, the historical establishment of land registers and real property, and the problem of affordable housing in present-day Munster. Instead of installing a piece of decorative “plop art,” Eichhorn prompted visitors to reflect on the economic and social realities of everyday urban spaces and the conflict of public and private interests. At the end of the exhibition, the artist sold the plot back to the city and donated its resale value to the area’s tenants association.

More recently, Eichhorn has focused on goods unlawfully obtained by the German state. For her 2003 exhibition “Politics of Restitution” at the Lenbachhaus in Munich, she worked with historian Anja Heuss to research the provenance of 15 paintings in the Lenbachhaus’s art collection on permanent loan from the Federal Republic of Germany. After World War II and until 1962, the Allies sought to return art objects stolen by the Nazis; after that, the remaining 20,000 or so unclaimed items were declared state property. Heuss determined that 7 of the 15 paintings were likely stolen or forcibly taken from their Jewish owners. Eichhorn displayed these paintings so as to reveal the markings on the reverse that document how they changed hands over time. She also exhibited another painting in the Lenbachhaus’s collection that was formally restituted just a year earlier to the heirs of its original Jewish owner.

Chronicling how these paintings got to where they are begs a follow-up question: what other objects currently in public collections were wrongfully taken by the state? Eichhorn’s 2017 Documenta project built on her work at Lenbachhaus, but dealt more actively with restitution. In Kassel, she created a project called “The Rose Valland Institute,” to investigate the looting of all forms of Jewish-owned property, not just artworks, since 1933. Her multiroom installation centered around a towering shelf filled with books from the main public library in Berlin. A wall text claimed that the nearly 2,000 volumes on view were once owned by Jewish persons and unlawfully acquired by the municipal library in 1943. Eichhorn also displayed photos, auction records, inventory lists, and other documents related to the confiscation of Jewish-owned assets, artworks, books, and other material possessions, as well as a reference library of publications on these issues.

Viewers also learned from accompanying texts that the Rose Valland Institute is an actual functioning organization, based in the Neue Galerie in Kassel for the run of the exhibition (and now in Berlin), whose mission is to return the looted items to their rightful owners or their descendants. Eichhorn’s project provokes viewers to actively question how objects in the country’s public collections were acquired, and to make their own restitution claims or provide other pertinent information.

Like Eichhorn, Cameron Rowland displays found objects accompanied by detailed handouts that elucidate the dark histories the objects index. Rowland’s work often addresses racialized exploitation and its ongoing effects, such as a piece titled Assessment (2018) that comprises an 18th-century English grandfather clock once housed at a plantation in South Carolina, and three 19th-century receipts that show property taxes were collected on slaves, clocks, and livestock alike in slaveholding states.

At the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Rowland displayed Assessment alongside used everyday objects—leaf blowers, a hedge trimmer, a stroller, and bicycles—placed casually around the gallery. These items were purchased at police auctions of goods taken through civil asset forfeiture, a legal proceeding in which law enforcement can seize without warrant property believed to be connected to illegal activity. Originating in the English Navigation Act of 1660 to maintain England’s monopoly on trade with its colonies and West Africa, civil asset forfeiture has since thrived in the United States. Today, it is practiced by police departments as well as federal agencies including the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Astoundingly, Rowland notes in their text that in 2013, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agency under DHS, contributed $1 billion in seized property to the Treasury Forfeiture Fund.

Just as property taxes on slaves were used to fund state governments in the antebellum South, auction sales from civil asset forfeiture are used to fund the agencies that seize properties. Together, the objects in Rowland’s show link issues of property concerning enslaved and undocumented people to highlight the dispossession and profiteering that results when groups of people are denied the protections of citizenship.

Where Eichhorn has focused on restitution, Rowland spotlights reparations. For Disgorgement (2016), part of an exhibition at Artists Space in New York, Rowland established an entity called the Reparations Purpose Trust, evidenced by framed legal documents on view there. Through this trust, they purchased shares of the insurance company Aetna, Inc., which had once profited from issuing insurance policies on the lives of slaves to slaveowners. The trust is to hold these company shares until the US government passes a law to make financial reparations for slavery, at which point the trust will dissolve and give its shares to the federal agency responsible for making the payments.

Where Rowland has focused on reparations, Gala Porras-Kim proposes mediation as a form of redress. In her project “Precipitation for an Arid Landscape” (2022), first presented at Amant in Brooklyn, she displayed works centered on Maya objects collected by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University. In several large drawings, collectively titled “Offerings for the Rain at the Peabody Museum,” she depicts objects found in the Chichén Itzá cenote, a sacred Maya sinkhole in Mexico. These objects were originally deposited as offerings to Chaac, the Maya god of rain, lightning, and thunder, but between 1904 and 1911, the American diplomat and archaeologist Edward H. Thompson dredged them up.

A circular enclosure in the center of the gallery displayed photographs, documents, letters, newspaper clippings, and other publications from the Peabody archives and elsewhere, enabling viewers to learn about the troubling circumstances that brought the objects into the museum. Thompson purchased property around the cenote in order to access it before smuggling the artifacts into the US; an 1897 Mexican law made exporting antiquities illegal.

In a framed letter to the Peabody Museum’s director, part of a work titled Mediating with the Rain (2021–), Porras-Kim points out that the desiccated condition of the Chaac objects is at odds with their intended wet state. The objects were meant to remain in the cenote, where they had been preserved in water. Exposure to air and the excessive dryness of the museum’s climate-controlled storage rooms have permanently changed their physical composition. Now, she notes, the objects are “just dust particles held together through conservation methods.” Porras-Kim suggests opening a dialogue on how the objects could at least regain what she calls their “dignitary interests” and thus be spiritually restituted in some form. One idea she has proposed is to designate the objects as owned by the rain and “on loan” to the museum.

In combining artistic research and institutional critique, artists like Porras-Kim and the others surveyed here are critically interrogating the institutions thought to be arbiters of authority. In other words, they are researching research to question the norms of knowledge production and to challenge the status quo. Rather than conducting investigations in order to present conclusive results, they unsettle and expand how we can see the world with all its inglorious pasts. 

Dodgers Star Shohei Ohtani Scores a SoCal Estate for $7.8 Million

Ebay refreshes ‘shop the look’ for the new era of ai, marvel might split avengers: secret wars into two movies, anthony edwards’ business team is ‘prepared for this moment’, the best yoga mats for any practice, according to instructors.

ARTnews is a part of Penske Media Corporation. © 2024 Art Media, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

• Primary Hub
• Art & Design
• Design & Technology
• Health & Wellbeing
• Secondary Hub
• Citizenship
• Primary CPD
• Secondary CPD
• Book Awards
• All Products
• Primary Products
• Secondary Products
• School Trips
• Trip Directory
• Trips by Subject
• Trips by Type
• Trips by Region
• Submit a Trip Venue

Trending stories

Top results

• Teaching Resources
• Gcse Art Final Piece Resource

GCSE art final piece – Examples, guidance & advice

Word docs and PowerPoint

These five art GCSE final piece resources will support students to create an impressive project.

• FINE ART – Guidance on how to write effective contextual studies and critical responses to examples of fine art.
• ANALYSIS – A PowerPoint of good and excellent examples of AO1 critical understanding / artist analysis pages.
• GRAPHICS – Advice on how to present successful contextual studies and critical responses to examples of illustration and graphic design.
• PHOTOGRAPHY – Suggestions on what’s required to produce contextual studies and critical responses to photography, in a way that satisfies the GCSE art assessment criteria.
• BETTER WORDS – A list of suggested alternative words that will get students more points (eg ‘create/develop/produce’ instead of ‘do/doing’

GCSE art final piece advice for teachers

As art teachers, we’re all familiar with the arc of a project. More often than not, we start with artist research and finish with an artwork, or collection of pieces that show the student’s journey from initial investigation to a personal conclusion.

With these two elements regularly bookending a project, then, the pressure on them to hold the work together is paramount. Here are some ideas to make sure they do just that.

First, let’s get rid of the idea that students always need to look at ‘artists’. Yes, they normally do (it makes sense), but I prefer to use the term ‘influences’. For us, this switch in language led to a new openness in seeing how varied artistic traditions, not at first obviously related, could inform one another.

British artist Polly Morgan points out the need to not ‘restrict yourself to your own medium’. It’s just as possible to be inspired by a filmmaker, fashion designer, writer or friend than another artist.”

Her contemporary, Isaac Julien, has much the same idea: “I have a magpie attitude to inspiration. It’s about taking all the little everyday things and observing them with a critical eye; building up a scrapbook which you can draw on.”

To help our students develop an understanding of breadth, we have a 10-point independent learning list, into which we encourage them to dip each week. This may or may not feed back directly into their work, but helps them develop a much more rounded understanding of the arts.

GCSE art form and structure

Next, let’s consider structure. It’s important to understand that we’re not here to create historical documents. Biographical information is useful only if it informs our understanding.

For example, we don’t need to know how many children a person had, but we may want to know what their relationships were like if their work is directly related to the experience of family life. Added to that, the cost of artwork is irrelevant.

The fact that someone may have paid several millions for a piece is not an indicator of its value – not in artistic or cultural terms, anyway.

Each artist has a range of interests, experiences and perspectives. From this, we want to know the aim of their art practice. Let’s take for example Käthe Kollwitz, a German, born in Kaliningrad, who lived from 1867 to 1945. These are useful facts. They tell us she lived in a place and time when the world was at war.

Her city of birth was a strange geographical example of detachment; a part of Russia, separated from its motherland by Poland and Lithuania. As such, we can guess she was interested in the effects of war and in belonging. But can we find evidence?

Here is where quotes from the artist can be helpful. The MoMA website starts its section on Kollwitz with her quote “I felt that I have no right to withdraw from the responsibility of being an advocate. It is my duty to voice the sufferings of men.”

So now we know where and when she lived. We know what was happening socially and politically at the time, and that her aim for her work was to make clear the suffering experienced.

GCSE art themes

Research undertaken, let’s now start to observe. Here is where the formal elements come in.

Look at her colours, use of line, compositions. Do they, as she lays out they should, tell of man’s suffering? Do students believe she has achieved what she set out to do? Why? Is it through her use of visual isolation, the individual surrounded by the white space of the paper?

Perhaps the fracturedness with which she used a pencil; the intense focus on the human face?

Linking facts, quotes and observations steeped in an understanding of the formal elements is needed to ensure a written piece has the depth required to show true engagement with the work.

This understanding becomes the diving board for the student’s own work. Once they know ‘what’, ‘how’ and ‘why’, they can apply this to their own piece.

What causes them anguish? What do they want to portray so others can see? Have they thought about what marks they will make to convey the urgency they feel?

This is why we research: not to copy, but to give ourselves an understanding and language for our own artwork’s aims.

In fact, the assessment objectives do not state that all research must be written. Any real investigation of an influence must be deeply practical, too. In order for students to develop ideas through investigation or show an understanding of critical sources, their creative response is central.

Sketchbook ideas

Yes, AO1 focuses on research, but this research should permeate all the way through to A04.

A GCSE art final piece on its own is worth nothing. It might feel like the Big Daddy; but we all know that the bulk of the marks come from AO1-3, and that unless the outcome sits firmly within the preceding investigations, it has little value.

The assessment criteria asks for a ‘purposeful and meaningful response’. In order for any pieces that come at the end to achieve this, they must be a response to the work in the sketchbook, showing development from initial ideas, and a refinement of both thought and practice.

One of the challenges I face is when students propose a GCSE art final piece, rather than an area of investigation right from the start. So, in order to keep projects open – to ensure experimentation and exploration is genuine – we remove any specific final piece planning.

Instead, we focus on an arena of interest, laying down specifics only when initial investigative and experimental work is complete.

In reality, the only difference between the GCSE art final piece and the rest of the submission is how it consolidates the journey. The body of work that precedes it is there to help students find interesting connections and surprising new pathways that can then be narrowed down. Any particular approaches used in a final piece need to be evidenced in that preceding work.

I will end with this: that while I believe, as do those I have spoken to, that exam boards and moderators have favourite styles or types of outcomes, the student’s strengths and interests must win out.

When I was once asked at interview to name a favourite artist, my answer was simple – that it didn’t matter. It was finding the creative influences that were right for the students that should be my aim.

I stand by that, and hope that all art teachers would, too.

Writing checklist

Five pointers for better-written analysis…

• Remove any biographical information that’s not relevant.
• Watch out for commonly used weak words and provide students with alternatives. The ‘Better Words’ sheet at the top of this page can help you get started.
• Find quotes from respected art critics. Include them and explain what they mean. Many media outlines charge for their online content, but The Guardian and the BBC’s arts coverage can be accessed for free.
• Make sure students explain any tricky terminology they use and any key ideas for art movements they mention.
• Consider adjusting writing guides for different art practices. Some points of focus will vary according to the medium.

Hannah Day is head of art, media and film at  Ludlow College . Lucy Wilding is head of art at Lacon Child School, Shropshire . Download a free GCSE art sketchbook resource .

Similar resources

• Teaching drama – First lesson plan and tips for putting on a play
• KS3 art – Mix music and art with this free lesson plan
• Year 10 GCSE art sketchbook ideas – Natural forms resource
• Wire art – Simple 3D activities for KS3/KS4
• Collage art lesson – KS4 ‘Inside my Head’ mixed-media project

Sign up to our newsletter

You'll also receive regular updates from Teachwire with free lesson plans, great new teaching ideas, offers and more. (You can unsubscribe at any time.)

Which sectors are you interested in?

Early Years

Thank you for signing up to our emails!

Explore teaching packs

Why join Teachwire?

Get what you need to become a better teacher with unlimited access to exclusive free classroom resources and expert CPD downloads.

Exclusive classroom resource downloads

Free worksheets and lesson plans

CPD downloads, written by experts

Resource packs to supercharge your planning

Special web-only magazine editions

Educational podcasts & resources

Access to free literacy webinars

Newsletters and offers

Create free account

By signing up you agree to our terms and conditions and privacy policy .

Already have an account? Log in here

Thanks, you're almost there

To help us show you teaching resources, downloads and more you’ll love, complete your profile below.

Welcome to Teachwire!

Set up your account.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur adipisicing elit. Commodi nulla quos inventore beatae tenetur.

I would like to receive regular updates from Teachwire with free lesson plans, great new teaching ideas, offers and more. (You can unsubscribe at any time.)

Log in to Teachwire

Not registered with Teachwire? Sign up for free

Reset Password

Remembered your password? Login here

The Art Teacher

Art Lesson Ideas, Plans, Free Resources, Project Plans, and Schemes of Work. An 'outstanding' art teacher in Greater Manchester. Teaching KS3 and KS4 art and design.

Sarah Graham

Artist Sarah Graham creates bright and colourful paintings of food that could be described as ‘still life’, however many of her paintings focus on wrappers, sweets and desserts.

Type your email…

Sarah Graham is a British painter, born in 1977. Her artwork is often painted on a large scale using oil paint, giving her beautiful paintings a rich, deep and vivid finish.

Sarah Graham often chooses compositions (layouts) that show a small section of the subject (sweets, wrappers etc.) in focus, with the background out of focus. Why do you think this is? What effect does blurring the background give the work?

If you look very carefully at Sarah Graham’s paintings, you will notice a huge range of tones. There are a lot of very dark and very light, almost white colours. The use of tints and shades in her work makes them seem more realistic.

She tries to capture all of the crinkles, creases and reflections in the wrappers. Adding all of these details and textures to her paintings also makes them more realistic; they could be described as hyper-realistic.

How many reflections and textures can you see in the painting ‘Candy Carnival’ above?

Sweets, cakes and desserts are bright and colourful to make them look more attractive – so the subjects Sarah Graham chooses to paint allow her to use bright, radiant and intensely coloured oil paints. Oil paints give a real depth of colour, as you can see in her work. They are very good for blending from one colour to another and they create a bold, luminous finish.

What materials do you need to create artwork like Sarah Graham?

Painting like Sarah Graham takes a lot of practise – so get going! I recommend using high quality oil paints for rich, deep colours. A good set of brushes with different tips will allow you to get crisp edges and blend tones. A good linseed oil is essential if you want to blend colours smoothly.

Winsor & Newton Winton Oil Paint Starter Set

Pure Hog Bristles Professional Paint Brush Set

Winsor & Newton Linseed Oil

DOWNLOAD this page below, for free, as an Artist Research handout to use in your lesson. It includes all of the facts and images, and has questions for students to answe r.

Sarah Graham has a lot of great videos on her YouTube channel , check them out!

Enter your email address

What do you think of Sarah Graham’s artwork? How could you describe it? Does it make you hungry? Let me know in the comments!

Sharing is caring

5 thoughts on “ sarah graham ”.

She gives her art a surreal shine and vibrancy to it, and it makes us want to eat what she’s painting because if it looks delicious in the painting, and is based on real life, then we’d be hungry ourselves for that kind of thing.

I love this post!

Like Liked by 1 person

Thanks! I love Sarah Graham’s artwork too.

Very much akin to pop art.

Wow, I love her art it’s just so bright and colourful and everyone can see how amazing she is at painting! I know another artist called Sarah Graham! Her Instagram is Sarah Graham Creations.

Leave a comment Cancel reply

Published by art_teacher_mcr

Making and teaching art. Based in Manchester. View all posts by art_teacher_mcr

• Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
• Subscribe Subscribed
• Copy shortlink
• Report this content
• View post in Reader
• Manage subscriptions
• Collapse this bar

• International
• Schools directory
• Resources Jobs Schools directory News Search

GCSE Artist Research Page Layout & Questions

Subject: Expressive arts and design

Age range: 14-16

Resource type: Worksheet/Activity

Last updated

29 September 2020

• Share through email
• Share through twitter
• Share through linkedin
• Share through facebook
• Share through pinterest

Tes paid licence How can I reuse this?

Your rating is required to reflect your happiness.

It's good to leave some feedback.

Something went wrong, please try again later.

This resource hasn't been reviewed yet

To ensure quality for our reviews, only customers who have purchased this resource can review it

Report this resource to let us know if it violates our terms and conditions. Our customer service team will review your report and will be in touch.

Not quite what you were looking for? Search by keyword to find the right resource:

Articles on Visual art and design

Displaying all articles.

Who really was Mona Lisa? More than 500 years on, there’s good reason to think we got it wrong

Darius von Guttner Sporzynski , Australian Catholic University

All surface, no substance. Kids will probably love Beings at ACMI. Pity about the rest of us

Dominic Redfern , RMIT University

How First Nations fashion design can rewrite painful memories and be a powerful method of healing

Treena Clark , University of Technology Sydney

15,000 squares, 500 hours, 19 months: how I used embroidery to make sense of Australia’s catastrophic fires

Tracey Clement , Australian Catholic University

A brief history of found footage video art – and where Macklemore’s Hind’s Hall fits in

Kim Munro , University of South Australia

Photos are everywhere. What makes a good one?

T.J. Thomson , RMIT University

Strong, resolute and uncompromising: you should see the intense and beguiling art of Waanyi artist Judy Watson

Alasdair Macintyre , Australian Catholic University

It is unexpected and oddly refreshing to see Andy Warhol in a regional Australian art gallery

Christina Chau , Curtin University

Women have been excluded from men’s spaces for centuries. That’s why the MONA Ladies Lounge matters

Catharine Lumby , University of Sydney

Related Topics

• Avant garde
• bushfires 2019
• Visual art review
• Women in art

Top contributors

Associate lecturer visual arts, artist, PhD, Australian Catholic University

Professor of Media, Department of Media, University of Sydney

Lecturer at Curtin University, Curtin University

Lecturer in Visual Art and McGlade Gallery Director, Australian Catholic University

Senior Lecturer in Visual Communication & Digital Media, RMIT University

Lecturer, Creative Industries, Documentary and Digital Media, University of South Australia

Honorary (Senior Fellow) School of Culture and Communication University of Melbourne. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne

Associate Professor, School of Art, RMIT University

Chancellor’s Indigenous Research Fellow, Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building, University of Technology Sydney

Historian, Australian Catholic University

Associate Professor of Practice, University of Sydney

• X (Twitter)
• Unfollow topic Follow topic

• Free Resources
• Register for Free

Find, Find, Choose – Artist Research Hunt

I want to pay in australian dollars ($) canadian dollars ($) euros (€) pound sterling (£) new zealand dollar ($) us dollars ($) south african rand change currency, description.

Artist Research Hunt!  Ideal for home learning.

This two-page art resource asks students to search for artists on the internet.  There are 9 groups of artists they need to collect.  For example 10 artist who paint portraits, 9 artists who paint landscapes, and then it counts down, 8, 7, 6 etc, asking students to find different sorts of artists. Students are asked to send you these lists of artists.  Wow!  They will have looked at so much art.  Finally, it asks students to choose 1 artwork that they like the best and create a research page on it.  It asks them to include facts about the artist, a description of the artwork and why they chose it.  A good example of a research page is include which you can see pictured above.  I would give students 2 lessons to complete this.

There are lots of resources on The Arty Teacher that ask students to analyse art.

The Arty Teacher

Sarah Crowther is The Arty Teacher. She is a high school art teacher in the North West of England. She strives to share her enthusiasm for art by providing art teachers around the globe with high-quality resources and by sharing her expertise through this blog.

By The Arty Teacher on July 23, 2020 at 5:51 am

Hi Jenny, Thank you for taking the time to leave a review. I'm sorry you feel that the resource is overpriced. When I delivered this lesson to my students as a home learning task, they came back to me with fantastic lists of artists and were able to talk to me about artists they liked over zoom. They then went on to create a research page on their favourite painting (this is what the resource asks them to do) and included the information that was asked for, and using the provided good example for inspiration. Completing this task took them two lessons. The description of the resource states that it is a two-page resource. If there is any way I can improve the description, please let me know. A majority of the lessons on my website are £3/$3. For even better value I can recommend subscribing because when you do you can download 10 resources a month very cheaply. https://theartyteacher.com/downloads/10-resources-a-month-for-year/

106 of 200 people found this review helpful.

Help other customers find the most helpful reviews

Did you find this review helpful? Yes No

You must log in and be a buyer of this download to submit a review.

Username or Email Address

Remember Me

More art lessons that you'll love...

Subscribe & save in any currency! I WANT TO PAY IN Australian Dollars ($) Canadian Dollars ($) Euros (€) Pound Sterling (£) New Zealand Dollar ($) US Dollars ($) South African rand Change Currency

Basic subscription free.

Register and you can download 3 of the Free Resources Every Month!

Premium Subscription $9.99 Per month $99 Per year

Save money and get 10 resources of your choice every month, and save even more with a yearly subscription.

School Subscription Free Per year Free Per year Free Per year Free Per year Free Per year Free Per year Free Per year Free Per year Free Per year

For departments with 2 or more members. Subscribe for a total of 2 teachers to download 10 resources each month.

Sarah Crowther – The Arty Teacher

I set up The Arty Teacher because I have a passion for my subject that I want to share with other art teachers around the world.

I have been a high school art teacher for over 20 years, so I understand what it’s like to be in front of a class of students, often with very different abilities and attitudes.

I wanted to develop resources that would help teachers to bring out the best in every student in every class. I also wanted to free-up staff from time-consuming lesson preparation to let them focus instead on delivering exciting, motivating, dynamic lessons, supported by excellent resources.

Privacy Overview

Username or Email

Lost Password?