“I love to draw plants and faces,” Patrycja Podkościelny tells me, “‘cause you can hide [in] there a lot of secrets.” Known for her compelling characters, the figures in her illustrations appear at the mercy of what they’re keeping. They tell none of it but rather suffer the consequences instead; whether they’re being bullied by […]
Category: Portraits
Sacrifice and Sanctity: Blood Paintings by Vincent Castiglia
Vincent Castiglia is a renowned New York–based artist who paints large-scale portraits using blood. He began this project in 2000, shortly before he began as a tattoo artist. His work has been recognized worldwide, attracting attention and accolades from Slayer’s Gary Holt, comedian Margaret Cho, and the late H. R. Giger, who in 2008, invited […]
Katharsis: Powerful, Purifying Portraits by Anemites
Anemites (Luciana Rodriguez) is a multidisciplinary designer and artist living in Cordoba, Argentina. Most of her powerful images are self-portraits. Featured here is “Katharsis,” a conceptual series that incorporates evocative poses and surreal elements (such as fire, multiplicity, and bodily dissolution) to convey moments of great psychological pain. The power and drama of these images […]
Darkly Expressive Portraits of Dancers by Alessandro Risuleo
Alessandro Risuleo is an Italian photographer. With more than twenty years of experience as an art director and advertiser, he is the founder of Visual Creative Studio. When he discovered photography as a means of creative expression, Risuleo was quickly drawn to “the expressiveness of the naked body [and] the use of lighting and shadows,” […]
Gothic, Romantic Hand-Painted Photographs by Katie Eleanor
Katie Eleanor is a storyteller and photographic artist based in London. Inspired by literature, costume art, performance, and Victorian illustration, her work is dreamy, poetic, and filled with indescribable emotion. She hand-paints each photograph. Wearing powdered wigs, white makeup, and gauzy veils, the figures resemble nineteenth-century monarchs suspended in private states of reverie and despair; […]
Sleep Elevations: Peaceful Surrealism by Maia Flore
Maia Flore is a Paris-based photographer whose thought-provoking images explore the “coincidences between reality and her imagination.” Featured here is a selection for her first series, titled “Sleep Elevations,” which was inspired by the artist’s childhood memories. Blending soft, feminine imagery with surrealism, the sleeping women are gently lifted across peaceful landscapes, their bodies light […]
What Girls Are Made Of: Feminist Photography by Maisie Cousins
Maisie Cousins is a London-based photographer who makes art that is “hedonistic and self-satisfying.” The themes she explores are femininity, sexuality, and the deconstruction of bodily standards. With titles like “Overgrown” and “What Girls Are Made Of,” Cousins’ series poke fun at gender tropes, replacing passivity and “sugar and spice and everything nice” with slugs, […]
Everyday Life Expressed as Surreal Paintings by Alice Wellinger
Austrian-based artist and illustrator Alice Wellinger finds inspiration in the “troubles of daily life and childhood memories.” To depict these confusing, conflicting, or just plain annoying thoughts and situations, she illustrates them as surreal paintings. The double-exposure effect is common in her work—a portrait of a person, for instance, is fused with faraway landscapes or fractured […]
Alluring Modern Fairies by Fate Troppo Belle
In Italian folklore, the fate are magical beings (like fairies) who disguise themselves as humans to play dangerous tricks on people. This is the mythology that inspires the work of Fate Troppo Belle (Alina Akhmatova), a digital artist based in Milan. Using nature imagery and unusual objects, the fate she envisions are modern tricksters, often […]
Shadows and Symbols: Haunting Paintings by Nick Morte
Nick Morte is a painter, illustrator, and award-winning tattoo artist. His unique style is consistent across his mediums, mixing photorealism with dark symbols and hallucinatory elements. Featured here is a selection of his paintings, all of which are surrounded by an air of mystery. Death, sensuality, and vulnerability occur interchangeably in the same image, signified […]