1. Albrecht Dürer
Born - 1471-1528
Albrecht Dürer was born in the city of Nuremberg, a lively cultural and commercial centre in 15th
century Germany. He was the third of eighteen children. Originally taught to draw by his father who
was a goldsmith, he seems to have inherited that craft's appreciation of fine detail. Although Dürer
became one of the greatest oil painters of the Northern Renaissance, he is equally famous for his
exquisite watercolours, engravings and woodcut prints.
Creatures were not generally considered to be appropriate subjects for serious art until the eighteenth
century when George Stubbs elevated the genre by the sheer quality of his work. Critics felt that the
painting of animals was simply a demonstration of technical skill, and as such did not aspire to the
creative vision of great art. Almost two centuries before, Albrecht Dürer was one of the first artists to
view animals as a subject worthy of attention and he demonstrates this across a range of watercolours
and prints that have become hugely popular and frequently reproduced.
'The Wing of a Blue Roller' is one such
example of his remarkable drawing ability. It
is a beautiful watercolour painting that
accurately captures the structure, texture
and shimmering colour of the bird's
feathers. He uses watercolour to delicately
blend the soft graduating colour of the
plumage and over paints linear detail with
gouache (an opaque watercolour) to pick
out the jagged edges of the feathers.
Dürer was fascinated by nature as he believed that the study of the natural world
could reveal the fundamental truths he was seeking to discover through his art. He
wrote, "Nature holds the beautiful, for the artist who has the insight to extract it.
Thus, beauty lies even in humble, perhaps ugly things, and the ideal, which bypasses
or improves on nature, may not be truly beautiful in the end.

2. Durer’s woodcuts are even more
mind-blowing than his exquisite
watercolours. And there is so much
to learn from the process of making
woodcuts – not only drawing skills,
but also the process of working in
reverse, using negative space, and
trying to represent forms with
simple black and white. I think this is
a wonderful project, and continue to
be inspired by the people who
generate these ideas.
‘’But life in nature manifests the
truth of these things…. Therefore
observe it diligently, go by it and do
not depart from nature arbitrarily,
imagining to find the better by
thyself, for thou wouldst be misled.
For, verily, “art” is embedded in
nature; he who can extract it has it’’
— Albrecht Durer
Hundreds of surviving drawings, letters, and diary entries document Dürer'stravels through Italy and the
Netherlands (1520–21), attesting to his insistently scientific perspective and demanding artistic
judgment.
The artist also cast a bold light on his own image through a number of striking self-portraits—drawn,
painted, and printed. They reveal an increasingly successful and self-assured master, eager to assert his
creative genius and inherent nobility, while still marked by a clear-eyed, often foreboding outlook. They
provide us with the cumulative portrait of an extraordinary Northern European artist whose epitaph
proclaimed: "Whatever was mortal in Albrecht Dürer lies beneath this mound."