Today Is...International Artist Day

I like to dabble with art and am capable of producing something which i look at and think, 'that went well' or equally something which looks as if a 4 year old had done in nursery which even the most loving parent would hesitate to put on the fridge so while i won't have anything selling for big bucks, they are more likely to go for a few pence to line the bottom of a budgie cage but there are some breathtaking pieces of art in existence.   
Whenever we are away we do like to wander around an art studio and i have been lucky enough to have seen many of the greats and also some which are considered great but have me wondering if there is another definition of great which i am unaware?
Anything by artists such as Michaelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci or Rembrandt you know what you will see is going to be a bit special, if the name is Van Gogh or Picasso not quite so much.
The impressionists i was never overly keen on but by definition they were not meant to be a direct painting of a scene, rather the way the artist saw it and quite what people like about Picasso i never understood, his efforts just looks very weird to me.
I do have a soft spot for the bright, vivid colours of Pop Art and regardless of how you feel about religion, you can't deny that it has given us some of the greatest art of all time and some of the religious paintings are breathtaking and are the reason why Angels are depicted as dressed in white and have wings because the artists gave them wings as a way to identify them from the regular people in the painting.
Another Biblical character is the Devil, him of the cloven-hoofed, pitchfork, red-skin, goatee and horns only that's how the artists painted him to make him visually striking by giving him all of the above and the image just stuck as did that of Hell with it's fire and brimstone with demons handing out punishments for eternity.
The art world does seem very male dominated for some reason, a survey of the National Gallery showed that out of the 2,300 works in it, only 11 were by women but of the paintings themselves, 85% of the nudes are female.