“I’ve never tried to make a painting look like a photograph, but time and again, when I feel I have finished, the work looks quite realistic,” he admitted in a piece he shared with Artsy Shark. Primarily self-taught, Sutter discovered an aptitude for composition, value, and hue in his mid 50’s, having not picked up a paintbrush in decades and never shown any of his work before.

Nowadays, his work is well recognized, having gained a few awards in the process, as well as memberships in the prestigious Copley Society of Art in Boston and the North Shore Arts Association in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Working mostly from source photos that either he or his clients have taken, and sometimes combining aspects of multiple photos, his work captures the very heart of Boston city life.

As for his toolbox, Sutter mainly works with acrylic, gouache, and watercolor. “I’ll be drawn to a set of colors or an interesting shape or to a scene I’d like to capture, but one that’s a bit off the bell curve for other artists,” he explains his creative instinct.

Here are some highlights from his Instagram page:

The post Experience Boston Through Jed Sutter’s Paintings appeared first on PlayJunkie.

And being all over the place, Carlino’s toolbox is just as overflowing as her creations themselves, working with water-based media that has high-flow capability like watercolor, ink, and high-flow acrylics. She also takes to oil-based markers, graphite, and sharpies, and even dabbles with spray paint and stencils. “I am interested in materials that have different surface qualities from matte or glossy to metallic or somewhere in between,” she explained in an interview with Jung Katz. “I work on nontraditional, paper-like surfaces such as yupo, duralar, acetate, and tyvek. My best friend is my compass and ruler collection.”

When it comes to her creative process, Carlino mostly relies on instinct and improvisation, aiming to create organic, fluid-like forms. Working on nonporous surfaces, she floats watercolor, ink and high-flow acrylic into the surface of the water and into each other to cause interactions of materials and pigment that create granulation, striated edges, and floating islands of color. As this dries and evaporates, everything settles and the form emerges.

“This is my beginning point,” she says. “I’ve created a form/situation in which to interact and riff off of which I then look for an entry point into the form to begin to assert order in the form of line, geometry, and pattern.” Describing her work as an arena in which pattern and form engage and accentuate the contradictions, opposites, and contrasts that exist in this fabricated world, the finished result is a sort of colorful mess that we find compelling without understanding why that is exactly.

Take a look for yourself:

The post Finding Order In Disorder: Kim Carlino’s Art Is a Colorful Mess appeared first on PlayJunkie.

“My own personal style involves continuously creating tension in the artwork,” she explained in a piece she wrote for Artsy Shark. “I achieve this through the combined use of premeditated realism and abstract improvisation. Realism is used as a measure of my ability and the abstract work displays my artistic expression.”

In her most recent series, Velozo focused on the rich birdlife inhabiting grasslands. Through it she hopes to encourage a connection between humans and nature, whilst focusing on the birds that live within this unique environment. “I want to create a subconscious connection to the environment,” she says. “I believe viewing a painting of nature evokes an intuitive reminder of the fragility and sacredness of the natural world.”

Crows, ravens, and eagles are seen throughout her work, captured in stunning detail. Those are placed against an abstract version of an environmental landscape, bringing energy and antics to the painting and creating interest and narrative to the small birds’ struggles.

According to Velozo, grasslands are among our most vulnerable and endangered habitats due to urbanization. But as the conversation revolving around our natural environments is now at the forefront, she hopes her work can stimulate care and concern for this place we call home.

The post Australian Painter Captures the Many Grassland Birds appeared first on PlayJunkie.

After that first illustration, more and more commissions followed through. “Two months later it basically became my full-time job- and 3 years and 500 portraits later, here I am,” said Kwietniewska.

Now a respectable brand, with little over 10k followers on Instagram, Kwietniewska makes both commissioned portraits as well as other paintings and illustrations, using a variety of mediums, including watercolors, oils, and ink.

“Most of my work comes from within really,” she admits. “But I am easily inspired, I recently went to the BP Portrait Awards and I all I wanted to do was go home and paint. I also love literature. I adore Nabokov’s Lolita, which I had the pleasure to paint recently. Also, I paint quite a lot from my experience.”

A creative at heart, her artwork (both personal and commercial) is shared through Instagram.

The post Paulina Kwietniewska is a Master of Portraiture appeared first on PlayJunkie.

All that changed after she started going to university, where she accidentally ended up taking a foundations art class. “Within less than a week I was completely in love (or addicted, depending on the point of view) – I knew that this was what I wanted to do, every day, for the rest of my life,” she says.

Now a full-time artist, she works as both a painter and a curator. A contemporary realist miniaturist, she admits that she likes to stick to smaller-scaled work. “I don’t think I was ever anything except for a miniature painter, although I’ve tried painting on all sorts of scales,” she says. “I remember my mother taking me to a children’s art school in Minsk that one of her friends was running – I must have been around 5. He asked me to draw a figure, and put me in front of an easel with a large pad of newsprint, I drew a figure that took up a tiny corner. He asked me to try again, bigger, and I drew something only slightly bigger- after a few attempts he told my mother he couldn’t really teach me.”

“I think I’m incredibly fortunate, because, within the last 15 years that I’ve been working as a professional artist, the art world has started to emerge from what I always thought of as a sort of dark age,” she says. “I think for a lot of the 20th century the mainstream art world has been dominated by art that is very commercial, conceptually heavy-handed and visually bland.”

Take a closer look:

The post Dina Brodsky’s Paintings Are Incredibly Detailed, and Incredibly Small appeared first on PlayJunkie.

After graduating from college, Hanson entered the art trade as a professional, inspired by landscapes and vantage points only beheld by the most adventurous. After a lifetime of experimenting in different styles and mediums, it wasn’t until Hanson began rock climbing at Red Rock Canyon that her painting style was consolidated by a single inspiration and force of nature. Rock climbing among the brilliantly colored cliffs of Nevada and Utah, watching the seasons, and the light change daily across the desert, provided endless inspiration for her work.

In these beautiful surroundings, Hanson decided to dedicate herself to creating one painting every week for the rest of her life. She has stuck to that decision ever since and has for the past decade been developing a unique, minimalist technique of placing impasto paint strokes without layering – a technique which has become known as “Open-Impressionism.”

Transforming landscapes into abstract mosaics of color and texture, her impasto application of paint lend a sculptural effect to her art. “I think the modern or contemporary art world shies away from landscapes or natural beauty,” she remarked in an interview with Art Aesthetics Magazine. “I don’t really understand why since it is one of the most pleasing art forms to the eye and certainly one of the most popular. I have a hard time keeping up with the demand for my work, so I am not so concerned about what the great ‘curators’ or ‘critics’ might say, but what the actual collectors and fans think and feel as a result of my works.”

Take a look at some of her striking landscapes:

The post The Open-Impressionist Landscapes of Erin Hanson appeared first on PlayJunkie.

“With these un-gravity constructions, I want to show that we live in one world, but we live in it in very different ways,” she explained in an interview with Hi-Fructose Magazine. “Playing with everyday objects and spaces, placed in impossible ways to express that many times, the inner dimension of each one of us does not match the mental structures of those around us. The architectural spaces and day-to-day objects are part of a metaphor of how difficult it is to fit everything that shapes our daily space: our relationships, work, ambitions, and dreams.”

According to Vidal Agulló, her chosen style is realistic (as opposed to abstract) so as to help the viewer recognize the quotidian space that we all inhabit, assisting him to understand the ordered maze that is this proposal. “I want the viewers to recognize what they are seeing, but to see it in a very different, unstructured, broken way,” she adds.

And like most creatives, Vidal Agulló’s artistic calling was clear from the get-go. “I’ve been drawing all my life,” she says. “Since I was a little kid I’ve been drawing both real-life models, objects, buildings when going on holidays and copying all the illustrations that I would like. My need to draw was one of my key traits.”

Enter her disorienting space:

The post Cinta Vidal Agulló’s Paintings Defy Gravity appeared first on PlayJunkie.

But though her landscapes seem like imagined dreamscapes, in actuality they lean on Shaw’s reflections on her surroundings. Based between Melbourne and the US, her paintings are also very much inspired by her travels around the world. “Most of the time I really need to experience a place before I make work about it,” she explained in an interview with Lost At E Minor. “Recently, I did a residency at SIM in Iceland that allowed me to travel to some amazing places there. The lava flows and melting glaciers create incredible sculptural forms, which inspires how I translate this into the paintings. I am very visceral.”

Other times, she is inspired by what she calls “scientific facts”, such as that illustrated in Isao Hashimoto’s work, ‘1994-1998’. “With these works – for the exhibition ‘Nightingale’, for instance – I chose different locations were nuclear testing had occurred and tried to imagine a nuclear flash moment.”

According to Shaw, her interest in landscape painting sparked after a visit to Central Australia. “A visit to Central Australia in 2004 really helped me coalesce ideas about the materiality of paint and how this could connect with the material world through landscape,” she says. “The sedimentary layers of rocks literally looked like the paint I was playing around with in my studio, and it started from there.”

Her work has been exhibited around the world, anywhere from New York and San Francisco, to London and Hong Kong. But you can also peek inside her landscapes through Instagram:

The post The Vibrant Dreamscapes of Kate Shaw appeared first on PlayJunkie.

“I hope my drawings can facilitate a deeper understanding of the climate crisis, helping us find meaning and optimism in shifting landscapes,” she told ArtStar. “I hope they can serve as records of landscapes in flux, documenting the transition, and inspiring our global community to take action for the future.”

Her mission took her around the globe, having flown with NASA on several Operation IceBridge missions over Antarctica, Greenland, and Arctic Canada. “In all my travels I have never experienced a landscape as epic and pristine as Antarctica,” she admits. “I still haven’t found the words to properly convey the majesty and ethereal wonder of that icy continent!”

“It was fascinating to see how the ice differed from its northern counterpart,” she adds. “The biggest difference I noticed were the unbelievable shades of blues—I had no idea so many existed! In the Arctic, every now and then we came across an iceberg with a thin strip of bright sapphire ice, whereas in the Antarctic, almost all the icebergs glowed. It was as if they were lit from the inside.”

Forman’s paintings manage to capture the many shades of blue, highlighting the extraordinary beauty of the icy continent. As such, her works have appeared in publications like The New York Times, National Geographic, The Wall Street Journal, and the Smithsonian Magazine.

Take a look at some of her pastel landscapes in the gallery below:

The post The Pastel Landscapes of Zaria Forman appeared first on PlayJunkie.

“Narrative and narrative imagery has always appealed to me,” she relayed in an interview with Girl Trip. “Abstract and minimal work never seemed to be an option for me, I needed more to hold onto, I needed to feel engaged. I think it’s necessary to investigate the stories we grew up with, and other stories that have been told throughout history, and how those have shaped us – not just how they morally shaped us, but how they conjure certain images in our brain. Most of these stories I’ve come upon through narrative resources of literature and film, but also very clearly from the research and image-mining that I conduct while traveling.”

These narratives often rely on her experience as a female artist. “The fact that I’m female is an important part of my work,” she stressed. “My work involves my identity directly, especially since I often use my own body as a model. A lot of artists don’t call themselves feminists or don’t want to be classified as ‘women artists’ and I get that; we should be considered across the whole broad sphere of art discourse, not just as a representation of our gender. Men don’t face that same prescription. However, because we ARE less represented in the art world (in terms of who is being shown at galleries and museums, who is selling, etc), I think shouting out that identity, as a female artist, serves the call for more female representation in the art world.”

Her paintings are meant to look stained, emphasizing the effects of a visceral mark. In one series, Carter paints using cranberry juice, which refers to her background. The fluid is juxtaposed with collage elements; using solvents and other transfer methods she directly appropriates reference images from her archive.

Follow her Instagram page for more.

The post Alexandra Carter’s Paintings Are Meant to Look Stained appeared first on PlayJunkie.

“I’ve never tried to make a painting look like a photograph, but time and again, when I feel I have finished, the work looks quite realistic,” he admitted in a piece he shared with Artsy Shark. Primarily self-taught, Sutter discovered an aptitude for composition, value, and hue in his mid 50’s, having not picked up a paintbrush in decades and never shown any of his work before.

Nowadays, his work is well recognized, having gained a few awards in the process, as well as memberships in the prestigious Copley Society of Art in Boston and the North Shore Arts Association in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Working mostly from source photos that either he or his clients have taken, and sometimes combining aspects of multiple photos, his work captures the very heart of Boston city life.

As for his toolbox, Sutter mainly works with acrylic, gouache, and watercolor. “I’ll be drawn to a set of colors or an interesting shape or to a scene I’d like to capture, but one that’s a bit off the bell curve for other artists,” he explains his creative instinct.

Here are some highlights from his Instagram page:

The post Experience Boston Through Jed Sutter’s Paintings appeared first on PlayJunkie.

And being all over the place, Carlino’s toolbox is just as overflowing as her creations themselves, working with water-based media that has high-flow capability like watercolor, ink, and high-flow acrylics. She also takes to oil-based markers, graphite, and sharpies, and even dabbles with spray paint and stencils. “I am interested in materials that have different surface qualities from matte or glossy to metallic or somewhere in between,” she explained in an interview with Jung Katz. “I work on nontraditional, paper-like surfaces such as yupo, duralar, acetate, and tyvek. My best friend is my compass and ruler collection.”

When it comes to her creative process, Carlino mostly relies on instinct and improvisation, aiming to create organic, fluid-like forms. Working on nonporous surfaces, she floats watercolor, ink and high-flow acrylic into the surface of the water and into each other to cause interactions of materials and pigment that create granulation, striated edges, and floating islands of color. As this dries and evaporates, everything settles and the form emerges.

“This is my beginning point,” she says. “I’ve created a form/situation in which to interact and riff off of which I then look for an entry point into the form to begin to assert order in the form of line, geometry, and pattern.” Describing her work as an arena in which pattern and form engage and accentuate the contradictions, opposites, and contrasts that exist in this fabricated world, the finished result is a sort of colorful mess that we find compelling without understanding why that is exactly.

Take a look for yourself:

The post Finding Order In Disorder: Kim Carlino’s Art Is a Colorful Mess appeared first on PlayJunkie.

“My own personal style involves continuously creating tension in the artwork,” she explained in a piece she wrote for Artsy Shark. “I achieve this through the combined use of premeditated realism and abstract improvisation. Realism is used as a measure of my ability and the abstract work displays my artistic expression.”

In her most recent series, Velozo focused on the rich birdlife inhabiting grasslands. Through it she hopes to encourage a connection between humans and nature, whilst focusing on the birds that live within this unique environment. “I want to create a subconscious connection to the environment,” she says. “I believe viewing a painting of nature evokes an intuitive reminder of the fragility and sacredness of the natural world.”

Crows, ravens, and eagles are seen throughout her work, captured in stunning detail. Those are placed against an abstract version of an environmental landscape, bringing energy and antics to the painting and creating interest and narrative to the small birds’ struggles.

According to Velozo, grasslands are among our most vulnerable and endangered habitats due to urbanization. But as the conversation revolving around our natural environments is now at the forefront, she hopes her work can stimulate care and concern for this place we call home.

The post Australian Painter Captures the Many Grassland Birds appeared first on PlayJunkie.

After that first illustration, more and more commissions followed through. “Two months later it basically became my full-time job- and 3 years and 500 portraits later, here I am,” said Kwietniewska.

Now a respectable brand, with little over 10k followers on Instagram, Kwietniewska makes both commissioned portraits as well as other paintings and illustrations, using a variety of mediums, including watercolors, oils, and ink.

“Most of my work comes from within really,” she admits. “But I am easily inspired, I recently went to the BP Portrait Awards and I all I wanted to do was go home and paint. I also love literature. I adore Nabokov’s Lolita, which I had the pleasure to paint recently. Also, I paint quite a lot from my experience.”

A creative at heart, her artwork (both personal and commercial) is shared through Instagram.

The post Paulina Kwietniewska is a Master of Portraiture appeared first on PlayJunkie.

All that changed after she started going to university, where she accidentally ended up taking a foundations art class. “Within less than a week I was completely in love (or addicted, depending on the point of view) – I knew that this was what I wanted to do, every day, for the rest of my life,” she says.

Now a full-time artist, she works as both a painter and a curator. A contemporary realist miniaturist, she admits that she likes to stick to smaller-scaled work. “I don’t think I was ever anything except for a miniature painter, although I’ve tried painting on all sorts of scales,” she says. “I remember my mother taking me to a children’s art school in Minsk that one of her friends was running – I must have been around 5. He asked me to draw a figure, and put me in front of an easel with a large pad of newsprint, I drew a figure that took up a tiny corner. He asked me to try again, bigger, and I drew something only slightly bigger- after a few attempts he told my mother he couldn’t really teach me.”

“I think I’m incredibly fortunate, because, within the last 15 years that I’ve been working as a professional artist, the art world has started to emerge from what I always thought of as a sort of dark age,” she says. “I think for a lot of the 20th century the mainstream art world has been dominated by art that is very commercial, conceptually heavy-handed and visually bland.”

Take a closer look:

The post Dina Brodsky’s Paintings Are Incredibly Detailed, and Incredibly Small appeared first on PlayJunkie.

After graduating from college, Hanson entered the art trade as a professional, inspired by landscapes and vantage points only beheld by the most adventurous. After a lifetime of experimenting in different styles and mediums, it wasn’t until Hanson began rock climbing at Red Rock Canyon that her painting style was consolidated by a single inspiration and force of nature. Rock climbing among the brilliantly colored cliffs of Nevada and Utah, watching the seasons, and the light change daily across the desert, provided endless inspiration for her work.

In these beautiful surroundings, Hanson decided to dedicate herself to creating one painting every week for the rest of her life. She has stuck to that decision ever since and has for the past decade been developing a unique, minimalist technique of placing impasto paint strokes without layering – a technique which has become known as “Open-Impressionism.”

Transforming landscapes into abstract mosaics of color and texture, her impasto application of paint lend a sculptural effect to her art. “I think the modern or contemporary art world shies away from landscapes or natural beauty,” she remarked in an interview with Art Aesthetics Magazine. “I don’t really understand why since it is one of the most pleasing art forms to the eye and certainly one of the most popular. I have a hard time keeping up with the demand for my work, so I am not so concerned about what the great ‘curators’ or ‘critics’ might say, but what the actual collectors and fans think and feel as a result of my works.”

Take a look at some of her striking landscapes:

The post The Open-Impressionist Landscapes of Erin Hanson appeared first on PlayJunkie.

“With these un-gravity constructions, I want to show that we live in one world, but we live in it in very different ways,” she explained in an interview with Hi-Fructose Magazine. “Playing with everyday objects and spaces, placed in impossible ways to express that many times, the inner dimension of each one of us does not match the mental structures of those around us. The architectural spaces and day-to-day objects are part of a metaphor of how difficult it is to fit everything that shapes our daily space: our relationships, work, ambitions, and dreams.”

According to Vidal Agulló, her chosen style is realistic (as opposed to abstract) so as to help the viewer recognize the quotidian space that we all inhabit, assisting him to understand the ordered maze that is this proposal. “I want the viewers to recognize what they are seeing, but to see it in a very different, unstructured, broken way,” she adds.

And like most creatives, Vidal Agulló’s artistic calling was clear from the get-go. “I’ve been drawing all my life,” she says. “Since I was a little kid I’ve been drawing both real-life models, objects, buildings when going on holidays and copying all the illustrations that I would like. My need to draw was one of my key traits.”

Enter her disorienting space:

The post Cinta Vidal Agulló’s Paintings Defy Gravity appeared first on PlayJunkie.

But though her landscapes seem like imagined dreamscapes, in actuality they lean on Shaw’s reflections on her surroundings. Based between Melbourne and the US, her paintings are also very much inspired by her travels around the world. “Most of the time I really need to experience a place before I make work about it,” she explained in an interview with Lost At E Minor. “Recently, I did a residency at SIM in Iceland that allowed me to travel to some amazing places there. The lava flows and melting glaciers create incredible sculptural forms, which inspires how I translate this into the paintings. I am very visceral.”

Other times, she is inspired by what she calls “scientific facts”, such as that illustrated in Isao Hashimoto’s work, ‘1994-1998’. “With these works – for the exhibition ‘Nightingale’, for instance – I chose different locations were nuclear testing had occurred and tried to imagine a nuclear flash moment.”

According to Shaw, her interest in landscape painting sparked after a visit to Central Australia. “A visit to Central Australia in 2004 really helped me coalesce ideas about the materiality of paint and how this could connect with the material world through landscape,” she says. “The sedimentary layers of rocks literally looked like the paint I was playing around with in my studio, and it started from there.”

Her work has been exhibited around the world, anywhere from New York and San Francisco, to London and Hong Kong. But you can also peek inside her landscapes through Instagram:

The post The Vibrant Dreamscapes of Kate Shaw appeared first on PlayJunkie.

“I hope my drawings can facilitate a deeper understanding of the climate crisis, helping us find meaning and optimism in shifting landscapes,” she told ArtStar. “I hope they can serve as records of landscapes in flux, documenting the transition, and inspiring our global community to take action for the future.”

Her mission took her around the globe, having flown with NASA on several Operation IceBridge missions over Antarctica, Greenland, and Arctic Canada. “In all my travels I have never experienced a landscape as epic and pristine as Antarctica,” she admits. “I still haven’t found the words to properly convey the majesty and ethereal wonder of that icy continent!”

“It was fascinating to see how the ice differed from its northern counterpart,” she adds. “The biggest difference I noticed were the unbelievable shades of blues—I had no idea so many existed! In the Arctic, every now and then we came across an iceberg with a thin strip of bright sapphire ice, whereas in the Antarctic, almost all the icebergs glowed. It was as if they were lit from the inside.”

Forman’s paintings manage to capture the many shades of blue, highlighting the extraordinary beauty of the icy continent. As such, her works have appeared in publications like The New York Times, National Geographic, The Wall Street Journal, and the Smithsonian Magazine.

Take a look at some of her pastel landscapes in the gallery below:

The post The Pastel Landscapes of Zaria Forman appeared first on PlayJunkie.

“Narrative and narrative imagery has always appealed to me,” she relayed in an interview with Girl Trip. “Abstract and minimal work never seemed to be an option for me, I needed more to hold onto, I needed to feel engaged. I think it’s necessary to investigate the stories we grew up with, and other stories that have been told throughout history, and how those have shaped us – not just how they morally shaped us, but how they conjure certain images in our brain. Most of these stories I’ve come upon through narrative resources of literature and film, but also very clearly from the research and image-mining that I conduct while traveling.”

These narratives often rely on her experience as a female artist. “The fact that I’m female is an important part of my work,” she stressed. “My work involves my identity directly, especially since I often use my own body as a model. A lot of artists don’t call themselves feminists or don’t want to be classified as ‘women artists’ and I get that; we should be considered across the whole broad sphere of art discourse, not just as a representation of our gender. Men don’t face that same prescription. However, because we ARE less represented in the art world (in terms of who is being shown at galleries and museums, who is selling, etc), I think shouting out that identity, as a female artist, serves the call for more female representation in the art world.”

Her paintings are meant to look stained, emphasizing the effects of a visceral mark. In one series, Carter paints using cranberry juice, which refers to her background. The fluid is juxtaposed with collage elements; using solvents and other transfer methods she directly appropriates reference images from her archive.

Follow her Instagram page for more.

The post Alexandra Carter’s Paintings Are Meant to Look Stained appeared first on PlayJunkie.