How old do the masters I admire have to be to qualify? half asking so that answer can be the introducing text for the topic and half asking so that I dont feel bad about my likely ignorance about real real real real real masters :p.
Some titles or artist names would be nice for those of us not knowledgeable of the same stuff as the poster :p
eh, they should be dead, I suppose. I'm not so sure what's going on in contemporary art, if anything is going on at all. Realistically it would be anything associated with the likes of Picasso backwards, but I'm not too picky. The main criteria is just so people don't post some genre digital painting of a dumb fantasy/sci-fi-whatever. So, actual fine art is the only rule.
Sorry for not naming the artists. I posted DG Rossetti, Mallais, Lepage, a Monet, a Caravaggio, a John Herbert, an El Greco, and (the link seems broken now) a Courbet. Mallais is my current favorite, my favorite (posted) of his is
Christ in the House of his Parents, which is fitting to my taste of Welles as a director, Ibsen as a dramatist, Hart Crane as a poet, and Joyce/Hawthorne as novelists. All adds up to a strong longing for humanism.