PUREHONEY 128

5/21

MIAMI BCH BANDSHELL: Laraaji, Arji

OceAnanda Cakouros perform Aqua Garden

Flow w Coral Morphologic, Robert Beatty

FLORIDA KEYS BREWING CO: AfroRoots Fest w Nag Champayons, Johnny Dread, Grupo Barrio POMPANOAbajoAMP: One Night of Queen ft Gary Mullen & the Works

5/24

LIBRARY SPEAKEASY: Tiny Gear Concert

5/25

REVOLUTION LIVE: Hippie Sabotage, Daisy Guttridge

5/26

RESPECTABLE STREET: Make RSC Goth Again

REVOLUTION LIVE: LPB Poody

NORTON MUSEUM: Art After Dark

5/27

REVOLUTION LIVE: Doors Alive

RESPECTABLE STREET: Harry Potter Night

5/28

RESPECTABLE STREET: 80’s Prom: Purple Prom

5/29

MIAMI BCH BANDSHELL: Miamibloco’s Saideira Social ft Samir Langus, Munir Hossn, Rose Max & Ramatis, Jason Matthews, DJ Le Spam

5/30

HULLABALOO: SoulFam

6/1

LIBRARY SPEAKEASY: Wax On Wax Off BAR NANCY: Punk Nights in Lil’ Havana

6/2

REVOLUTION LIVE: Peezy

MIAMI BCH BANDSHELL: Afrikin Intuition ft

Iniko, Danay Suarez, Funke, Myoka

NORTON MUSEUM: Art After Dark, Jazz Friday! Swing All Stars

THE PEACH: Young Masters Gallery Show

PROPAGANDA: Summer Goth Celebration: Gulf Blvd, Sarah & the Silent Poets, Cypher Rotring, The Abominable Dr. John, DJ Jason

ARTS GARAGE: Art of Laughter

BAR NANCY: Disco AF

6/3

REVOLUTION LIVE: Hardwired (Metallica

Trib) The Pantera Experience

THE PEACH: Art Walk

PROPAGANDA: SummerGoth Celebration Part

II: Shadow Reborn, Rux Vendetta, Push Button

Press, Laboratory, Aktas Luna, DJ Jason

BAR NANCY: New Dawn Fades – Ordinary Boys

ARTS GARAGE: Tito Puente Jr.

6/7

REVOLUTION LIVE: Ruel

THE PEACH: Life Drawing, Artist Talk

ARTS GARAGE: Tito Puente Jr.

6/8

PROPAGANDA: Billy Doom is Dead, Fuakata, Control This, Blabscam

BAR NANCY: Stereo Joule

6/9

MIAMI BCH BANDSHELL: Dread Mar-I

REVOLUTION LIVE: Nirvanna, Linkin Park

Trib, Breakout (Foo Fighters Trib)

NORTON: Art After Dark, JJ & Florida Oranges

PROPAGANDA: Further North Further South, Fatal Frames, Chasing Airplanes

ARTS GARAGE: Libra Live: Libra Sene

BAR NANCY: Audioecho, Ina Nutshell

6/10

REVOLUTION LIVE: Anees, Michael Minelli

MIAMI BCH BANDSHELL: Midnight at Mu- seZeuM ft Big Daddy Kane

RESPECTABLE STREET: We’re Wolves, Dirty Rivals, World I See, Further North Further South

THE PEACH: Artist Appreciation Event

ARTS GARAGE: Otis Cadillac and the El Dorados ft the Sublime Seville Sisters

BAR NANCY: Kitchen Club

HARD ROCK LIVE: Rebelution, Iration, The Expendables, Passafire

6/11

REVOLUTION LIVE: Durand Bernarr

6/13

ARTS GARAGE: All Arts Open Mic

BAR NANCY: 80’s Rap Attack

6/14

REVOLUTION LIVE: Men I Trust, Triathalon >>> READ MORE IN PUREHONEY

HARD ROCK LIVE: Paramore, Bloc Party, Genesis Owusu >>> READ MORE IN PUREHONEY

6/15

MIAMI BCH BANDSHELL: Lettuce, Steel Pulse, Makua Rothman

REVOLUTION LIVE: Up Next Music Fest

ARTS GARAGE: Authors Speak: Dr. Marquis Bey BAR NANCY: Ricky Valido, Hialeah Hillbillies

6/16

REVOLUTION LIVE: The Taylor Party

NORTON: Art After Dark, Larry Johnson’s Essence of Motown

RESPECTABLE STREET: Jen Kober Comedy

6/17

KRAVIS CENTER: Tori Amos >>> READ MORE IN PUREHONEY

RESPECTABLE STREET: MEGARAVE

REVOLUTION LIVE: Blk Mrkt Fest, Disco Inferno

THE PEACH: “Geminism” Gallery Show

BAR NANCY: Molly Takedown

PROPAGANDA: Stereo Joule, Optional

6/18

FLA LIVE ARENA: Duran Duran, Nile Rogers & Chic, Bastille >>> READ MORE

IN PUREHONEY

6/19

MIAMI BCH BANDSHELL: Juneteenth Experience

6/20

HARD ROCK LIVE: Bryan Adams

6/21

MIAMI: Make Music Miami 2023 at select locations throughout Miami-Dade County.

MAKE MUSIC MIAMI brings our city into the global music festival that began as FêTE DE LA MUSIQUE in Paris in 1982 – a celebration welcome summer with music.

MIAMI BCH BANDSHELL: Hermanos Gutierrez

ITHINK AMP: Garbage, Metric, Noel Gallaghers High Flying Birds

GRAMPS: Head Automatica, Love Tempo, Staircase Spirit

PROPAGANDA: 33 Lions

BAR NANCY: Peach Martine

6/22

RESPECTABLE STREET: K-Pop Night

HARD ROCK LIVE: Dream Theater

6/23

NORTON: Art After Dark, Pride Night, Lindsey Mills, Terese “Chunky” Hill

RESPECTABLE STREET: Make RSC Goth Again

REVOLUTION LIVE: Chili Poppers, Blink 180-Deux

ARTS GARAGE: Selwyn Birchwood

BAR NANCY: Nacho Londoño

PROPAGANDA: Lybica, sumo

6/24

RESPECTABLE STREET: Emo Night

PROPAGANDA: Evil Pony (Rage/Deftones

Trib) Systematic Attack (System of a Down Trib)

ARTS GARAGE: Miami Big Sound Orchestra

BAR NANCY: Nil Lara

6/28

FPL SOLAR AMP: Cigarettes After Sex

>>> READ MORE IN PUREHONEY

LIBRARY SPEAKEASY: Tiny Gear Concert

MIAMI ARENA: Drake, 21 Savage

PROPAGANDA: WUB Wednesday

6/29

RESPECTABLE STREET: Souls of Mischief, Breakbeat Lou, The Architect, Broot McCoy, DJ Heron >>> READ MORE IN PUREHONEY

JAMES L KNIGHT: The Smile >>> READ MORE IN PUREHONEY

BAR NANCY: Chris Alvy

6/30

RESPECTABLE STREET: DRI, Metal Riser, LiveKill, Killed By Florida

NORTON: Art After Dark, Nerry Brisette

BAR NANCY: Alexa & the Old-Fashioneds

PROPAGANDA: Mount Sinai

7/2

MIAMI BCH BANDSHELL: Gran Fiest de San Juan

7/3

REVOLUTION LIVE: The Struts, Mac Saturn

7/6

MIAMI BCH BANDSHELL: Duda Beat

7/7

PROPAGANDA: Adam Arritolas

Untame Impala, Fresh Esh, Waxworms, Floridians, Flower Child Slumber Party

The embodied came from putting punk into day derided as throwaway. But so much and place go for serious cash online today, opportunistically “trashy” art were playing of their time, Duran Duran evolved into contemporary new-wave awesomeness that Every time one could count them out, a new dial would be reset for a new generation Simon LeBon and his fashion-plate mates Nick This was no sure thing for a band lacking and Depeche Mode, the rabid base of Morrissey exist) or the posthumous staying power of Duran Duran have become their own thing, “Girls On Film”) and ’90s arena pop (“Come adulthood, middle age and senior status — with smoothness and a positive outlook. A who wields an orgasm-inducing death machine critics just by doing what they do, thus proving about Duran Duran were misplaced and That’s quite a lot of living, struggling, creating Romantics from an English steel town. Put today and they might say that’s pretty punk-rock. Duran Duran play 7pm Sunday, June 18 guests Nile Rodgers & Chic and Bastille.

TORI AMOS

by CARLY CASSANO

I can just imagine Tori Amos, all flaming windblown hair, gazing out from the wild cliffs of the Cornish coast — as she does on her latest album cover — and fixing on South Florida, where she lives part-time and will begin the next stage of her Ocean to Ocean Tour

Riding out the pandemic with her family at their converted farmhouse in Cornwall, England, deprived of “the spiritual ceremony of the collaboration with a live audience,” as she wrote in an essay for The Guardian, singer-songwriter Amos made the 2021 samenamed album this ongoing tour supports. She returned to the road in 2022, the riveting, redheaded figure at the piano renewing her intense bond with fans.

A longing to reconnect suffuses “Swim to New York State,” one of this album’s standouts. “I’d swim to New York State/from the Cornish coast of England,” Amos sings. “For even just a day/We’ll meet at that café.” The U.S. is essentially a second home now for the American-born preacher’s daughter turned pagan pop mystic, who keeps a residence one county up from the opening-night host venue, Kravis Center for the Performing Arts.

Amos has attributed some of her kinship to different lands to her mixed, Cherokee-Scottish roots. A play she wrote the music for, “The Light Princess,“ is based on a Scottish fairy tale whose heroine literally and figuratively floats, unable to alight until she learns to love. Finding balance between the physical and the astral, and finding strength and a voice, are themes winding through her discography, from the wrenchingly beautiful “Silent All These Years,” on 1992’s Little Earthquakes, onward. 1996’s Boys for Pele called down the mythology of mortal sacrifice to an oceanic goddess of fire. 2005’s The Beekeeper contemplated women empowered through environmental stewardship. 2017’s Native Invader “looks to Nature and how, through resilience, she heals herself,” in Amos’ own words.

Ocean to Ocean reaffirms her reverence for the natural and cosmic influences she unhesitatingly calls “Muses,” and for life in a beautiful, ecologically fragile world.

Duran starting Birmingham, place, whirling British

JOHN SWANNELL

Tori Amos plays 8pm Saturday, June 17 at the Kravis Center in West Palm Beach. toriamos.com

DESLMOND MURRAY

DURAN DURAN

TIM MOFFATT

Duran Duran is a band with many lives, starting as a new-wave outfit in late ’70s Birmingham, England — a perfect time and place, as it turned out, to be immersed in the whirling dervish of radical artistic ideas and British political turmoil.

The new wave, of course, that Duran Duran a digestible form that many critics of the much for foresight: Singles from this era, time today, and it seems like pretty bands making playing the long game. Very much a product into the elder statesmen avatars of adult that they presently are.

new record or single would drop, and the generation of people to discover dashing frontman Nick Rhodes, John Taylor and Roger Taylor lacking the critical acclaim of New Order Morrissey and The Smiths (though Duranies do The Clash

thing, a pastiche of ’80s new wave (“Rio,” Come Undone, “Ordinary World”) attaining — and a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame berth — A band named after an R-rated sci-fi villain machine has outlasted peers and outwitted proving that any misconceptions anyone had based on internal biases.

creating and doing for a bunch of scrappy New Put that biography in front of a skeptical kid punk-rock.

at FLA Live Arena in Sunrise with special duranduran.com

SOULS OF MISCHIEF

by TIM MOFFATT

Early- to mid-1990s hip-hop will go down as the genre’s golden age. As the next millennium approached and people readied their New Year’s Eve playlists, it had become increasingly clear that hip-hop had entered its poodle metal phase: The Puff Daddys of the world were slinging re-hashed samples while draped in gold sweats and dancing like flamingos, their street cred if not their credit lines exhausted in the wake of the murders of Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur.

The subequent rise of rappers like Master P and Silkk the Shocker made it clear that the hook was the only currency that mattered now, and the cartoonification of gangsta rap had taken the spit out of a hard-hitting, almost documentary medium. By 1999 a lot of hiphoppers had forgotten where they came from.

But the people who stick to the art forms they’re passionate about with ethical aplomb see us through the bad times and out of the creative wilderness: Wu-Tang Clan; the Native Tongues collective; and Oakland, California’s Souls of Mischief — who took a step back, surveyed the landscape, and quietly decided to step around the pop carcass left on the curb. The Hieroglyphics hip-hop collective that Souls of Mischief belong to has a far reach in and beyond the music world. But whatever branding or crypto ventures they’ve gotten on to, it always comes back to the music. So here we are 30 years on, celebrating Souls of Mischief’s highest charting album, 93 till Infinity

Thirty years, and a resurgence of golden age hip-hop is again upon us. This year sees not only Souls of Mischief but Digable Planets, De La Soul and Jungle Brothers circulating again, online and on the road, bringing their perfect beats and rhymes to audiences starved for a refresher on the five elements of hip hop. Connoisseurs can tell the difference between Sanka and Folgers; when it comes to hip-hop, you better believe the cream can be skimmed from the top.

Souls of Mischief presented by Heroes Live play 7pm Thursday, June 29 at Respectable Street in West Palm with BreakBeat Lou, Architect, Broot McCoy, DJ Heron. soulsmischief.com

PARAMORE

by AMANDA Overnight

three years in 2004 teenagers the now-iconic album, their defining Oscillating alt-rebel fiery emotions high-school absolute early days from hardcore resonating with the passionate emo living inside

Since that breakthrough summer, Paramore ceaselessly adapts to the life phases of their navigating their own teen angst. Williams is friend to those who learned by watching her Paramore have followed their muse through tours and interpersonal drama. A trio today guitarist Taylor York and drummer Zac Farro their own astonishment, as expressed on Farro’s multi-platinum phenomenon. Their sixth studio to wide critical acclaim, led off by the jittery is why/I don’t leave this house/You say the coast Their enduring fame may amaze and sometimes devoted fans who always “Crave” more. performances draw raves not just from their loyal and Olivia Rodrigo. A 2022 mini-tour found Paramore after years of banishment from the set list, reconciled Paramore perform 7 pm Wednesday, June special guests Bloc Party and Genesis Owusu.

ELKE MUSEK

PARAMORE

AMANDA E. MOORE

Overnight success, as the saying goes, took about years for alt-rock heroes Paramore. Formed 2004 and signed to a record deal in 2005, the teenagers from suburban Nashville who made up now-iconic band in 2007 released their second album, Riot!, and what is to this day, like it or not, defining song: “Misery Business.”

Oscillating between emocore and pop, with alt-rebel frontgirl Hayley Williams narrating the emotions and unmatched confidence of high-school romance, “Misery Business” was an absolute smash. The song spread like wildfire in the days of organic streaming, amassing fans hardcore kids to the MTV mainstream, and inside of every millennial.

Paramore have stayed aloft by producing music that their base while speaking to younger listeners now like America’s cool older sister, a best her to never fear being “the weird girl.”

almost two decades of albums, EPs, singles, today consisting of original members Williams, , they approach their 20th anniversary — to Farro’s Instagram — as a Grammy-winning, studio album, This Is Why, came out in February jittery funk and wry chorus of the title track: “This coast is clear/But you won’t catch me out.”

sometimes scare them, but it’s no surprise to the (Sorry!) A must-see live band, Paramore’s loyal followers but admirers including Billie Eilish Paramore in great post-pandemic form and, reconciled with the inescapable “Misery Business.”

June 14 at Hard Rock Live in Hollywood with Owusu. www.paramore.net.

CIGARETTES AFTER SEX

by DAVID ROLLAND

How did it take rock ’n’ roll more than half a century to produce a band named Cigarettes After Sex? The wait for that flash of inspiration ended around 2008 when singer-guitarist Greg Gonzalez and a few friends in El Paso, Texas arrived with the evocative branding and a sound to match. Sultry, smoky, and laid back, Cigarettes After Sex are as warm and fuzzy as a postcoital embrace. If you like your music mellow but with an erotic charge, like say Mazzy Star or Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Cigarettes After Sex could be your new favorite band.

And if you’re just now getting into them, your timing is exquisite. They’re making their South Florida concert debut. Just don’t expect a refund if they don’t look to you what they sound like. “Not long ago, we had someone come to the show and want their money back because I wasn’t a girl,” Gonzalez told Financial Times in 2020. He told FT that his interest in sex as an expression not just of attraction, but of intimacy, goes beyond the band name. It also colors his lyrics. He loves the up-front sexual energy in club music. “But why can’t we have a narrative where I’m just telling a story about love and it includes sexuality?” he said.

Gonzalez also keys on the sense of place in his music. The band’s last album, 2019’s Cry, was recorded in a mansion on Mallorca, and in the press kit he likened the record to “a film … shot in this stunning, exotic location.” In their latest single, from November, a lonely protagonist drives out to the desert with a firearm to shoot off rounds in frustration over an absent lover. It’s called “Pistol,” but get your mind out of the gutter. The song “made me really emotional,” Gonzalez told Cosmopolitan India, “and I cried, pretty much every time I listened to it. It helped me process a bunch of feelings I went through last year.”

Cigarettes After Sex play 8pm Wednesday June 28 at FPL Solar Amphitheater at Bayfront Park in Miami. cigarettesaftersex.com

MEN I TRUST & TRIATHALON

by ABEL FOLGAR

Talk about trust issues if, from the get-go, most people – self-professed learned people at that – can’t decide if a band is indie, dream pop or electropop. Thankfully, for Canadian outfit Men I Trust, the assurances are in the sound.

And that sound happens to be pop. Pure, glorious, laid-back pop. Sweet but never diabetic. Formed in Montreal, Quebec in 2014 by two childhood friends later joined by a third member, Men I Trust, with their minimalist beginnings, do write in a way that would fit with the overlapping worlds of indie pop, dream pop and electronic music. But again, they make charming, inviting pop in the best sense of the term.

So much so that in a very short time, founders Dragos Chiriac (keyboard and bass) and Jessy Caron (drums), and their 2016 vocalist-guitarist recruit, Emmanuelle Proulx, have attracted a loyal base by sticking to their indie and DIY guns. They’ve released four albums, a pair of EPs, and over a dozen singles through digital platforms, with a French Canadian label, Return to Analog, handling physical releases.

For a band that found ears through streaming, they are a pleasure to experience live, with a quelque chose spécial that hints at roots in bedroom projects and immediately encloses the audience in a veil of intimacy. (Okay, it’s beginning to sound like “dream pop” might be the most accurate way to describe the band.)

Their latest long-player, 2021’s Untourable Album, a product of the pandemic, and synth-heavy, lends itself to that dreamy lo-fi mentality. The 13 tracks weave a hazy introspection-conducing web that is as oddly relaxing as it is fit for slow dancing.

Band members started working on the album with zero thought of how it might fare on the road; hence the name. “We wanted to take the opportunity to work on new and different material, without necessarily intending to play these songs live,” they said on their Tumblr. “We wrote freely, as if we were suspended in time with no external attachments.”

The band spent the better part of March and April 2023 touring though Australia and Asia, making stops at the Clockenflap festival in Hong Kong, the Wanderland festival in the Philippines, and doing gigs in Singapore, Thailand and Japan. They will finish up their U.S. tour in Florida (Orlando), before hopping over to Europe in July for dates in Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Germany and the UK, among others.

Men I Trust will be joined on a trio of Florida dates by New York-via-Savannah, Georgia indie psych outfit Triathalon. Formed in 2010 by high school buds Adam Intrator (vocals and guitar) and Chad Chilton (bass), followed by Hunter Jayne (keyboard) during college, Triathalon also reach out to you through an auditory haze. Their reverb-laden guitars, smooth bass lines and Intrator’s soulful voice draw inspiration from genres including and by no means limited to surf rock, psychedelia, and contemporary r&b. Theirs is a refracted, nostalgic sonic space.

According to the band, their latest album, 2022’s Spin, is a good combination of their previous five albums and three EPs –going further to describe it to Wonderland magazine as “running through a transparent tunnel underwater on acid.”

Like the Untourable Album, Spin was developed during the pandemic when the band was encouraged by the shutdown to pour their energies into the 13 compositions that make it up. It was also recorded live, imbuing the tracks with a breeziness that makes Spin perfect for sitting around reminiscing.

An evening with these two bands might not prompt you to trust all men or re-check the dictionary to see how “triathlon” is spelled, but you’ll experience real delight, and any accumulated stress you walked through the door with will likely be gone by show’s end, and when you drift off after returning home you might dream glorious dreams. Maybe that’s what it means to make bedroom pop.

Men I Trust and Triathalon perform an all-ages show 7pm Wednesday, June 14 at Revolution Live in Fort Lauderdale.

THE SMILE

by OLIVIA FELDMAN

Many indie/alt heads will tell you that Thom Yorke can do no wrong. The vocalist and multi-instrumentalist seems to master anything he touches, waving his invisible magic wand and creating something strange and beautiful to hear. He experienced both Top 40 stardom and elite acclaim in Radiohead (“Karma Police,” “Creep”), experimented well with solo work (2006’s The Eraser), and ruled the festival circuit with rock supergroup Atoms for Peace

As it goes for many bands, the men of Radiohead have always found it healthy to explore their own separate projects, and before fans knew it, Yorke was out with yet another brilliant musical pursuit: The Smile quietly released their debut album, A Light for Attracting Attention, in 2022 after performing a few London shows the previous year.

Composed of Yorke, fellow Radiohead member Jonny Greenwood on lead guitar (and occasionally harp) and Tom Skinner on drums and percussion, The Smile came together during the COVID-19 pandemic. Produced by longtime Radiohead collaborator Nigel Godrich, A Light for Attracting Attention shows Yorke and Greenwood at their alt-rock best, harkening back to Radiohead’s “Hail to the Thief” era with an air of psychedelia and rousing guitar work reminiscent of post-punk and progressive rock jams.

The album as a whole reflects on the promise of a new beginning, the fragility of life and the urgency to embrace it. “Pana-vision” is a beautiful mix of piano and strings, with Yorke crooning: “I am staring straight ahead / A view that is so wide / Like it’s gonna break / It’s like it holds me in its gaze.”

Skinner, who co-founded Sons of Kemet, showcases his jazz drumming skills well on “The Smoke,” accompanied by Greenwood’s complex yet razortight riffs. On a three-song NPR Tiny Desk set performed in November and posted three days into the new year (now at 1.5 million views) Yorke is having a genuinely good time: He kicks off playing piano on “Pana-vision” and switches to bass guitar on “The Smoke” and “Skrting On the Surface,” relishing in this little space where his boundless creativity can run.

The Smile perform Thursday, June 29 at 8pm at the James L. Knight Center in Miami. thesmiletheband.com

IWONA SACHARZ

by KELLI BODLE, JACEK GANCARZ

Polish artist Iwona Sacharz paints languid-looking women with a linear edge — seated and standing portrait figures rendered with a meld of the Cubism and Fauvism present in the young artist’s touch. Facing the viewer head-on, unabashedly sensual, and often nude, “The women in my paintings are proud of their femininity,” Sacharz says, “They are not ashamed of it; they have no complexes.”

The subject is never one specific person; Sacharz calls them up collectively, from memory; they are an amalgam of women she has known. “The color of her hair, her look, or just something that reminds me of her,” the artist says of individual elements that make up the whole.

Likewise, she says, she wants people viewing her work “to see someone they know or recognize” — a response that she strives to elicit through the universal language of emotion. Every woman in her portraits has a title dealing with an emotion: “Joy,” “Courage,” “Strength,” Fulfillment,” or “Irony.”

Emotion and intuitive process are foundations of her practice. Sacharz paints at home in her kitchen. She first creates a sketch, then, in her head, will arrange the colors that she wants to use. Possibly more sketching follows, and she lays out the body. She keeps a small sketchbook filled with drawings of characters in different bodily positions, such as arrangements of hands or legs.

When the time is right, she hits the canvas. “Everything comes with another stain, with another shape and color,” she says.

In the past, Sacharz would throw out any canvases that she felt were not good enough. Later, she painted over them and started from scratch when she was displeased. At this point in her career, she said that, “I try to work on it until it finds its beauty and is finished.”

Born in 1982 and currently living and working in Poznan, Poland, Iwona Sacharz (pronounced “eevoh-nah sah-hazh”) did not easily find her way to the art world. Although she has a robust online presence — more than 33,000 followers on Instagram — the artist is shy and reserved, the opposite of an art influencer.

She grew up in a small village located near Kielce and studied in Częstochowa, focusing on photography and graphic design. As a child she dreamed of working in fashion because it entailed design, drawing, and choosing colors and shapes. Today, she says, “My world is a mass of emotions, earth tones, spots, and simple geometric shapes.”

Scroll further back on her Instagram timeline, and you find more than Fauvist female nudes. There is a painted cornucopia of pots and pans, espresso machines and mugs in a beautiful art deco style tableaux of warm tones. Of these still-lifes, Sacharz says, “I painted still-life in school and decided it was not interesting and pretty. So I focused on ceramics and photography.” When she circled back to still-life, she decided to jettison realism and perspective (“I hate hyperrealism; I have a camera for that,” she confides). With these new studies of household objects, she found color, composition and simplicity. “Then I created something I started to like,” she says. “It was the first time I looked at my [still-life] paintings and didn’t want to destroy them.”

In terms of inspiration, Sacharz lists some of the established greats: Vincent Van Gogh (particularly the Van Gogh artistic biography, “Passion for Life,” by Irving Stone); Paul Gauguin; Tamara de Lempicka (one of the few female artists of Polish descent that Americans would know), and also William Scott, Amedeo Modigliani, and Jerzy Nowosielski. Like many of her influences, Sacharz loves to people-watch and absorb how they express their emotions through gesture. She then speaks to her viewers through the bodily forms on her painted canvases, waiting to see if they can recognize the feelings portrayed through her placement of a hand, or a tilt of a head.

When asked what comes next, Sacharz says, “There is still a lot of emotion to be painted on women’s faces.”

Iwona Sacharz is on Instagram @iwona_iw_ and Pinterest @deliratio