Jean-Michel Michael Craig-Martin
Sir Michael Craig-Martin CBE RA (born 28th August 1941) is an Irish-British contemporary conceptual artist and painter.
He's noted for fostering the Young British Artists (YBAs), many of whom he taught (including
Damien Hirst). He is Emeritus Professor of Fine Art at Goldsmiths.
The Dublin born and reared Craig-Martin was given an eight year Roman Catholic religious education by nuns, and later at the English Benedictine Priory School, where pupils were encouraged to look at religious imagery in illuminated glass panels and stained-glass windows - an obvious influence for his art.
He gained an interest in art through one of the priests, who was an artist, and was also strongly impressed by a display in the Phillips Collection of work by Mark Rothko.
Michael Craig-Martin studied in the Lycée Français in Bogotá, Colombia, where his father had employment for a while. Drawing classes in the Lycée by an artist, Antonio Roda, gave him a wider perspective on art.
In mid-1961, he studied art at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, and in the autumn began a painting course at Yale University, where the teaching was strongly influenced by the multi-disciplinary experimentation and minimalist theories on colour and form of Josef Albers, a former head of department. Craig-Martin later said, "Everything I know about colour comes from that course". Tutors on the course included artists Alex Katz and Al Held.
Craig-Martin has lived and worked in London since 1966. From his early box-like constructions of the late 1960s he moved increasingly to the use of ordinary household objects. In the late 1970s he began to make line drawings of ordinary objects, creating over the years an ever-expanding vocabulary of images which form the foundation of his work to this day. During the 1990s the focus of his work shifted decisively to painting, with the same range of boldly outlined motifs and vivid color schemes applied both to works on canvas, and to increasingly complex installations of wall paintings.