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ArtMaze Magazine is an independent artist-run and ad-free international print and online publication dedicated to showcasing and promoting experimental and progressive contemporary art, which reflects modern society and its environment, provokes conversation and action; and fosters innovation and diversity of mediums which make today’s art scene so intriguing and versatile.

HOW WE WORK ArtMaze Magazine is published four or five times per year and announces a competition-based curated call for art for each issue every 2-3 months.

We do not outline any specific themes for each of our opportunities—this helps us maintain a broad spectrum of submission material which we find fruitful in order to find as many inspiring works as possible which haven’t had enough spotlight and need exposure.

We accept works to be sent to us for consideration only via our application forms for calls for art for print and online publications. Please visit our website for more details: www.artmazemag.com/call-for-art

ArtMaze print editions offer its readers a continuous art experience without advertisement. Our carefully curated selections of artworks offer an insight to the inspiring progress and success of an extraordinary amount of emerging and mid-career contemporary artists from all over the world who have been applying to our annual competition-based curated calls. Each of our issues contain curated selections of works by our editorial team as well as, on some occasions, by a guest-curator (s), and normally include 30-65 artist features.

Each individual submitting work to ArtMaze Magazine opportunities is provided with a fair and equal chance.

Incoming submissions are following a very specific and unique process via Submittable platform, therefore each competition-based call for art has a transparent policy.

HOW TO SUBMIT YOUR WORK

ISSUES

Artists are welcome to submit works in any visual medium which can be showcased in print format:

All issues of ArtMaze Magazine are stored in the UK in the British Library (London), Bodleian Library (Oxford University), Cambridge University Library, National Library of Scotland, National Library of Wales and Trinity College (Dublin).

painting, drawing, sculpture, printmaking, photography, textile, installation, digital, film, performance, any form of mixed media etc.

Artists or any art organisations on behalf of artists from all countries are welcome to submit.

FIND US ONLINE www.artmazemag.com facebook.com/artmazemag instagram.com/artmazemag

Please visit our website to find out where to purchase print and digital copies of ArtMaze Mag: www.artmazemag.com/shop

FRONT COVER:

Business information:

Fiona Finnegan Moonblight oil on linen on wood 50 x 38 cm more on p. 22-23

© 2023 print ISSN No. 2399-892X online ISSN No. 2399-8938

INNER FRONT COVER:

BACK COVER:

® ArtMaze Magazine is a registered trademark

Nico Mazza El Deseo de No Querer (The desire to not want) hand embroidery on percal 50 x 75 cm more on p. 58-59

Elisa Filomena Donna Con Cane acrylic on canvas 60 x 45 cm more on p. 20-21

ArtMaze Magazine is printed in London, United Kingdom

by Park Communications Ltd.

Issue 33

call for art DEADLINE: April 13th 2023 EST Issue 33 is to be curated exclusively by ArtMaze Magazine editorial team

Submit your work for a chance to be published in print and online.

ELIGIBILITY: This competition is open to all artists, both national and international, working in all visual mediums: painting, drawing, sculpture, ceramics, printmaking, photography, textile, installation, digital, performance, film, any mixed media etc.

DISTRIBUTION: ArtMaze Magazine is an independent international publication which is distributed worldwide: www.artmazemag.com/shop HOW TO APPLY: Please visit our website for more details and fill in the online form via the following link: www.artmazemag.com/call-for-art You are welcome to read more information on our website: www.artmazemag.com or contact us at info@artmazemag.com

Featured image: Tuan Vu Les sept cygnes et les deux princes oil sticks and oil on canvas 36 x 30 inches more on p. 38-39

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10-97 featured artists Iwo Zaniewski . 10 Benjamin Andersson . 12 Anne Griffiths . 14 Emily Faith Holtzman . 16 Mengmeng Zhang . 18 Elisa Filomena . 20 Fiona Finnegan . 22 Leonie Plattner . 24 Paige Perkins . 26 Allan Villavicencio . 28 Jennifer Laflamme . 30 MOSAZ . 32 Emily Rose Wright . 34 Ian Caleb Molina Zoller . 36 Tuan Vu . 38 Nika Rubinshtein . 40 Sebastian Supanz . 42 Falon Stutzman . 44 Hidetaka Suzuki . 46 Jane McKenzie . 48 Julia Norton . 50 Paweł Olszewski . 52 Tal Regev . 54 Brad Stumpf . 56 Nicole Mazza . 58 Katalin Kortmann-Járay and Karina Mendreczky . 60 Alex Puz . 62 Tadeáš Kotrba . 64 Chiara Baima Poma . 66 Emma Steinkraus . 68 Jeffly Gabriela Molina . 70 Marcos N. Sayas . 72 Sasha Deyash . 74 Zora Gamberg . 76 William Schaeuble . 78 Anna Ortiz . 80 Vanessa McKernan . 82 Shoshana Walfish . 84 Stanzie Tooth . 86 Helia Chitsazan . 88 Patricia Paludanus . 90 Eirini Apsychou . 92 Heather Drayzen . 94 Chen Peng . 96

FEATURED ARTISTS curated selection by ArtMaze Magazine Featured image: Vanessa McKernan Night Swimming oil on panel 20 x 16 inches more on p. 82-83

I w o

Z a n i e w s k i

www.iwozaniewski.com

Image: Aquarium oil on canvas 150 x 110 cm

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Iwo Zaniewski works with traditional oil painting, predominantly focusing on the matters of composition.

He consistently explores formal relations and draws on the history of figurative painting, mining his subjects from contemporary, everyday life. To reach the state of perfect visual harmony—Iwo’s ultimate goal—he has been constructing his works in a way that each element of the composition becomes irreplaceable support for the arrangement of others. A few years ago, together with a group of theoretical physicists, experimental psychologists, and neuroscience researchers, Iwo conducted research under the overarching theme “Algorithm of Harmony” to explore the phenomenon of visual harmony. The concept of this ‘algorithm’ demonstrates relations most likely occurring between all forms or elements of a composition that make it reach a perfect state, where any change introduced could make it perceptibly worse.

Although Iwo Zaniewski graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, Poland, in 1981, he has split his professional career between painting, photography, and art direction. He is a celebrated art director, but his paintings—the heart and soul of his life—still remain relatively unknown to a wider audience. Iwo Zaniewski’s exhibitions include Pinta Miami, USA (2020), Polswiss Art, Poland (2014), Today Art Museum, China (2008), Sunshine International Art Museum, China (2008), and National Museum in Cracow (2005). His works are included in private and public collections in Europe, USA, Mexico, China, and Japan.

Image: Sun on the Grass oil on canvas 110 x 140 cm

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ArtMaze Magazine Double Volume Issue 30-31: curated selection

B e n j a m i n

A n d e r s s o n

www.benjaminandersson.com

Image: Järtecken oil on canvas 55 x 45 cm

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Benjamin Andersson works intuitively and process-based, the references exist within the secret, sacred and divine, where man’s deeply rooted relationship to symbols and signs takes off in a pictorial tradition with light as its starting point. Andersson works in a stripped-down color scale where the surfaces both absorb and reflect light, the motifs both appear and dissolve before the viewer’s gaze, the surfaces alternate between the abstract and the concrete, a suggestive and marvelous interplay between the eye’s perception and the mythologies we carry within us.

Benjamin was born in 1988 and graduated with an MFA from the Umeå Academy of Fine Arts in 2015. He lives and works in Malmö, Sweden.

Image: Vial oil on canvas 55 x 45 cm

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ArtMaze Magazine Double Volume Issue 30-31: curated selection

A n n e

G r i f f i t h s

www.annegriffiths.ca

Image: Like A Moth To The Light oil on canvas 54 x 47 inches

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Anne Griffiths is a Canadian painter with a studio practice based in Victoria, British Columbia. She studied painting at Emily Carr University and has a diploma in design and illustration (1986) from Capilano University’s IDEA Program. Post graduation, Anne had a successful 20 year career as an art director in several of Vancouver’s prominent design firms.

The past decade Anne has shifted her creative pursuits to focus on her painting practice, building upon her experience pivoting from professional realms to imaginative ones. As such, her studio practice fixates on the interplay of colour and form, indulging in expansive colour palettes and exploring landscape intuitively. As Anne has moved through a variety of disciplines her paintings beget a similar kind of evolutionary flow—shifting dimensions and spatial relationships build new places for the viewer to gaze upon, wander through or step away from.

Anne’s Canadian representation is in Vancouver at Bau-Xi Gallery and in Toronto at the Dianna Witte Gallery. She works with a few art consultancy firms in London, UK and one in Los Angeles, California. Her work has been placed in numerous private collections in Europe, the US and Canada. She recently was included in the group show ‘Uprising’ with Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery at Schloss Goerne in Germany.

Coming from a natural and wild environment, I am focusing my painting practice on the effects of the landscape on memory as it relates to the development of the human psyche. Through the interplay of colour, line and form I create my personal interpretation of the Canadian landscape and how it impacts our collective identity in the West Coast of Canada.

Image: Westcoast Daydreamer oil on canvas 44 x 47 inches

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ArtMaze Magazine Double Volume Issue 30-31: curated selection

www.emilyfaithholtzman.com

E m i l y

F a i t h

H o l t z m a n

Image: How You Felt fabric, embroidery floss, and gel transfer 9 x 9 inches

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We forget as desperately as we remember and we remember as blindly as we forget. Using estranged photographs, thrifted fabrics and plant matter as a means of inspiration, memory can be analyzed without nostalgia’s haze or regret’s shadow. Meditative and laborious strategies, such as embroidery, crochet, and sewing, drive my practice. It is vital that the means match the ends. Looking at memory as a collective experience, we can share in the deja vu of found materials. I refuse to treat these crafted memories as precious. Preservation is against nature’s ontological need to decay. I also refuse to treat memory carelessly. Destruction is against nature’s need to rebirth life. I am invested in the balance between remembering and forgetting and secrets in between.

Image: Oh, Memory fabric, embroidery floss, and flowers 26 x 23 inches

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ArtMaze Magazine Double Volume Issue 30-31: curated selection

M e n g m e n g

Z h a n g

www.mengmengzhang.com

Image: Falling leaves oil on canvas 91.4 x 121.9 cm

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Mengmeng Zhang (b.1997, China) is a visual artist whose work is informed by an intuitive process of colour choice, figurative gestural mark making and representations of self exploration through the act of psychogeography, compositional frameworks and Asian manga aesthetics. Zhang incorporates movement into the creation process through wandering and documenting the outer environment while also being reflective of inner emotions, thoughts, ideas and feelings experienced during this process. Through intuitive colour choices that gravitate towards expressing certain emotive qualities, Zhang then incorporates stylized characters to embody moods, actions and fictional experiences inspired by her personal reflections and reactions to everyday life. Zhang lives and works in London, UK.

Image: Bothered oil on wood 30.5 x 40.6 cm

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ArtMaze Magazine Double Volume Issue 30-31: curated selection

E l i s a

F i l o m e n a

www.elisafilomena.com

Image: Llorona crayons on paper 48 x 33 cm

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The persistent quest focuses on the human figure and nature, both experienced as everlasting and tender forces in contrast and harmony with the transience of existence. The artworks are often made up of unnatural images that form dreams and tales of that which is hidden. The outcome originates from pictures of the early 1900s that are used as a starting point for the creation of tales and suggestions that come up naturally during the creative process. Canvasses, often large ones, used for the experience of and the longing for existence. Gestures and crayons on paper of eerie shapes and human masks. Man’s being and his rising, shining and fading.

The Drawer magazine, features an article on Filomena’s site-specific paintings in the #21 – Wall drawings issue. On 5th November 2021 the group exhibition entitled An Ego of her Own, was inaugurated in both New York City and Milan venues of Kaufmann Repetto, curated by Amanda Schmitt. In 2021 the following solo exhibitions took place: Eden (site specific) at Casa Vuota in Rome, curated by Francesco Paolo Del Re and Sabino De Nichilo; The Moth Magazine (Irish) featured one of Filomena’s paintings on the 10th anniversary edition front cover in 2020. In 2019, she inaugurated the Diario Notturno, a solo exhibition at Circoloquadro Contemporary Art Gallery in Milan, curated by Arianna Beretta. In 2017, she took part in Landina, an en plein air painting experience curated by Lorenza Boisi. Over the past few years, her works have been exhibited widely in public institutions and private spaces such as galleries, museums, art fairs and cultural venues both in Italy and abroad, the main solo and group exhibitions: Tornielli Museum in Ameno (2021 & 2018), Luigi Varoli Public Museum – Palazzo Sforza in Cotignola (2021 & 2018), Giovanni Fattori Public Museum in Livorno (2019 & 2018), Kommunale Galerie [City Gallery] of Mörfelden – Walldorf – Frankfurt (2018), 54° Edition of the International Art Exhibition – Venice Biennale – Piedmont Region (2011).

Image: Vānum acrylic on canvas 52 x 45 cm

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ArtMaze Magazine Double Volume Issue 30-31: curated selection

F i o n a

F i n n e g a n

www.fionafinnegan.com

Image: The infinite sadness oil on linen on wood 50 x 32 cm

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Fiona Finnegan is an Irish artist, currently living and working in Belfast. She graduated with an MFA distinction from Ulster University, Belfast in 2009 and a BA Hons in Music and Visual Practice at the University of Brighton, 2001. Solo exhibitions include ‘Midnight Candy’ at Arusha Gallery, Edinburgh (2020) and ‘The Frog Devoured The Sun’ at Domobaal Gallery, London (2018) and the University of Ulster, Belfast (2017). Recent group shows include ‘Ashes denote what fire was’ at Fortnight Institute, New York, ‘Generation 2022’ at Butler Gallery, Kilkenny, ‘Chorus’ at Arusha Gallery, Edinburgh and ‘Waking the Witch’, a touring exhibition supported by Arts Council England (2018/2019).

Fiona Finnegan’s paintings explore the myths and mysteries surrounding twilight and dawn, times when night and day are in flux, the witching hour.

By merging found images different points in time coalesce creating an alchemical relationship, halting the continual flow for a moment of pause— in which to observe moonlit hazy landscapes often occupied by vast silhouettes, transporting the viewer to an ethereal, atmospheric dreamscape.

Image: Dana’s hands oil on linen on wood 50 x 38 cm

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ArtMaze Magazine Double Volume Issue 30-31: curated selection

L e o n i e

P l a t t n e r

www.instagram.com/ithasnottakenlong

Image: Untitled mixed media on plexiglass

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Leonie was born on 9th of November 1998 in South Tyrol and studied fine arts at the University of Applied Arts Vienna since 2017.

Having worked a lot with mixed media, as of now the predominant medium in my practice is oil on canvas. The subject of my work is painting history, techniques and materiality in an experimental way, as well as thinking about concepts such as femininity in its outdated understanding and to what better use it could be made. The woman, often seen as frivolous and not capable to face the qualms of the real world, was represented to be inherently lacking seriousness. Camp strategy has rightly found this concept of the playful female as means to overcome self-constituting rituals and habits as well as external conventions.

The artistic practice is supported by not taking oneself too seriously and embracing one’s vulnerability.

Image: Untitled oil on canvas 50 x 44 cm

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ArtMaze Magazine Double Volume Issue 30-31: curated selection

P a i g e

P e r k i n s

www.arushagallery.com/artists/114-paige-perkins

Image: Other Voices oil on canvas 91 x 122 cm

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Paige Perkins’ work reflects a personal folklore where the borders between human and animal, fantasy and reality dissolve. The paintings reveal a visionary world where time and space unfold with a strange logic that springs from darker sources, including myths, pagan mysticism and fairy tales.

Perkins attended the Turps Banana Art School from 2014 to 2016 and holds an MFA from University of Brighton 2006. She lives and works in London and Warwickshire and is represented by Arusha Gallery, Edinburgh.

Image: The Call oil on canvas 85 x 75.5 cm

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ArtMaze Magazine Double Volume Issue 30-31: curated selection

A l l a n

V i l l a v i c e n c i o

www.allanvillavicencio.com

Image: Cadencia oil on linen 170 x 130 cm

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In my practice I question the pictorial process as a metabolism in constant transformation, challenging the everyday to generate new narratives of perception. This contextualizes the pretext to seek the visible in unfolded perspectives and to interrogate the virtuality of the spaces we live in. By virtuality, I mean the imaginary visual scenarios we create when we pay attention to our surroundings, that can take place in small cracks, hidden creases and subtle shadows etc. In my painting I extract fragments from my life, endowing them with expansive and emotional qualities, creating ‘residual landscapes’. In this sense, they reveal ecosystems of material, form, and texture, where I’m looking to present the viewer with a visual experience that highlights how the fragmentary and textural nature of the works, makes up the whole.

I consider my practice multidimensional, exploring various mediums including painting, drawing, collage, three-dimensional structures, installations and writing. It develops at the intersection of perception theories, the architecture topologies within the city landscapes, and the relationship between the clothing, the bodies and the objects that inhabit both the private and public spaces. This crossroad with the design, the countercultures and the politics of the gaze has always informed my interests but, lately, it has developed more concretely in my work.

Allan Villavicencio was awarded the Honorary Distinction for the XVIII Rufino Tamayo Painting Biennial in 2018 (Museo Tamayo, Mexico City) and is a three-time recipient of the FONCA grant. He has completed several residencies including Cité des Arts and Casa Wabi. His work has been exhibited in institutions such as Museo Tamayo, Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Sonora, among others. In the past years, Villavicencio has been part of exhibitions in galleries and fairs in Mexico, France, the USA, the United Kingdom, Turkey, Spain, Colombia, Peru, and Austria. Recent solo shows include: frutiplanismo at Salón ACME (Mexico City, 2022); Pieles ciegas at Galería Karen Huber (Mexico City, 2021); La recherche du rayon vert at Maëlle Galerie (Paris, 2019).

Image: Dulces notas oil on linen 44 x 32 cm

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ArtMaze Magazine Double Volume Issue 30-31: curated selection

J e n n i f e r

L a f l a m m e

www.instagram.com/mifi.mifi

Image: Ukibana oil on naturally dyed silk/cotton (dyed with indigo and goldenrod) 32 x 40 inches

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Jennifer Laflamme (b.1992, Kobe, Japan) is an artist working with paintings and textiles which are imbued with the memory and spirit of her interactions with the natural world. Her paintings are centred around reverie landscapes using rich earth tones. Laflamme has studied Fine Arts in Paris and is a graduate at the Toronto Metropolitan (formerly Ryerson) Fashion Design Program. Upon completing her degree, she moved back to Japan for a year to study traditional folk textiles and Japanese natural dyeing techniques. All of these experiences have impacted her aesthetic vocabulary, resulting in making work that ties textiles and paintings together. She draws from her background in textiles, using traditional dyeing and pigment painting techniques that are rooted in her Japanese-Korean ancestry. Laflamme’s work showcases her lived experiences within her world of multiple identities. She seeks to bridge those worlds together creating what can be described as her inner landscape which has been shaped by familiar and imagined environments.

Image: Kimidori in Bloom Nihonga pigments on naturally dyed silk cotton (indigo and goldenrod) 16 x 20 inches

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ArtMaze Magazine Double Volume Issue 30-31: curated selection

www.instagram.com/mosaz_zj

M O S A Z

Image: Placenta God 1 ink, watercolor and color pencil on paper 21.5 x 30 cm

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I graduated from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Almost all my drawings are based on the recognition and pride of my Asian identity. Also conflict between real life and illusional world.

Including my points of view on life and death, value and self cognition, losing my self and finding it back. Every drawing is a process of quarreling with myself that I am creating a world without logic but with order, where I have an opportunity to feel safe for facing up to myself.

Image: Placenta God 2 ink, watercolor and color pencil on paper 21.5 x 30 cm

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ArtMaze Magazine Double Volume Issue 30-31: curated selection

www.emilyrwright.com

E m i l y

R o s e

Image: Cocooning ink on Kitakata paper 9 x 12 inches

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W r i g h t

Brooklyn based artist Emily Rose Wright earned her BFA in Painting with a concentration in Computation, Technology, and Culture from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2022, and has participated in recent shows throughout Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New York. Wright’s work consists of dour, largely monochromatic and hauntingly evocative vignettes. Incorporating a range of media and utilizing both printed and pliable material together in a given piece, most artworks bear a strong impression of the procedural and textural accumulation from which they are composed. Bearing readily the imprinted residue of ink on textured substrates, these works abound with entropic patterning. Wright balances the inherent tendencies of her materials and her intentions, crafting moments of representational figuration that sit amongst layers of abstraction, giving the ultimately inconclusive suggestion of wholly expansive forms. Wright’s personal experiences with loss and spirituality have largely informed her work, the influence of which is visible within both her physical and digital practices, her figurative pieces as well as her world-building dreamscapes.

Image: Juggernaut ink, charcoal, and digital print on paper 9 x 12 inches

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ArtMaze Magazine Double Volume Issue 30-31: curated selection

I a n

C a l e b

M o l i n a

www.iancalebmz.com

Image: Prologues egg tempera and pyroengraving 42 x 29 cm

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Z o l l e r

My work focuses on the study and cultivation of the silent world that underlies everyday experience, of the primitive roots that sustain life and how they connect with us. Individual and collective memory, conscious/unconscious relationship, exteriority and interiority are some of the dualities approached from a symbolic narrative, where the landscape is the protagonist. Using dream collection practices, experimental writings and photographic research, I try to condense in my works, pieces that serve as a talisman in the encounter with the unfathomable, of offering, in the communion of being and nature. I work from Patagonia since 1987, wherever I live.

Image: Pirque 02 egg tempera and pyroengraving 29 x 21 cm

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ArtMaze Magazine Double Volume Issue 30-31: curated selection

Tu a n

V u

www.tuanvu.art

Image: La Traversée du Styx mixed media on canvas 72 x 63 inches

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At the age of five, Tuan Vu began drawing the monsters that populated his nightmares. He had no dreams at that time because Vietnam was then going through a troubled period. In hindsight, he realizes that it was through painting that he had long sought to give meaning to everything that was happening around him.

Even today, he still wonders about the strange world in which we live and tries to better understand the humans who inhabit it. Even if he sometimes tries to move away from it, his works always end up being filled with fantastic characters, such as nymphs and mermaids, reminiscent of those of Greek mythology.

Inspired by the color palette of the great masters he admires such as Gauguin, Vuillard, and Redon, and that of more contemporary painters such as Peter Doig, Tuan Vu plays with our imagination, between dreamed scenes and contemplated landscapes.

Vibrant, colorful, and playful at first sight, his works present various levels of reading. The artist thus implicitly questions very current themes such as the impact of climate change on our lives. Without ever wanting to impose himself and give a ready-made answer, he leaves it to the beholder to question himself in turn.

Vestiges of memories of his childhood in Vietnam and palm trees are found in almost all his works. Flamboyant or bare, fragile or robust, they often give a clue to the hidden meaning of the work. Sometimes winking at renowned painters such as Botticelli or Manet, Tuan Vu comes to pay homage to them while reclaiming their work to integrate it into his own artistic approach and to be part of a continuity in the history of art.

Image: Retour après baignade oil on canvas 73 x 63 inches

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ArtMaze Magazine Double Volume Issue 30-31: curated selection

N i k a

R u b i n s h t e i n

www.instagram.com/paintnika

Image: The critics acrylic, oil paint, unprimed canvas 70 x 60 cm

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Nika Rubinshtein (b.1991) is an artist living and working in Israel (originally from Russia, but ran from that country as soon as the war started). She graduated Istituto Europeo di Design in Milan and worked as an interior designer and art director for seven years. In 2019 she left the design field and started her career as an artist.

Nika is moving between two worlds: familiar material world and thrilling spiritual one by giving a form to ephemeral moments, complicated feelings and to the unknown. Blurred boundaries between the two worlds are also emphasized by the style—there are no clear objects on Nikas paintings, everything flows from one to another, creating unusual forms that can be both people and spirits at the same time. This is the way Nika keeps a fine line between figurative and abstract painting. She divides her work in two phases: during the first Nika is using acrylics with a big amount of water, which gives an unpredictable result and a feeling of painting creating itself under the influence of invisible forces. The second phase comes when the painting is dry, then Nika works on details using oil paint and a dry brush.

Image: Escape acrylic, oil paint, unprimed canvas 100 x 80 cm

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ArtMaze Magazine Double Volume Issue 30-31: curated selection

S e b a s t i a n

S u p a n z

www.sebastiansupanz.com

Image: A new path wool on canvas 40 x 40 x 5 cm

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Sebastian Supanz was born in 1989 in Graz, Austria. 2013-2020 University of Applied Arts Vienna, Austria. 2017 FAAP São Paulo, Brazil. Exhibitions: 2022: Mit den besten Grüßen, BMJ Feldkirchen, Austria; Don’t leave false illusions behind, Kunstraum am Schauplatz, Vienna. 2021: I think I dropped them here, Zirkusgasse 38, Vienna. 2020: Colours of a sleepless knight (diploma exhibition, solo); Alternate mode, Angewandte Festival, Vienna; Staycation is A New Artwork On Your Wall, FouFou Contemporary, Vienna; Raus Project Vol.2, Hamburg, Germany; Group Show 2, Serving the People (online) While you were out, Alt Wien, Vienna. 2019: Soft Opening, Star1, Vienna (solo); Collage Collage, Aa Collections, Vienna; Ciphers of Regression ft. der Hausfreund, Vienna; Matinee avec croissants, Star1, Vienna; 2018 NogNog, Justice, Vienna. 2017: The Essence, Alte Post, Vienna; Grubisic & Supanz, Justice, Vienna. 2016: MIX, Boox, Vienna; Parallel, Alte Post, Vienna; Galeria Laval Nugent, Zagreb; No Show, Justice, Vienna; The Essence, Künstlerhaus, Vienna.

Since early 2019, I have been mainly working with the material wool as paint colours. The recurring motif of the knight is based on a children’s drawing by my older brother. Many different meanings can be associated with the knight with armour, such as a classic image of masculinity, strength, and power. However, the material wool is more associated with docile, innocent, and domestic qualities, which stand in direct contrast to the motif of the knight. Based on my old works, I created the templates for the three recently produced works ‘A new path’, ‘Der Compagnon’, and ‘Same same but different’ (all from 2022), with the help of an AI generator. It takes 5 seconds to generate AI-simulated images of art, and it takes on average 3 weeks to produce one of the felted wool paintings. Each and every poke through the thick canvas is the process of deceleration, from quick digital generation to slow felting motion, from innumerable possibilities to one chosen image that is created as a tangible work of art.

Image: Der Compagnon wool on canvas 40 x 40 x 5 cm

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ArtMaze Magazine Double Volume Issue 30-31: curated selection

F a l o n S t u t z m a n

www.falonstutzman.com

Image: Woman at a bar oil on canvas 16 x 20 inches

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My goal is to make images that invade the space between the viewer and it. Rather than a window INTO the image or a flat plane of texture, my aim is to paint in a way that projects forward/outward. At the moment I’m influenced by old technicolor movies, the softness of those colors over forms and the rich solid shadows that look sculptural. I think that the material of paint is subject enough so the handling of it is really my focus. Who or what I paint is never really at the forefront although there are certain forms I tend to use lately. Columns, pedestals, urns, busts, bone/muscle structure on a face or body. The meaning of these subjects comes at the very end when there’s some degree of closure and I decide to let the painting be finished. That is when I know why I painted that thing in the first place. Because it looks, in a way, right to me and I can appreciate all the marks as this new singular thing.

Image: Blonde man with mustache oil on canvas 12 x 15 inches

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ArtMaze Magazine Double Volume Issue 30-31: curated selection

H i d e t a k a

S u z u k i

www.suzukihidetaka.net

Image: Expose oil on canvas 91 x 72.7 cm

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Born in Hokkaido in 1986 and currently lives in Tokyo. Painter. Completed the Master’s Course in Oil Painting at the Musashino Art University Graduate School of Art and Design. In 2009, he received the Golden Acrylic Award at GEISAI#13 organized

by Takashi Murakami, and in 2021, he was selected by Emilia Yin, Founder and Director of Make Room, for Foundwork’s Guest Curators Program. He was also selected for ArtConnect’s Artists to Watch ’21. He has recently participated in the online exhibition ‘Together Through Painting’ at the London Paint Club and the group exhibition ‘Emergence’ at the Rise Art Soho gallery in the UK. I was fascinated at a certain point in my life with finding family photos on the internet. I was attracted to the sense of guilt and the strange feeling of being able to see other people’s private photos, which I had nothing to do with. Things opened up in front of me that I would never usually have the chance to see. Once I reblogged a family photo on Tumblr that was probably from overseas, and there was a comment on it. It was a comment in English. It was an angry “Why do you have my father’s picture? Delete it immediately”. Of course, I did not upload this photo. Nor do I own it. It was a photo taken somewhere, uploaded to the internet by someone else, and for whatever reason, it showed up on my dashboard. If I deleted the post, the data would never disappear from the internet, but I immediately deleted that reblog. When I read the comments, I felt an eerie sensation as if I was suddenly touched by something damp and caught a glimpse of a gaze from out of nothing. Something supposed to be fiction was somehow connected to reality and haunting me. The place I believed to be safe was, from the other side, just within their reach.

Image: Homage oil on canvas 31.8 x 41 cm

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J a n e

M c K e n z i e

www.janemckenziestudio.com

Image: Cowichan Lake watercolour on paper 7 x 5 inches

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Jane McKenzie (b. 1972, Worcester, MA) is a Montreal-based artist who works with watercolour and oil paint to make small-scale paintings that depict her everyday surroundings, most often urban landscapes. Her paintings feature loose brushwork and a calligraphic surface, and she paints with a sense of immediacy. McKenzie uses paint to notice and translate nuances that are imbued in everyday moments.

McKenzie received her BFA from the University of Montana and her MFA from Syracuse University. Her recent exhibitions include “The Feeling of Things,” curated by Colleen Grennan for White Columns Online; “Nocturnes” a solo show of watercolors at The Sheldon Art Galleries in Saint Louis, MO; and “Earth Sign,” a group show at False Cast Gallery in San Diego, CA. Her work was selected for the 2000 Everson Museum Biennial in Syracuse, NY and she has been included in the White Columns Curated Artist Registry since 2019.

Image: Treetops at Cowichan Lake watercolour on paper 5 x 7 inches

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J u l i a N o r t o n

www.julia-norton.com

Image: The Entrails of the Earth Group to Form a House #2 paper collage with raw cochineal and a pressed flower from Teotihuacan 8.5 x 11 inches

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Julia Norton is a multidisciplinary artist and educator. In her art practice, research, and education work she explores the unique qualities and legacies of natural color materials – such as ochres, mineral pigments, and plant-based inks and dyes. She holds an MFA from SUNY Purchase and an Ed.M from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She has exhibited at galleries such as Lyles & King, the Wassaic Project, and Dread Lounge, and has participated in residencies at the Wassaic Project, Cooper Union, Mass MoCA, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity (BC, Canada), SIM Residency (Reykjavik, Iceland), and Pocoapoco (Oaxaca, Mexico). She has worked as an educator at New Museum, Pioneer Works, Swiss Institute, Abrons Art Center, Dia Beacon, and Harvard Art Museums.

The imagery in my work references dreams, memories, rituals, and myths, that speak to the lived experience both real and imagined. I aim to tell stories of life cycles of all kinds, including those that are human/animal, geological, ecological, and spiritual. Recently I have been exploring collage work that portrays elements of bodily existence, with objects and shapes that interweave and enter spaces within the arrangement of the composition. The title of the series, “The Entrails of the Earth Group to Form a House”, is quoted from the poem “The Iron and the Rust” by the French Surrealist writer Michel Leiris.

Made in a time in my life that followed several health-related incidents, and in reference to years of living in chronic pain due to migraines, these works were made with an understanding of the often invisible threads of pain we carry in this house we call a body. The natural materials used, many of which were found in Mexico, include copal seeds, pochote and marigold petals, raw cochineal insects, naturally dyed yarn, and various ochres. These living contributions act as characters within the stories told, and speak in conversation with the meaning behind the work of life and death, the containers of our existence, and all that is given, all that is taken, and all that is left behind.

Image: The Entrails of the Earth Group to Form a House #3 paper collage with amate, indigo and brazil wood dyed yarn, and ochre pastel 8.5 x 12 inches

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P a w e ł O l s z e w s k i

www.instagram.com/pa_olszewski

Image: Brainpipe oil on canvas 47 x 44 cm

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Paweł Olszewski b. 1996 in Tarnów, lives and works in Kraków (Cracow), Poland. Paweł Olszewski creates works that are to be consistent through technique, not narration. A characteristic thread in them are symmetrical mirror images that could indicate the repetition of motifs and create disturbing visual situations. In addition to painting, the artist also creates objects, installations and 3D prints.

One of the influences on the Olszewski works was the character of Terrence Andrew Davis (December 15, 1969 - August 11, 2018). An American programmer who created and designed TempleOS, a public domain operating system. Its development was an extremely complex, timeconsuming and unusual undertaking for one person. After experiencing a self-described “revelation”, he proclaimed that he had been in direct communication with God and that God had commanded him to build a successor to the Second Temple as an operating system after the DOSbased interfaces of his youth.

In 2005, Davis stated that his ambition was “to recreate the dynamic environment that used to exist when the Commodore 64 was around and everyone was creating odd-ball software”. He envisioned the system as a Commodore 64 with a “thousand times” more powerful processing speed. As such, references to Biblical tropes are ubiquitous in the OS. One bundled program, ‘After Egypt’, is a game in which the player travels to a burning bush to use a “high-speed stopwatch”. The stopwatch is meant to act as an oracle that generates pseudo-random text, something Davis believed to be coded messages from God. He likened the process to a Ouija board and speaking in tongues. During his final years, Davis amassed an online following and regularly posted video blogs to social media. Although he remained lucid when discussing computer-related subjects, his communication skills were significantly affected by his schizophrenia.

Image: brain and skeleton on a crossroad oil on canvas 115 x 105 cm

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Ta l

R e g e v

www.talregev.co.uk

Image: Into her oil and pastel on canvas 170 x 150 cm

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Tal Regev creates luminous and ethereal spaces on the surface of her canvases. Bodies and objects oscillate in mysterious territories conjured from light washes of colour, often threatening to slip from a viewer’s grasp completely. Conceptualising the body as a porous vessel through which forces flow, Regev engages in a highly personal meditation on her experiences, while also alluding to more universal questions of political histories, borders and health. Regev looks to the invisible things we carry within us; how memories and feelings become embodied rather than stored solely in one’s mind. This ‘psychic map’, as she describes it, unavoidably incorporates troubling darkness alongside lightness and joy. An acute sharpness resides in the subtle delicacy of Regev’s paintings.

Image: Throat of fire oil on canvas 170 x 150 cm

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B r a d

S t u m p f

www.bradstumpf.com

Image: Is It for the Tree That Sprouts From My Chest oil on panel 16 x 20 inches

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Brad Stumpf is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist from St. Louis, Missouri. He attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2015.

My paintings are acknowledgements of real and imaginary moments in my life that make me want to hold my breath. They are attempts to capture the purity and stillness of an idle moment spent alongside my wife. They explore the adoration and hope that accompanies a new marriage and new lifestyle. My paintings function like miniature stage sets. They are painted from observation and depict handmade objects, oftentimes organized atop my bedside table. The images are like an open door to a quiet room for which you can peek into, or a still photo of a play halfway through. The beauty of giving a rose is watching her smile as she carefully reaches for its thorned neck. It’s seeing her trim its stem to better accommodate her short vase. It’s talking about her day as she fills the vase with water.

Image: My Hair on Your Hips oil on panel 24 x 24 inches

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N i c o l e

M a z z a

www.nicomazza.com

Image: Backstabber hand embroidery on percal 33 x 45 cm

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Nico Mazza was born in Gainesville, Florida in 1989. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011 and lived and worked in New York City until 2014 when she moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina. She has participated in many group exhibitions in the US, South America and Europe and recently presented her latest body of work in a solo show titled ‘Blandir el Quiebre’ (Softening the Break) at Crudo Contemporáneo in Rosario, Argentina. She has also shown work in various art fairs including ArteBA (Buenos Aires), Frieze (London), and Pinta (Miami). Her work was selected for numerous art competitions including ‘El Fugaz’ (2019 and 2022), ‘Fondo Nacional de las Artes’ (2021) and ‘Salon Nacional de Artes Textiles’ (2022). She is currently represented by Crudo Arte Contemporáneo in Rosario, Argentina.

She works with textile and embroidery to create figurative works. She integrates strong pictorial and sculptural resources in a baroque, poetic narrative that raises questions about the construction and deconstruction of the body. She is concerned with the iconography of the body and how it is seen through the lens of socially constructed relationships and fantasies, and how gender is constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed—devoured, fragmented and rebuilt by the voyeur.

Nico stitches together dream-like landscapes and interiors filled with pattern and texture. Images are formed from memories, family histories and fantasies, often juxtaposing the delicate practice of needlework with characters who negate socio-political norms of gender and sexual identity. Her figures are often contorted: bodies in positions of discomfort and impossibility. Limbs are intertwined, wrapping, reaching and wanting. Though they are sometimes nude and sexualized, observed and objectified, they take front and center stage—autonomous and engaging in the extremes of human behavior. There is a darkness—a crudeness in the visual narrative she weaves. There is violence in the way that thread meets fabric, and the obsessive nature of the needle penetrating something soft.

Image: Pool Party hand embroidery on percal 28 x 34 cm

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K a t a l i n

K o r t m a n n - J á r a y

K a r i n a

M e n d r e c z k y

www.katalinkortmannjaray.com www.karinamendreczky.wixsite.com/karina

Image: Oasis - People Look Like Flowers At Last mixed media installation variable sizing

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a n d

Karina Mendreczky (*1988 in Budapest), lives and works in Vienna and Budapest; 2009 - 2015 University of Applied Arts, Graphic and Printmaking (Prof.

Jan Svenungsson); 2014 - 2015 University of the Arts London, Printmaking and Time-based Media; 2015 - Prize of Kunsthalle Wien. Solo and group exhibitions in Austria, Hungary and Germany. In her works, the artist reflects childhood memories and individual localizations of socio-cultural identity.

Katalin Kortmann-Járay (*1986 in Budapest) lives and works in Budapest. 2006 - 2012 Hungarian University of Fine Arts (HUFA) and Academy of Fine Arts Munich. Recently a doctoral student at HUFA. Participation in group exhibitions, biennials, triennials and award ceremonies in several European countries. The main theme of her work is the influence of culture on human perception.

In their works, Karina Mendreczky and Katalin Kortmann-Járay draw on objects and natural elements in a variety of ways, referencing collective and personal histories. With the installation “Oasis - People Look Like Flowers At Last” with Galerie Rudolf Leeb they created a fictional space, which was shown for the first time in September 2022 in an abandoned room, a former maternity ward of the Semmelweiss Women’s Hospital, during the 10th edition of Parallel Vienna. Gloomy visions of the future are the order of every-day life. We are witnesses to irreversible man-made processes, which give rise to numerous and urgent moral and philosophical questions about the relationship between man and nature. To develop more sensitive and prudent relations, we often seek knowledge from the past. Animism, probably the oldest view of the world and based on the belief that natural elements, objects and living beings are all animated, forms the basis of indigenous religions to this day, but is also present in modern society in different forms. Contemporary new animistic approaches, however, are no longer visual representations of religious beliefs or exclusively evocations of the world of fantasy or fairy tales. New animistic approaches, including scientific positions, are emerging. According to many prominent thinkers, they offer alternatives to the environmentally destructive lifestyles of the present. In this respect, these approaches reflect very rational positions.

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www.alexanderpuz.com

A l e x

P u z

Image: Breath Play flashe vinyl acrylic on canvas 36 x 48 inches

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The matter between our ears pulses with neural electricity, charged by excitations of color and shadow. Visual experience is localized in our cognition – color is registered in one location, line and depth in another. I directly stimulate these processing regions of the brain.

I build paintings from back to front in a process of strict accounting: I mix gradients in sequences of varying hue, value, and saturation.

I then apply tape and masking fluid to canvas to create networks of thin stripes that intersect at slanting angles. The color-modulated lines weave together and produce animated patterns that simultaneously recall cabaret curtains, a stovetop flame, and the spectral vibrancy of the aurora borealis.

These paintings flicker between the theatrical and the organic: they direct focus to individual moments of color immersed in a system that resembles camouflage. This duality is a magic trick; looking closely, you see fine intersecting lines that create narrow diamonds of hue. Step back, and the composition coalesces into a spread of sensations that is fixed, fluid and warped. My paintings are windows of uncanny atmosphere, a glimpse of churning chroma and interference pattern.

I paint because visual sensation is psychophysical—it transforms our thoughts. The tension that links granular color experience and optical illusion generates questions about self-understanding. Our minds alone are the site of ecstasy and suffering, a lesson I internalized while working as an overnight operator on a suicide hotline. Coping with trauma, panic, and dissociation is a matter of proximity to the event.

The way we decode percepts—received environmental data about what is happening—is a high stakes affair. Each move in my paintings is tightly controlled. When the final mask is taken off, however, the particular consequence of each decision is striking and unforeseen.

This mystery compels me. Science, politics and technology recount an ever-narrowing view of what it means to be human, pulling our attention from one algorithmically engineered solution to the next. My paintings lure the eye into new, uncertain spaces.

Image: Internal Context flashe vinyl acrylic on canvas 26 x 42 inches

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Ta d e á š

K o t r b a

www.instagram.com/tadeas_kotrba

Image: Katka oil and acrylic paste on canvas 120 x 90 cm

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Tadeáš Kotrba was born in 1986 in the Czech Republic and in 2012 graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague where he studied printmaking and painting. A year before that he spent an exchange stay at the CSM in London. Since then his works have been exhibited at solo and group exhibitions and are part of private and institutional collections in the Czech Republic and abroad. He lives and works in Prague.

The enduring theme of his work revolves around the path that we take both as individuals and as a community, and the different obstacles we must overcome in that process. His paintings most commonly depict figures in a landscape who come into contact with these obstacles, which are either manmade or naturally occurring. The landscapes are inspired by travels in East and South Asia and Europe.

Currently he works with his father’s sketches, the late sculptor Marius Kotrba. Drawings that he made in the last year of his life often feature legions of demons and angels, chaos but also resolution. Tadeáš has used these sketches, in part or in their entirety, as the basis for his own paintings. Through these works he has been seeking to maintain an ongoing dialogue with his father, and to develop a new narrative.

Image: Mama oil and acrylic paste on canvas 120 x 90 cm

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C h i a r a

B a i m a

P o m a

www.instagram.com/chiarabaimapoma

Image: Wives and oxen from your country acrylic on canvas 165 x 128 cm

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The prevailing themes that intertwine in my works are the sense of identity and the attraction to ancestral and spiritual forms such as myth, fable, religions. After studying at Albertina Academy of Fine Arts in Turin for 2 years I dropped it for traveling around Asia. Those years are characterized by a drive for new inspirations and different cultures but also turned into an unbridgeable quest of identity. I therefore feel that my heritage is grafted into others, which enriches me but also confuses and destabilizes me. My works are the product of this battle between where I’m from and where I’ll go that leads to an idealization of what’s no longer there. Mine is an eye that looks at the past, at the skeletons of the great fallen cultures and idealizes them, mixing and reinterpreting in a coeval point of view. From Asia I then moved to Australia where I lived for a year when with the elements collected by traveling I realized the zine “Kaos“ and an exhibition with the same name.

Moving to London my works change and fascinated by the colorful vitality of the neighborhood where I lived (Hackney, east London) I started to paint portraits of the locals that were then exhibits at the show “Fried Chicken”. Alongside it however, my fascination for myths hadn’t waned, and I worked on the series of drawings “Orpheus and Eurydice”, that I would eventually turn into a zine. When I moved to the Canary Islands (Spain) my practice became more consistent and my paintings are now the mirror of an inner world, a solo practice that gets inspiration from ancient stories, outdated traditions and rituals, all altered and reimagined with an aesthetic that has its roots in the art of the great Italian masters, particularly in the Gothic and early Renaissance. When I paint I play with different techniques and textures, I move from detailed drapery to flat and two-dimensional surfaces. I use factors that do not belong to the same space, creating new unrealistic and imaginary ones. The surrealism of spaces, the use of strong colors and gold fascinates me. Also I love mixing to the bi-dimensional space of the canvas, figures in paper mache, making character and details partially come out of it.

Image: To make milk come to knees gouache on canvas 50 x 50 cm

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E m m a S t e i n k r a u s

www.emmasteinkraus.com

Image: Cut Paper (for Mary Delany, Charity Bryant, & Sylvia Drake) oil and photo transfer on canvas 24 x 18 inches

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I combine paintings with installations to distill complex research into cohesive visual spaces, shifting the stories we tell about women, art history, mythology, and the natural world. My work is densely detailed and slightly surreal, hybridizing the bright colors and 1990s pop aesthetic of Lisa Frank with wide-ranging art historical references. Nearly all my work cultivates an ecological gaze in which humans are depicted alongside non-human species rendered with equal sensitivity and attention.

My latest project, Impossible Garden, explores the lives of historical women artist-naturalists through paintings and a wallpaper constructed from their illustrations of flora and fauna. Each painting combines detailed portrait painting with acrylic medium photo transfers that form patterns on the women’s clothing. The transfers act as annotations for the paintings, inventorying the nuanced ways individual women abetted and resisted patriarchal constraints, environmental exploitation, and colonialism.

My work is represented by 1969 Gallery in New York, NY and has been included in recent exhibitions at UNTITLED Art Fair (Miami, FL); Monti 8 Gallery (Latina, Italy); Hashimoto Contemporary (Los Angeles, CA), and Deanna Evans Projects (New York, NY). Recent appearances in publications include Burnaway, Jezebel, Juxtapoz, and on the cover of New American Paintings. I have attended a number of residencies including the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Wassaic Project, and the Blue Mountain Center. In 2022, I was awarded the Helen Frankenthaler Fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center and I was a 2020 Eliza Moore Fellow at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation. I live and work as an assistant professor in Lexington, VA.

Image: Frog Ballet (for Beatrix Potter) oil and acrylic on canvas 20 x 24 inches

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J e f f l y

G a b r i e l a

M o l i n a

www.jefflyart.com

Image: Marriage Story from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil oil on linen 78 x 36 x 2 inches each panel

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Jeffly Gabriela Molina is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist from Táchira, Venezuela. In 2016, she graduated with a Master of Fine Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Molina has participated in multiple group and solo exhibitions and has been commissioned for several public sculptures. Her most recent solo exhibitions are De Madera y Aire at Galeria Enrique Guerrero in CDMX and Suspiro at Kavi Gupta in Chicago.

My paintings are inspired by my family’s history, our daydreams, and contemporary life in places I have lived. Some of the images I create are of a past that I never knew, of a Venezuela of yesterday, that today nostalgia transfigures. Images of family, ancestors, and ghosts accompany a present that honors and wants to learn. Perceptions toward life rituals such as marriage, work, and religion, which have changed over time with the pursuit of equality, and a profound desire to create a prosperous present and future. These themes that traffic in the everyday and a history of migration inspired a body of work that speaks of what life is made of—love, fear, memories, and daydreams.

Image: Self Portrait as a Clown oil on linen 22 x 17 x 2 inches

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M a r c o s N .

S a y a s

www.marcosnsayas.com

Image: Diana watercolour 36 x 31 cm

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Marcos Navarro Sayas (Spain, 1999) completed his Fine Arts studies in Valencia and currently resides in Madrid. His work, which consists mainly of detailed watercolour paintings, has its roots in the wild nature and the mythological world of Navarra and the Basque Country, combined with a personal language inspired by his own experiences and dreams, he creates a wild and ethereal pictorial universe where animals and solitary characters coexist among forests and misty fields.

In my latest project ‘Murmuro’, made with the support of Huarte Contemporary Art Centre, I explore the forest as a living organ, inspired by Spanish literature in the fashion of ‘Animated Forest’ by Wenceslao Fernandez Flórez or ‘When I Sing, Mountains Dance’ by Irene Solá, and the aesthetics that go from XIX century illustration to modern comic. The forest has a language of its own, the murmur: a soft set of sounds that hides a universe behind it. The works that make up this project seek to delve into everything that is hidden behind the whisper, from realities such as birth, metamorphosis or death, to fantasies that man creates and delivers to nature, filling her with myth, projecting our ideas, doubts, fears and a desire to escape that leads us to imagine a parallel world between the branches.

Image: Metamorfosis watercolour 25 x 30 cm

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S a s h a D e y a s h

www.instagram.com/_deyash

Image: Lost it All oil on linen 60 x 60 cm

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I was born in 1998. At the moment I am studying for a master’s degree at the architectural institute. In my art practice I mostly work with oil painting, metal and glass, sometimes resorting to the use of wood. Creating works for me is an attempt to explore myself and determine my own place in the context of the phenomena of the surrounding reality. A recurring motif in my works is the alienation of the protagonist from the rest of the world, his turning inward and conserving in the world of his own reflections and unresolved issues.

The space of my works is made up of objects that promised to become symbols of idealized beauty and peace. However, instead, they meet the main character with their cold and alienated shells, enclosing him in a lifeless space, where the shadows of events from the past lie in the corners.

Image: A Wound, an Arrow and a Swansong; I Need a Pair of Wings, Snowlike and Translucent oil on linen, metal wire 30 x 30 cm

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Z o r a G a m b e r g

www.zoragamberg.com

Image: Self Portrait at the Bottom of the Hill graphite on paper 38 x 42 inches

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Originally from Pennsylvania, Zora Gamberg is pursuing a BFA in painting at Rhode Island School of Design, graduating in 2023. Zora’s work is invested in deconstructing the human-centered logic which defines our relationship to land. She sees landscape painting as a practice that holds great potential for accessing new and constructive perspectives that seek not to other, but to unite with nature through processes of generative world building. These are worlds in which trees, birds, water, and the soil from which they are born possess autonomy and memory; spaces in which the cycles of change, decay, and rebirth are unavoidable and celebrated as truth. Through material exploration in painting, drawing, and knitting, she seeks to create spaces that challenge our constructions of the natural world in order to access our innate connection to land.

Image: Death Cycles graphite on paper 42 x 18 inches

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W i l l i a m S c h a e u b l e

www.williamschaeuble.com

Image: Sadie Street Blues oil on canvas 42 x 50 inches

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William Schaeuble is an American painter, amateur outdoorsman and wannabe bird watcher. Schaeuble’s work focuses on telling stories of his personal life in connection to the broader world of contemporary culture, art history and the great outdoors. His works are semi-autobiographical, filled with figures, animals, nicknacks, lovers, enemies, locations and themes that all come from the artist’s personal life. He depicts certain memories and moments from his life that stand out enough to spend extra time with. The Artist alters those memories through a lens of humor and intimate reference of what is occupying the mind at the time, turning the work in to a body of documentary paintings that when Schaeuble is an old man he will be able to use to revisit old friends through paint.

Schaeuble grew up in Iowa and graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He now splits his time between Chicago and his family’s home in Iowa. The American Midwest landscape and culture is a prominent focal point in his work.

Image: Filled With Rings oil on canvas 24 x 20 inches

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A n n a

O r t i z

www.annaortiz.com

Image: Acróbata oil on canvas 38 x 32 inches

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Anna Ortiz is a Mexican-American painter living in Brooklyn. Growing up in Worcester, Massachusetts, Ortiz spent much of her childhood visiting her family in Guadalajara Mexico. There she studied painting with her grandfather Alfonso who was a professional portrait painter. Her love for painting and travel led her to study in Paris at the Ecole du Louvre while in her undergraduate studies at Tufts and the Museum School. Ortiz continued her education at Tyler, receiving her MFA in painting in Philadelphia and Rome. Ortiz moved to New York in 2006 and has never stopped traveling. She has exhibited at Proto Gomez, Transmitter Gallery, TSA and My Pet Ram. Inspired by the archeology of Mesoamerican figures and the landscape of Mexico, my work serves as a reflection on my Mexican- American identity.

Growing up with one foot in the US and the other in Mexico, I’ve always felt distanced from both of my nationalities. Similarly the beings in my paintings embrace their ambiguities. Rooted in statuary and botanicals, these figures come to life in dream-like landscapes where they are neither dead nor alive. Their narrative nature references ancient Aztec and Mayan mythology while reflecting back on current and personal events. Out of the ruins of their previous existence, these new creatures inhabit a borderland between memory and imagination. Dualities define them; they give them shape. Weaving together invented spaces with references to actual places, the paintings take both a familiar tone and a sense of the uncanny. Taken as a whole, my paintings offer a purview into an invented world existing just slightly out of the realm of possibility. By playing with spatial compression and a filtered palette, I invite viewers to consider the realities we create for ourselves and the possibilities that lie ahead.

Image: El Pensador oil on canvas 22 x 18 inches

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www.vanessamckernan.com

V a n e s s a

M c K e r n a n

Image: Night on the Lake oil on panel 48 x 36 inches

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Vanessa McKernan is a painter from Toronto, Canada working on canvas, wood, mylar and paper with both oil and water-based materials.

She holds a BFA from Montreal’s Concordia University and was recently awarded the prestigious Elizabeth Greenshields Grant for emerging artists.

As an artist, painting is the way I process my experience of the world and what I intuit and imagine are the experiences of the greater human collective. Pulling from art history, contemporary culture, observations, and dreams, my paintings work within a narrative structure that moves back and forth between things deeply personal and universal. As I slowly build my oeuvre, I see that I am interested in describing the mythologies of our modern day.

In my work I am primarily concerned with the complexity and fragility of relationship; intra-personal and familial, as well as our relationship to the natural world. While my paintings are primarily figurative, I am increasingly drawn to landscape and the way in which the environment within a composition can be used to further express the psychology of the painted figures. After giving birth to my son Raphaël in 2020, I created a body of work that drew on rivers and water symbology to explore birth, death, mothering, and the postpartum self.

What I paint is deeply connected to my process in the studio. In front of the canvas, I am trying to marry the formal elements of making figurative painting, with intuition. This means starting with a theme—a framework that provides structure and a place to return to if I get lost.

Within a given theme I sit down each day to engage in dialogue with my materials, being open to who and what shows up. This I believe gives space for the life of the painting itself and its ability to reveal something to me that is greater than or bigger than my own intentions for it. I see this process as the height of creative expression.

Image: Mother Earth oil on panel 36 x 36 inches

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S h o s h a n a

W a l f i s h

www.shoshanawalfish.com

Image: Forbidden Fruit oil on linen 80 x 70 cm

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I am a queer feminist Canadian painter, based between Montreal and Brussels. I work with themes of ecofeminism and existentialism, abstracting and collapsing the boundaries between the foreground, background, real and surreal, playing with the classical painting tenets of space and flesh. I hold a BFA with Distinction from Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, and a diploma in Classical Painting from the Florence Academy of Art in Italy.

My work as a painter engages surrealist world building, symbolism and corporeality. I use the physicality of my body as the painter and the materiality of the paint to capture the fleeting sense we have of our bodies’ connection to the land. The core of my work enacts the Lacanian concept of objet petit a: the unattainable object of desire—in this case, our idea of the natural world—where we as a species have corrupted and lost the concept of paradise.

I am influenced by Dr. Stacy Alaimo’s theory of trans-corporeality, wherein the human and the natural non-human are inherently interconnected. The environment has been feminized, exaggerated, and objectified, and the treatment of the two are strikingly similar, a topic deeply investigated in the work of activist and scholar Silvia Federici. This has brought us to the brink of environmental collapse yet grasping at the notion that we can save ourselves. Still, as Rebecca Solnit aptly puts it, “our culture is pervaded by a nostalgia for things that probably never have existed”—again, the objet petit a.

In my paintings, I use trans-corporeality in a sensuous and humorous way; the nature is lush but artificial, the trees bear breast-fruit and the people are part of the landscape. There is a tension between desire and objectivity, but figures dissolve any objectification, to embody their own eroticism, to evoke a desire for nature, love of the wild, existing rather than observing or existing to be observed. My process involves a synthesis of images: my own photos, drawings of live models and old masters’ paintings are combined, while imagined and found objects and elements provide context and symbolic meaning.

Image: Cornucopia oil on linen 80 x 70 cm

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www.stanzietooth.com

S t a n z i e To o t h

Image: Couple (After Rodin) ink on watercolour paper 11 x 14 inches

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My work is rooted in my personal history of growing up in a closed, rural community in Southern Ontario. My family lived off, and worked, the land. Our relationship to our natural surround was one of respect and interdependence. I didn’t see my experience reflected in the art history I was taught, where the landscape was framed [by male settlers] as a thing that was owned by a myopic power. My accumulated bodies of work riff on the art historical landscape, while in search of one that reflects a bodily, and intersectional, experience. Through mining my own history I hope to connect to a wider discourse about the representations of women and landscapes in art.

I became a mother at the beginning of covid. With the events of the past two+ years, my relationship to my body, place, and the internal landscapes that inform my artistic practice, have been rocked. I am now coming to these spaces from the lens of new motherhood during a global pandemic. I recently developed a new body of ink on paper works, which reflect my postpartum joys, anxieties, and mediations on the state of our climate. Themes of sleep, isolation, protection and (dis)embodiment predominate these works.

An undercurrent of this series is the juxtaposition of art historical archetypes, like the madonna and child, with the images of invasive species.

‘Phragmites’, shows a female figure on the ground with tall stalks of phragmites australis (an invasive species to Ontario) extending from her body and supporting a child above. Brought to Canada for their beauty and utility, phragmites have completely transformed the landscape, changing the very composition of the soil. Where historically, the madonna and child were surrounded by natural symbols of fertility and purity, by invoking various invasive species in these images I address some of the unspoken paradoxes of motherhood. I hope to make space in the canon for these contemporary images of feminism, mothering and a more intimate appeal to our connection to nature.

Image: Duprass ink on watercolour paper 30 x 22.5 inches

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H e l i a

C h i t s a z a n

www.heliachitsazan.com

Image: Just Careless oil on canvas 48 x 24 inches

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Helia Chitsazan is a contemporary painter born in Tehran, Iran, in 1995. She graduated from the Tehran University of Art in 2018. Currently, she is pursuing the MFA Fine Arts program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

In this series of paintings, ‘Once upon a time, something happened’, I convey the notion of memories, identity, absence, and ephemerality. My works reflect significant moments spent with my friends and family back home in Tehran, Iran, as those people, places, and moments are now inaccessible. To overcome this absence, I use my imagination and recreate those moments of affection and intimacy. The narratives usually take place in indoor spaces reminiscent of ‘home.’ Home is where the secret double lives of Iranians occur—drinking, dancing, smoking, and holding hands, despite these being illegal in public. These moments are profoundly honest, emotional, and sincere demonstrations of our community.

I use videos shot with my phone and old family VHS records to build these compositions based on the imprints I have experienced as a protagonist of the painting. In this series of works, I aim to show a hidden and intimate layer of my life as an Iranian woman and more importantly, a human encompassing the dilemmas and sadness, as well as states of happiness. With this approach, I try to offer an answer to the chaotic world that makes us forget our most basic and crucial feelings.

Image: When I heard that he is gone oil on canvas 48 x 60 inches

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P a t r i c i a

P a l u d a n u s

www.patriciapaludanus.com

Image: Lost in Translation colored pencil on paper 40 x 40 cm

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Dutch born artist Patricia Paludanus (1974) lives and works in Amsterdam. However, it might be closer to the truth to say she actually resides in the topography of her drawings: meticulous, laborious works that have their genesis in the unspoken dreams and mindscapes of her imagination. Yet, far from being a hermit, she invites the viewer to enter these intimate spaces and explore abstract, surreal worlds that may unlock the unconscious.

Having rediscovered the colored pencil after decades of working in media as diverse as kinetic art, animation, photography, and light sculptures, she uses this material in a curious, unrecognizable way, hard-edge and graphic, applying almost pulsating combinations of pigments in thick, dense coats that she then burnishes, a process that makes the paper’s textured surface look like leather. Turning color into object—something to hold, feel, taste—and transforming a sheet into a portal, she uses a process of free association to draw herself—and us—back to an early magical seeing that we all must have experienced when our eyes were brand new.

Patricia Paludanus has exhibited her drawings both in the Netherlands and internationally, with BDDW gallery in New York City, Miami Beach and Milan and currently in The Hague at the US Delegation to the OPCW, as part of the US Art in Embassies program.

Image: Old Timber to New Fires colored pencil on paper 50 x 50 cm

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E i r i n i

A p s y c h o u

www.eiriniap2.wixsite.com/eiriniapsychou

Image: Flow of the Mind colored pencils on paper 70 x 100 cm

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Eirini Apsychou was born in Xanthi, Greece, in 1994, graduated with the degree of Integrated Master from the Faculty of Fine Arts and School of Visual and Applied Arts of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece in 2018 and currently lives and works in Porto, Portugal, since 2020.

In my creative research I observe humans’ behavior in relation to themselves and to the world. I am fascinated by the innate tendency of the individual regardless of time and space, culture and philosophy, to realize within one’s self the reason and role of Existence. Through art, I study the space in between – where sky meets the earth, where light succeeds darkness, where the inner world expresses into the outer world – the field of reconciliation of matter and spirit.

The last three years I have been working on the theme ‘Celestial Bodies’. It is a collection of artworks which I created using colored pencils on paper. Through this process I observe the dual nature of humans, their material and spiritual existence. In their combination the subtle plan of individual consciousness is revealed like a psychogram, a spiritual portrait. The body is the carrier of the spirit and the celestial body signifies this divine origin inherent in every creature. Working with pencils is like measuring time. It is as if I manage to count the grains of sand, count the stars and conquer Infinity. The slow process of painting gives me the space and time to dive into the mystical dimension of Cosmos.

During the creation of these works, I applied a meditative method, following the image that unfolds itself through the process, with total concentration. I retain a silent contact with the work, letting it guide me in every next step. The creative process is a game between the apparent and the unmanifested, between what I perceive and what exists beyond the mind. The clarity with which the idea is approached, contributes to its development and manifestation, letting the flow without effort for possession or appropriation. Inspired action offers the result and step by step leads to actualization.

Image: Manifestation of the Spirit colored pencils on paper 70 x 100 cm

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H e a t h e r

D r a y z e n

www.heatherdrayzen.com

Image: Nap Time oil on linen 10 x 8 inches

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Heather Drayzen is an artist and educator based in Brooklyn, New York. Drayzen holds a BFA from School of Visual Arts and a MAT from Rhode Island School of Design. She is continuing her education through the New York City Crit Club. Drayzen’s paintings have been included in various exhibitions in the United States. She has a forthcoming two-person exhibition with My Pet Ram in 2023 (NYC). Recent group exhibitions include: I Like Your Work at Piano Craft Gallery (Boston, MA), Manifold Global at Moravian University’s Payne Gallery (Bethlehem, PA), Prince Street Gallery (NYC), Colnaghi (NYC), The Yard (Brooklyn), and My Pet Ram (NYC). Drayzen’s paintings are featured in ArtMaze Magazine Issue 26 and the I Like Your Work Podcast 2022 Spring, Summer, and Fall Exhibition Catalogs.

I was raised with a keen awareness of the beauty and fragility of life. In 2019, I experienced a health scare—this, combined with the pandemic in 2020, cultivated an urgency to document my own life, memories, and relationships. My paintings draw upon my lived experiences, interior world, and emotions with a tender and intimate touch. I primarily paint small-scale domestic scenes in oil on canvas often featuring myself and those I cherish in quiet everyday moments. Moments like sharing a cup of morning coffee, grabbing a bite from the fridge, or taking a nap with the pups take place in an atmosphere of iridescent golden light highlighting the passage of time while nodding to art historical influences. Jewel-like fields of day-glo color contrast with subtle neutral tones tapping into a full on sensory experience. My work sits between figuration and abstraction, and I render descriptive elements with varying levels of information to summon a psychological energy. Each painting is a vignette within the larger narrative of my life, and when viewed together they reveal the feeling of a life lived along with a genuine emotional history.

Image: Cuddle Bucket oil on linen 14 x 11 inches

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C h e n

P e n g

www.chenpengstudio.com

Image: In the Garden oil on canvas 36 x 36 inches

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Chen Peng is a Taiwanese artist. She currently lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio, where she is a Visiting Instructor for the Foundation Department at the Cleveland Institute of Art. She received an MFA in Painting from Boston University (2022), BFA in Painting from Cleveland Institute of Art (2016), and a BA in Philosophy from National Taiwan University (2012). Peng was an artist-in-residence at The Studios at MASS MoCA and the Vermont Studio Center.

Her paintings have been shown in New York, Boston, Cleveland, and Taiwan, and have been included in several public collections including Cleveland Institute of Art, Metro Health, University Hospitals, and Fidelity Corporate Art Collection. She is a recipient of various grants and awards from Boston University, National Culture and Arts Foundation (Taipei, Taiwan), and the Ministry of Culture - Taiwan, among others. Peng’s work was recently published in New American Paintings’ MFA Annual issue.

I use images of my dog and objects I treasure to create fantastical paintings that explore loss, longing, and the wish to feel grounded as an expatriate. I take every object to my studio and paint from life, trying to capture the warmth within it. Sometimes, the object itself occupies the entire painting and becomes the painting. Other times, I erase its original surroundings and create an imagined space for the object to live in. I often use the sky as a backdrop to create a space that is dream-like and uncomplicated. I render the clouds and stars in a cartoonish style as I try to remember and reconnect with the mindset of painting the sky as a child. I always think of the sky as a refuge for the mind. It contains hopes, dreams, and memories. Floating in the middle of the sky, the images and objects in my paintings turn into a portal to a sense of tenderness and timelessness.

Image: The Final Minute oil on canvas 48 x 60 inches

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We are looking to discover more emerging artists and to publish and help further promote their work If you would like your work to be featured in our upcoming issues, please find out more details on how to apply to be considered (p.5).

Visit our website: www.artmazemag.com We have an open call for art for the next print issue which provides publishing opportunities.

For any questions, please feel free to get in touch with us at info@artmazemag.com