Brooklyn-based illustrator Graham Yarrington creates some bizarre otherworldly art that I can’t step away from. Whether it’s a mottled forest scene, a UFO mid-abduction, or ancient Egyptian art recreated, Yarrington does it all with a certain flair that makes each piece feel vibrant and fresh.
This week has been sweltering, well, just about everywhere. Reyes de la Flor‘s paintings set in everyday urban life are resonating because of it. Can’t you almost smell the street smells, the humanity of it all? This type of summer heat seems to pull people out of their homes rather than keep them inside, and that’s just what she captures.
I had never really considered how many artists focus on females until I came across the paintings of Kris Knight, the male form is the subject of his work. His exploration in oils are ambiguous and intimate in one fell swoop, never directly addressing the viewer.
Cécile van Hanja finds inspiration for her paintings in the Modernism of the beginning of the 20th century finding order in a time of chaos in the work of Bauhaus and De Stijl. The transparant layering of each painting intensifies the depth and the confusion within each structure she captures.
Besides the beauty of their creations, I’m also fascinated by the lost idealism of progress and malleability where this movement stood for. In my paintings the images of modern architecture are based on a rhythmical pattern of verticals and horizontals in which an uncertain world is created; a multi coloured labyrinth of spaces and look-throughs in which it’s not clear if one is inside or outside. The painted façade seems to consist of parts that come forward and recede. The window sections in between may reveal something of the interior, in vibrating light. A lost modern world symbolising confusion and uncertainty that depict our time.
Los Angeles-based Katy Ann Gilmore is a multidisciplinary wonder – illustration, installation, painting, and sculpture are all within her wheelhouse. Her work is heavily influenced by topography and the relationship between 2D, perpendicular planes, and their distortions into 3D space.
I’ve been absorbed in art depicting water and swimmers this summer. Chilean-born Nicole Tijoux has been painting the subject matter since at least 2004, and tracking her progress up to the present is something special. She also has some phenomenal work focusing on riots and protests, which is unfortunately timely here in the U.S.
Though Endre Penovác paints with oils as well as draws, it’s his watercolors that I’m drawn towards. The depth and detail he creates with pigments spreading across the wet paper on their own is utterly mesmerizing, made all the more so then the simplicity of most of Endre’s subjects is considered.
Rebekka Connelly makes her own rules when it comes to painting by using stencils in some of her pieces. Each stencil print painting is individually unique, created using acrylic paint on cotton paper with super sharp edge lines. The result ends up feeling very organic to me despite the more streamlined process used.