Category: Surreal

Elegant, Colorful Chaos in Zeen Chin’s Digital Paintings

Zeen Chin is a self-taught artist living in Kuala Lumpur. Drawing upon a mysterious well of horror films, memories, and mysticism, his digital paintings are wildly elegant and unpredictable; scrolling from one image to the next, you can never predict (nor comprehend) what you will see next. Anime-like characters parade with cartoonish, folklore-inspired beasts, and […]

Clouded Eyes and Dark Horizons: Photography by Karina Boissonnier

Karina Boissonnier is a Finland-based photographer who is using the camera to create her imagined world. In a beautiful series of portraits titled “An Introduction: Anna,” which are part of a larger project that she has worked hard on, Boissonnier has captured the subject (Wei Wang) in a dark natural landscape filled with creeping branches […]

Stylish Hallucinations in Dane Nicklas’ Colorful Tattoos

Dane Nicklas is a tattoo artist currently working out of Valentine’s Tattoo in Seattle, a feminist-powered and inclusive space known for its collective of wonderfully offbeat and experimental artists (we featured the work of Valentine’s founder, Shannon Perry, last year). Dane’s work fits this niche perfectly, mixing classical art symbols with pastel colors and psychedelic […]

From Darkness to Light: Digital Art by Mohamed Medo

Mohamed Medo is a young digital artist from Cairo who is creating vast, haunting dreamscapes. By placing tiny human silhouettes among distant landscapes and crumbling, quasi-futuristic architecture, Medo generates a sense of isolation and introspection. Death, dreams, and the loss of connection appear to be recurring themes, with titles such as “From Darkness to Light” […]

Tiny, Creepy-Cute Sculptures by Qimmyshimmy

Qimmyshimmy is a designer and “accidental sculptor” from Singapore (currently based in the Netherlands) who has been gaining attention on Instagram due to her creepy-cute subject matter: particularly, the tiny sleeping babies and disembodied human hearts she’s been sculpting. With soft skin and sleeping faces, the babies look quite endearing—except that Qimmyshimmy often arranges them […]

Fusions of Body and Myth: Art by Stephanie Inagaki

Stephanie Inagaki is a Southern California–based fine artist and metalsmith. Her charcoal drawings are dark, poetic fusions of self and myth, drawing especially from Japanese folklore. The female subjects—which are often representations of herself—merge with crows and supernatural monsters, their bodies transmuting into uncanny hybrids inscribed with ageless mythologies. A particular emphasis is placed on […]

American Gothic: Eerie Visual Stories by Brendon Burton

Brendon Burton is a visual artist based in Portland whose style reflects his rural upbringing and an enduring fascination with lonely, decaying places; throughout his work, abandoned homes cower before immense backdrops of fields, hills, and storm-bruised skies. We’ve featured his work before, but here is a new series titled “American Gothic,” which reimagines the […]

Minimalist Creature Portraits by Delphine Cencig

Delphine Cencig is a French photographer who discovered her passion for photography after working in various fields, such as cosmetics and visual communication. This diverse background shapes her current work, which is best described as vivid and eclectic; through a combination of photography, fashion, makeup, and digital manipulation, she turns models into dolls, beasts, and […]

Bloody, Beautiful, and Bizarre: Portraits by Karina Marandjian

Karina Marandijan (a.k.a., “daunhaus”) is a Moscow-based artist creating wonderfully weird digitally modified portraits. Her compositions are dark and surreal with a touch of fetish; piercings and wounds mark the body of the ivory-skinned alien-esque subject, creating a bloody contrast of innocence and suffering. The white backdrops resemble a sterile, laboratory-type environment, within which the […]

Strange Things Are Happening: Drawings by James Lipnickas

James Lipnickas is an artist living in the woods of New England who draws the “strange and unusual.” He finds inspiration in his wandering mind, envisioning absurd events that could occur in ordinary situations. His black-and-white images are set in rural environments, where cabins and lone wanderers are beset by tentacled, multi-dimensional beasts that seem […]