Category: Portraits

Grace and Survival: The Beautiful Photography of Marta Syrko

Well-known for her fine art, fashion and beauty imagery, Marta Syrko began working professionally as a photographer at the age of 16. Gorgeous lighting, motion, and colors are traits in her refined work. Often using a Canon 5d Mark IV, she states that “it is necessary to create a high quality picture, but it’s not […]

Graffiti Bombed Faces: Tattoos by Mashkow

Looking at the portfolio of Russia’s Mashkow is like a flashback to 90s graffiti in New York City. Instead of walls and subways being bombed, it is his tattoo designs of female faces. They’re composed in an emotional and beautiful way—colors, textures, lettering … showing distinctly how skillful Mashkow is. And for the veracity of […]

Seungyea Park: Monsters are Everywhere

The art of Seungyea Park (aka, Spunky Zoe) is a meeting with “monstrousness”—that is, the product of our fear as it festers among us. Fear is necessary to social systems because it distinguishes the self from a monstrous Other—the enemy, the freak. “Monsters are everywhere,” Park writes, because we compulsively create them. To help herself […]

Dark Dream Characters in the Paintings of Bill Mayer

Bill Mayer is a well-known artist currently based in Decatur, Georgia, whose curious creatures have been widely featured on magazines, ads, stamps, posters, and more. Since an early age, Mayer has been attracted to things that are strange; this leaning towards oddity is evident in the selection of gouache paintings shown here, which include  anthropomorphic […]

Nebula: Graphite Portraits by Thomas Cian

One of Thomas Cian’s recently launched art series is “Nebula,” which was on display at the Malaka Gallery in Milan, the native city of the artist. Working with graphite and water and mixing it up with different textured techniques on paper, his drawings are both experimental and expressive—see “Laura” and “Two Girls,” both strong examples […]

Powerful Portraits of People from Unique Cultures by Adam Koziol

Adam Koziol is a photographer, photojournalist, and filmmaker from Poznan, Poland. In 2013, he began a project to travel and document indigenous cultures and ethnic groups with small populations. Thus far, he has visited 18 groups from Asia and Africa. Included below are members from the Mentawai (Indonesia), Atayal (Taiwan), Apatani (India), Iban (Borneo), and […]

Macabre, Supernatural Digital Paintings by David Seidman

David Seidman is a Philadelphia-based artist creating gloomy, gothic, surrealist paintings. His imagination and dedication has gained him diverse and notable clients, such as Orbit Books and Wizards of the Coast (book covers), Zenescope Entertainment (comics), and Coheed and Cambria (backdrops for live shows). He’s a regular at Arch Enemy Arts, a gallery specializing in […]

The Surreal Imagination of Angela He

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 […]

10 Contemporary Embroidery Artists Carrying on the Tradition

There’s no stopping embroidery. As more people discover the traditional craft, the more that it continues to grow and change. Although many people work in traditional stitches and application techniques, their use of contemporary imagery makes the age-old practice new and modern. Sol Kesseler’s work is an example of new-school embroidery reinterpreting techniques from hundreds […]

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 […]