Angela He is a nineteen-year-old artist currently at Stanford who is creating beautiful digital paintings and video games. Her style is imaginative and diverse, ranging from floral, sun-dappled portraits to personified moments of twisted, tender darkness. The mystical characters she creates are shimmering and translucent, emitting light and shadow from within. Her video games encompass […]
Author: Hayley Evans
We Die to Become: Interview with The Ljilja
“Everyone carries a Shadow. And the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.” These are the wise words of the Ljilja, a mysterious Switzerland-based artist. She is referring to Carl Jung’s conception of the Shadow: the unconscious “dark side” of the personality driven by our more unenlightened […]
Fear, Beauty, and the Abject: Handcrafted Art Dolls by Emilie Steele
Emilie Steele is a multidisciplinary artist based in Stockholm, Sweden, who creates handcrafted posable art dolls. Each doll’s body is first sculpted in clay, then silicone molds are made, and the pieces are cast in resin. Steele also makes all the clothes, wigs, and accessories by hand. These are far from your ordinary dolls, notable […]
As Seen Through the Darkness: Digital Art by Lente Scura
Lente Scura, Italian for “dark lens,” has a working name reflecting both the atmosphere and meaning within his art. As he explains in an interview with Urban-Muse, his lens—his point of view—is expressed in a manner that is “surreal and mystical with dark emotional tones.” By combining photo-manipulation with digital painting, he submerges the subjects […]
Transgressive Portraiture of Historical Icons by Mathieu Laca
Mathieu Laca is a Montreal-based artist creating “deliciously appalling” oil paintings that transgress the conventions of traditional portraiture. The majority of his recent work focuses on various historical figures throughout the realms of art, literature, philosophy, and science. Whether he’s painting the face of Vincent van Gogh, Franz Kafka, or Frida Kahlo, there are always […]
Welcome to Faunwood: Enchanting Beasts by Miranda Zimmerman
Miranda Zimmerman, working under the title Faunwood, is a freelance artist currently based in the Pacific Northwest. With a bachelor’s degree in Evolutionary Biology, a graduate certificate in Science Illustration, and experience working on paleontological reconstruction in Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, it is clear she has a vested interest in the transformations and […]
Armour: Empowering Hairstyle Imagery by Luke Nugent and Lisa Farrall
Featured here are works of incredible hair art, photographed by Luke Nugent, a London-based photographer who specializes in portraiture, fashion, and hair & beauty. The stylist is Lisa Farrall, an award-winning hair session stylist and the beauty editor of Noctis Magazine. Titled “Armour,” this series about “embracing women and empowering women.” Combining abstract hairstyles with […]
Exploring Concealed Beauty: Mariamne Photography
The imagery of Spain-based Mariamne Photography is tender, ethereal, and melancholic. Much of her work is self-portraiture, which she describes as “an introspective journey through my own self, trying to express the fragility and complexity of human souls.” By incorporating subjects such as Kintsugi (the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery) and the “red thread […]
Shadowy Magical Realism in the Artwork of Sail (Useless Arm)
“Everything is beautiful, even the ugly,” observes Sail, an artist operating under the curious handle, “Useless Arm.” His paintings are as moody as they are playful, depicting solitary figures bedecked in flowers and masks and pierced by arrows. Various cultural and literary references can be seen throughout—most notably, Asian aesthetics—but Sail’s characters are born of […]
Time and Mutation: Photo Weaving by Jason Chen
Jason Chen is a Philadelphia-based artist (and the co-founder of Paradigm Gallery + Studio) who experiments with the “movement, process, and mutation” of time—a.k.a., the “Fourth Dimension”—in an innovative process called photo weaving. Using multiple photos of the same subject, each taken within seconds of each other, Chen merges them piece-by-piece. From a distance, the […]