Artists who inspire me

I have just started making some new art work which is really differant from what I have been doing before.  It is embroidery and text based and I will display some photos when I have finished a few of them.  I wanted to share with you some of the main inspirations for there pieces of work and for art in general because I feel it will help people have a better understanding of where I am coming from with my work.

First of all an artist who has had a major influence on my work since I was studying Fine Art at Oxford Brookes University is Tracey Emin. Famed for her Unmade bed and narrowly missing winning the Turner Prize back in 1999,she inspires me with her amazing embroidered pieces and subtle mono-prints. These are the works that I really love, they reflect her life, feelings, emotions and opinions and for me, these are the essense of everything I create:

Next, an artist who I discovered only recently on my trip to St Ives embodies many of my belief's about art, how it can be accessible to all and can be a very simple idea.  So many artists and critics think that Art must have many layers of meaning or that it should be subversive or contradictory or challenging.  I just though her work was lovely and reminded me of the pure pleasure of prettiness niceness:

Thirdly is an artist who for a long time I dismissed as just being childish patterns and pictures, I thought it was just colourfulness and shapes for the fun of it, but I recently started reading a book about him and my opinion has totally changed.  Hundertwasser draws his inspiration from a passion for the environment, he believed that beauty was the key to deliverance from evil and because God was creative it is right that we, made in God's image are creative also.