Henrik is a self taught artist from Norway. He is pretty crafty with his oil paints, isn’t he? I discovered Henrik’s art sort of by accident, although I’m sure I would have come across it eventually, as he has a number of exhibitions lined up for next year in the US and in the UK. He was also the cover artist featured on vol. 24 of Hi Fructose magazine. I kind of think that my way of meeting Henrik was more serendipitous. Henrik moved to Barcelona at the beginning of this month, and rented a room in my apartment for a couple of days, while he sought his own studio space. We met up for a beer to chat about art and Barcelona, and I discovered, while I enjoyed the sun and Henrik the shade on the terraza in Plaça del Sol, that he almost didn’t become an artist at all! It was only after he took up oil painting that he was able to capture his imagination and was able to project these in the way that he wanted. His suspended floating figures drift through space and forests and almost astrotravelling through distorted landscapes, resulting in a splendid diorama of dreamyness. Do have a look at all his paintings on his webpage, and become a fan on facebook. Henrik! Let’s do it again!

When I first came across the artworks of Moki, it was in her book “How to Disappear” which I couldn’t put down, and took home with me right away, where I spent hours pouring over her beautiful paintings. Now based in Berlin, her detailed paintings are dark, and intriguing.

Her images are unsettling and charming, strange yet familiar. They feature lonely northern landscapes: isolated Scandinavian and Icelandic terrain, a subarctic frozen lake continent, untouched caves and moss meadows, and mountains sculpted into anatomical shapes by wind and water. Animals and humans emerge and dissolve into their environments. Within the solitude of nature, disappearing seems an obvious act. (source)

Visit her website and blog to see more fantastic artworks.

Besides the awesome name of this artist from Seoul, South Korea, there is little information out there. You can find his website here, and facebook here, and perhaps you will be able to do a better sleuthing job than I. The work, however, does speak for itself, and has a loud and rather unusual voice, don’t you think? Trippy bathroom scenes, dripping paint, lurid colours, abstract shadows, what’s not to love? The paintings of legs in the bath, are wondrous, as pretty much any time I languish in the tub (with my book, legs over the rim), I always think the strange way your body disappears in the water in distorted shapes and colours, would make a great painting! So thanks Kim for making this wish come true!

Sometimes it’s hard to put into words how I feel about someone’s illustration or art. Mostly it’s “I like!” “I like!!” But that’s a pretty boring and shallow way to react to all this visual stimulation. Blame it on watching too much mindless TV. I don’t know. Anyway Jeremy Enecio’s fantastic art makes me gibber “I like” quite a bit. I had to stop for a bit, and actually look harder, take a moment and review why “I like”. I think first he caught my attention with his tribute work entitled Cthulu ( acrylic on paper | 11 x 14 ) The glowing eyes of the beast, and it’s enormity depicted with the tiny shark (that you instinctively know is probably a gazzillion meters long, at least 13 anyway!) drifting through the tentacles, froze me in it’s gaze. I couldn’t look away. Is it not fantastic to have this sort of physical reaction to an artwork. The more I browsed through his portfolio, the more I was entranced. The use of colour and subject matter, especially his fantastical artworks, blew my imagination open wide. Go do yourself a favour and take a peek at his website and blog!

Amy Ross writes “I am interested in the idea of artist as mad scientist. My drawings offer visual hypotheses to the question: what would happen if the DNA sequence of a plant or mushroom were spliced with that of an animal? Using graphite, watercolor, and walnut ink on paper as well as directly on gallery walls in site-specific installations, I portray animals morphed with branches, mushrooms, berries, and blossoms, thus forming implausible hybrid creatures. These images subvert the traditional genre of botanical illustration by approaching the close study of the natural world through the lens of genetic engineering and mutation gone awry.”

Her delightful images make your face smile as you imagine small mushroom birds bursting from the soil or hopping along branches. The delicate colours emphasise the unusual creatures created from both foliage and fur or feathers. Her attention to detail, and delicate renderings of shadow, smudge, beak and eye make you wish that her mad creations existed somewhere in the world. And perhaps they do! Find her work here.

Tiffany Bozic grew up in Arkansas amongst the natural elements on a farm. Working with acrylic paint on mapel wood, her observations of nature are both striking and dark. Living and working in San Francisco, she has shown her work in a multitude of galleries. Her art inspired by J J Audubon as well as notions of power, grabs your attention. Fascinating compositions, attention to detail and showcasing curious relationships between fauna and flora which blossom and bloom from the panels.

WWW.tiffanybozic.net

Ralph McQuarrie’s art must look familiar to generations of movie goers, his work featured in Star Wars, Battlestar Gallactica and a slew of sci-fi flicks. He was a conceptual artist, and past away this year in March at the age of 83. He left behind a legacy of fantastic moonscapes, robots, and epic futuristic space stations.

McQuarrie started off drawing teeth and aeroplane parts for a dentistry firm and Boeing respectively, and created posters for the Apollo Space Program. His technical illustration ended up catching the eye of George Lucas, who commissioned him to create conceptual art work for his new film, Starwars.

“McQuarrie designed many of the film’s characters, including Darth Vader, Chewbacca, R2-D2 and C-3PO and drew many concepts for the film’s sets. It was McQuarrie who suggested that Vader wear breathing apparatus. McQuarrie’s concept paintings, including such scenes as R2-D2 and C-3PO arriving on Tatooine, helped convince 20th Century Fox to fund Star Wars, which became a huge success upon release in 1977.Neil Kendricks of The San Diego Union-Tribune stated McQuarrie “holds a unique position when it comes to defining much of the look of the “Star Wars” universe.”McQuarrie noted, “I thought I had the best job that an artist ever had on a film, and I had never worked on a feature film before. [...] I still get fan mail — people wondering if I worked on Episode I or just wanting to have my autograph.” source

His work carved out a particular style within the sci-fi-fantasy genre, creating landscapes and worlds that one could really imagine inhabiting, vast alien vistas receding into the distance, populated with characters that, brought into our lives through cinema, feel like old friends.

“Ralph McQuarrie’s life can be clearly divided into two distinct sections: before Star Wars, he was an industrious, skilled, virtually unknown technical illustrator; after Star Wars, he became the most sought after Production Illustrator ever to work in films.
A primary reason for this change, of course, has to do with the film’s unprecedented success. But, in a very real sense, Star Wars wouldn’t have been the film it was without McQuarrie. His eyes and hands were the first lenses through which Star Wars was focused and captured for Lucas’ inspection and refinement.” source

You can find out more, and see more of his art on his website.

These are a few paintings from Stefan à Wengen, a Swiss artist based in Germany. His work is often times dark, mysterious, and I particularly love his “Occurrence” series, which I have presented here. The paintings make you ask questions, what happened? why? where? Your imagination spins off in a multitude of directions, fuelled by his landscapes and creatures, who seem furtive, perhaps trying to escape, flying off canvas, and creeping into shadows. The mood seems one of the hunter or hunted.

He includes an interesting interview in his website, an excerpt of which I have included here.

Where does your interest in night, darkness and desolation come from?
That is not an easy question! I try to answer;
I try to work with things I do not understand like death, sexuality and time. Since my childhood I am fascinated in things I tried to understand but nobody could explain me, for example where melancholy comes from, why do I have depressing days, why is alienation so alien, why is the night sometimes frightening and at the same time so beautiful and protective.
There is always light in the dark, there is always good in evil – or like Lautréamont once said: “Like Baudelaire, like Flaubert, he too believes that the aesthetic expression of evil implies the most vital appreciation of good, the highest morality.”
Or to tell it in an other way:
I always felt the idyll seems uncanny to me, the idyll of a fancy suburbia for example implies to me a great deal of violence to keep up the idyll as such, to keep up the atmosphere of this area, that suggests, that there is always Sunday. These things make me angry and are fascinating me at the same time.
There is no black or white, there is neither a grey, but there can be black and white… you know what I mean…
And doesn’t have everybody a dark side? Don’t we enjoy the execration sometimes – beside it helps to keep up our cardiovascular system?

Say hello to the girls of Sonya Fu, an artist based in Hong Kong. She says her artworks are based on dreams, which she renders in a digital format, with intricate details, her doll like figurines emerging from moody backdrops. The colours and compositions make for striking illustrations, and the girls are both cute and creepy at the same time.

These are collage artworks by Nicholas Lockyer. The juxtaposition of the cut out elements create new and interesting forms, often organic, sprouting horns or scales. “(His) work explores the relationship between the saturation point of digitalization in today’s society, Trash Cinema and lowbrow ephemera culture that exists outside the digital world and the themes of primitivism, ritualism, mutation and attitudes towards death.” I find the collages repellent but also find myself taking a closer look, as the figures appear to morph from human to animal to growth, and then back. They are intriguing also in their painterly qualities, and although nightmarish, they resonate with the viewer, and their shattered appearance emphasises their dreamlike, hypnotic effect. Visit the artists website Paper Phantasm.

Almost 2 weeks ago I attended the opening of the Rojo Rojo exhibition at Miscelanea Gallery in Barcelona. The gallery was jam packed, with some fantastic artworks on show. I was thrilled to see works by Joao Ruas and a beautiful painting by Paula Bonet. The exhibition was a wonderful example of artists working together, as each pair created a conversation of works using the colour red, the size of the artwork and the medium of paper as common threads. The exhibition is up until the 23rd of December with the works for sale as well as an edition of prints available. Artists include Mariana Santos, Chamo San, Anjo Bolarda, Berto Martinez, Charmaine Olivia, Conrad Roset, Guim Tió Zarraluki, João Ruas, Paula Bonet, Ricardo Cavolo.

This is the work of Phil Hale. Mostly working in figurative art, his work received recognition through the National Portrait Gallery where he has been awarded various prizes. Initially working soley as an illustrator, he created work for a variety of publications in America, and apprenticed to Rick Berry. Isolated figures are often the subject of his paintings, with stark backgrounds, surreal landscapes, his figures sometimes oddly contorted. He was commissioned to paint the portrait of Tony Blair which hangs in Westminster. His work graces the covers of a mountain of books, including Penguin Classics, where he worked on covers for six Joseph Conrad stories including Heart of Darkness. Hale currently lives and works in London. His artwork has been compiled into 2 publications, including most recently – Goad.