One-a-day Dexter Dalwood

Interesting one for the first years perhaps? Dalwood paints recreated scenes from contemporary history. Kurt Cobain Suicide, Bay of Pigs, Sharon Tate murder, Nancy Spungen death etc. He's shortlisted for the Turner Prize this year.

His paintings have a certain uncanny feeling, taking things we are perhaps culturally familiar with, but obviously foreign because they are pictured from his imagination. At the same time and his work also has a dreamy and surrealist quality to it in the same vein as Edward Hopper, with his use of colour, light and distorted perspective. Art critics are fairly divided over the quality of his work but generally public opinion of his paintings his fairly high, probably due to that fact that the scenes he paints are of moments in history that we can recognise and relate to, therefore his work is fairly accessible for us commoners.

http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/dexter_dalwood.htm