Inspiration: Otto Dix

Otto Dix is another painter whose work I find inspiring. He was a friend of George Grosz, (whose work I also admire and will post at a later date) and both belonged to a group of German Expressionists. In the early 1920's he took on a more realistic stlye but with a sense of caricaturist exaggeration. Some of his work tended to be very dark due to his experiences serving in the first World War and depicted the brutality he had seen. He was also critical of German society during the Weimar Republic again drawing attention to the darker side of life it represented. When the Nazis came to power in Germany, they regarded Dix as a degenerate artist and removed him from his teaching job and also destroyed some of his paintings.

http://www.mess.net/galleria/dix/
http://www.art-for-a-change.com/Express/ex7.htm
http://www.tendreams.org/dix.htm
Dix on Amazon