Horace Slughorn was a collector of students. Any student that he felt would be very important to the future would be invited to his Slug Club. Some notable members include: Lily (Evans) Potter; Lucius Malfoy; the owner of Honeydukes, Ambrosius Flume; a Quidditch captain, Gwenog Jones; Tom Riddle; Hermione Granger; and the boy-who-lived, Harry Potter. He collected these students and kept pictures of them long after they had graduated.
Painters and artists may also choose to collect people, though in a different way than Slughorn did. These artists collect people by painting different people (normally already famous) in their own style. In this way, they can collect a wide variety of people without ever actually meeting them potentially.
One such artist is Ken Flanagan. He is a self-taught artist who is pretty new to the fine art world and has lived in many states in the United States along with Japan and The Philippines. He started his artwork as just creating a still black and white image of a person, but did not like the final piece calling it "sterile". Instead, he added a small 'picture' window above an area of the piece giving a glimpse of the amazing career that this person would have. They weren't just a static person like the black-and-white image might have implied, but they had a fantastic careers in whatever it was they chose. When he paints people with this method, he considers the pieces part of one of his iconography series, of which he currently has 3 with people of a variety of professions.
Let's see who some of the people he collected are.
First up, we have probably the most famous music group to have ever existed. The Beatles. More precisely, he made images of Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr. You can see in color each of them was given a style that many see in marching bands, perhaps a nod to the amazing group that they were.
He has also collected one of the most popular fiction writers, Steven King. The colored slash marks across his face gives an illusion to the horror that he writes.
One of the greatest swimmers might just be Michael Phelps, so, of course, Flanagan would need to add him to his collection. Throughout Phelps's Olympic career, he earned a total of 28 medals, 23 of them being gold, 3 silver, and 2 bronze. It seems only appropriate that in his image, he is in black and white above the water and colored when he is in the water.
Flanagan has also collected several other artists. In this collection, he includes: Picasso, Salvador Dali, and Andy Warhol.
As far as the sports world goes again, in Flanagan's very first iconography series, he included who might be the best basketball player of his time, Michael Jordan, and the best boxer, Muhammad Ali.
Overall, Ken Flanagan has an amazing collection of famous people. I can't wait to see who else he adds to his collection as his career continues.
Who do you hope he adds to his collection?