Artist: Cheeming Boey

Cheeming Boey is an animator and game designer.

On his cups:

“People draw on napkins, receipts, wood. I was outside a coffee shop and had the urge to sketch while people watched. I found a foam cup on top of a trash can, and it was all I had, so that was what I worked with.”

On his variety of style:

“I don’t like to limit myself to a distinct drawing style. I want to be able to branch out as much as possible. I think that has worked to my advantage, because different styles appeal to different crowds.”

Check out his website to view his cartoon journal:

WS: iamboey.com

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Artist: Nathalia Suellen

Nathalia Suellen is a digital dark artist, born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She discovered her passion for digital art and photography in 2008 and since then she has began her journey as a self taught artist, mainly focused on macabre and dark imagery. At only nineteen, she started her own business, Lady Symphonia Digital Art and consequently, taking her first clients which allowed her to improve and challenge herself. Her strange and emotional dark vision drew attention from a great public of artists, photographers, clients and admirers worldwide. Nathalia’s artworks portray a dreamlike world with use of enchanting lighting and dark elements, always capturing the most intense and dramatic part of a story. Her style is characterized by the use of fairytale elements, victorian era, backlight, bokeh, damask, foggy environments and dark forests. Nathalia’s client list consists of many bands, publishers, photographers and artists in general. Including Random House, PenguinGroup, Simon&Schuster, Mccann Erickson and others.

WS: ladysymphonia.com

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Artist: Ġoxwa

via Axelle Fine Arts:

Ġoxwa, with a dot over the G, pronounced Joshwa, is the Old Maltese form of Josephine. Malta is the crossroads of the Mediterranean and look anywhere with the inquisitive eyes of an aspiring artist and you will find traces of all the wandering peoples that have come here on their way to bigger conquests or have stayed here to scratch a living out of the stony soil and build walls and paint pictures and fight each other and die.

The walls of the narrow rectilinear streets of Valletta were ideal ones to grow up with. Surrounding stones were fragments fallen off the weathered battered but still upright walls of neolithic temples which are the oldest freestanding buildings to be found anywhere on earth.

Goxwa was always sketching, from the day when, aged five, she saw a nun painting a portrait of the Virgin in a church wall. Later she went to art school for four years, though she prudently also took courses in fashion design, which she hated. Her parents, however, had other plans for her, they had arranged an ideal marriage for her with the son of a wealthy landowner, so she promptly ran away from home and caught the night plane for London. There she enrolled at St Martins Art School, took odd jobs in restaurants and in fashion design.

Returning from a nightmare vacation in Italy, she spotted and was spotted by, a handsome young man at the Genoa airport, and by the time they reached London they were in love. He later came back to London, and they got married and he took her to MIT, Goxwa waited on tables in well-known restaurants, she studied directing at Emerson College, she worked on a documentary film about the Amazon rain forest, And all the while she was painting, good art-student work which began to attract some attention — her first show was in Boston in 1985 – and eventually in 1993 she won a scholarship for a year at the Cité des Arts in Paris.

A series of lucky chances beginning with her finding a home in the old studio of Pierre Tal-Coat in the 14th arrondissement with all the magic carpet of the roofs of Paris spread out before her. And there she has been working away ever since, quietly, determinedly, untouched by local cliques or fashions, developing a personal distinctive style, dynamic patterns of colors that seem both subdued and extravagant, earthbound and winging away to an unknown direction, perky and deadly serious.

Walls, she says, are like masks, simultaneously concealing and revealing the living beings behind them. The backgrounds of her paintings are mottled with splashes of color and seemingly disordered scratchings, These are the walls. And looming out of each them are figures, faces, trees, bowls of fruit, sometimes cracked and spattered, but all of them unmistakable, individual. They may be portraits of old friends or of a dear dead cat. They may be reminiscences of paintings in museums, of Byzantine or Russian icons. But they all have that double nature which it is this artist’s special gift to illustrate.

Today’s painting may be pastoral, elysian; tomorrow’s may be ferociously witty. Over the last quiet determined decade, she has developed a mature style, which seems like a happy marriage of Mediterranean tradition and modern sensibility. She paints with a wax-and-oil-based medium, which demands rapidity of execution because the paint dries quickly. It also a more solid-looking coat of paint, one which suggests the permanence of a wall, and permits a richness and a liveliness of color that recalls both ancient Mediterranean art and modern Mediterranean scenery. They all have all had their own separate histories in the hurly-burly of mortal life, and they all also hover in another timeless world where past and present and future are one.

WS: goxwa.blogspot.com

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Artist: Anouk Kruithof

She studied photography at st.Joost Academy Breda from 1999-2003. In 2008/2009 she attended the artist in residences Künstlerhaus Bethanien Berlin and Meetfactory Prague.

Kruithof is fascinated by the emotional and mental condition of people and how this is manifested in behaviour and act in society and time in which she lives. The starting point is her personal experience or fascination with a subject and in her project based work she combines the conceptual thinking with aesthetics. In the last 6 years she examined the limitations of the medium photography. Photography is her main medium, but since 2008 she started to work with installation, video and performative actions. Her recent work shows how she determines the borders of this media.  Anouk Kruithof is very much interested in the printed book as a form to show her projects. She published 3 artistbooks: Playing borders (2009), Becoming Blue (2009) and the Black Hole icw Jaap Scheeren (2006). Her work has shown internationally in ACP Sydney, MAMAC Liege Belgium, FOAM Amsterdam, Künstraum Niederösterreich Vienna, Stedelijk museum Amsterdam, Temporäre Künsthalle Berlin and museum het Domein Sittard among many others.

WS: anoukkruithof.nl

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Artist: Peter Root

On graduating from the Fine Art BA Hons at University College Falmouth in 2000, my work was initially very much about highly repetitive techniques and algorithmic procedures applied to restricted units such as lines on a page or pieces of metal.

In 2001 I spent ten weeks at the Chitraniketan Artist Residency in Kerala, South India and exhibited the resulting work in an exhibition titled ‘Nearly Everything’ at a gallery in Thiruvananthapuram (see Under-Construction page). Prior to and since returning to Guernsey I have traveled extensively throughout South America and Asia.

In September 2006 I was nominated by Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst, art advisor to Roman Abramovich, and was then shortlisted through The Guardian’s G2 supplement to exhibit ‘Transformer’ at The Saatchi Gallery’s ‘Your Gallery’ exhibition at The Guardian’s Newsroom Gallery in London.

Artist Statement
The work I create regularly involves highly labor-intensive, mantra-like procedures of construction and assemblage. As well as being simple, playful experiments the work often touches upon themes of impermanence, repetition, structure, pattern, scale and architecture. My work often takes the form of extremely fragile, temporary arrangements, with works subject to micro-apocalyptic events such as a light breeze or a falling leaf.

I am interested in creating artwork that acknowledges and utilizes aspects of the world around me at times disregarding their intended or standard function: objects, technology, software, food, sound etc… and using these elements as starting points for exploration.

WS: peterroot.com

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Artist: Svetlana Tiourina

Svetlana Tiourina was born in 1964 in Perm (Urals, Russia). In 1994 she settled in Amsterdam, where she has been living and working. Until 2003, Tiourina worked as writer and illustrator of children’s books, which they gained great international recognition, which was ratified by the Price of the United Nations (New York, 2000). From 2004 Svetlana Tiourina fully devoted to painting. As a basis for her work she takes the traditional academic foundations, which they incorporated into their own insights. Insights not to think independently of her Russian soul.

“My work comes from a personal search for the inner of man: his soul and his spirit. Pain, longing, sadness, sacrifice, courage, fasting, temptation, dreams, struggle between good and evil, everything in human lives, is my endless inspiration. This complex of human illusions is contained in the most perfect earthly form: the human body. The Greek tradition is the perfect example of such a harmonious interplay of inner and outer. The woman and her emotional life are the main motive in my work. Her fragile beauty is enhanced by a profound mystical gifts and intuition. In my paintings is a romantic mood is often mixed with mild melancholy. People, gods and animals, all the mysterious symbols and their meaning by the viewer will discover themselves to be.”

WS: tiourina.com

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Artist: Pete Dungey

Pete Dungey is a designer working for print, installation and web development. Usually residing in London and Oxford, however currently based in Zürich, Switzerland.

On his Pothole Gardens:

“It began as part of a project called ‘subvert the familiar’,” he told the Guardian. “I wanted to do something that would grab attention but also raise awareness of an issue, and so the project was born. I have been planting the gardens for about a fortnight now and see it as an ongoing thing.”

“Potholes are a big problem that could be eradicated quite simply. Hopefully it’s something that grabs attention and raises awareness although I wouldn’t call myself a renegade cyclist.”

WS: petedungey.com

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Artist: Jack Shadbolt

Jack Leonard Shadbolt, artist, teacher, author, poet (b at Shoeburyness, Eng 4 Feb 1909; d at Burnaby, BC 22 Nov 1998). Best known as a painter and draftsman, he wrote 3 books and many articles and through his teaching profoundly influenced art and artists in BC and across Canada. He moved to British Columbia in 1912.

Jack Shadbolt studied at the Art Students’ League in New York City (1948) and in London (1937) and Paris (1938). After teaching art to children in BC between 1929 and 1937, he joined the Vancouver School of Art. He served in WWII 1942-45, including 1944-45 with the Canadian War Artist establishment, and then returned to the school, where he was head of painting and drawing until 1966. He was an influential teacher and adviser across Canada and the US, having conducted workshops (he was the first artist to do so at the EMMA LAKE ARTISTS’ WORKSHOPS in 1955) and juried exhibitions throughout North America. Some 70 solo exhibitions of Jack Shadbolt’s work were mounted and his many major international exhibitions included the Venice Biennale XXVIII and 4 major retrospective exhibitions at the VANCOUVER ART GALLERY, the BC Museum of Anthropology, the NATIONAL GALLERY OF CANADA and the Glenbow Museum.

An extraordinarily prolific artist, Jack Shadbolt worked in large series (or suites) which derived from his personal experiences of nature and Native art in BC, his many travels in Europe and his recognition of calligraphy and op-art; in paint slashes and in incisive lines, in butterflies and totem poles, in insect life and ritual brides, in poetry and architecture. Everything was transformed by his emotions as much as by his intellect. As well as painting many murals (Edmonton International Airport, the NATIONAL ARTS CENTRE and the former CBC building), he did stage, ballet and costume designs and theatre posters. Jack Shadbolt also authored In Search of Form (1968), Mind’s I (1973) and Act of Art (1981). Until his death, he continued to have an enormous output, eg, a 3-dimensional plywood relief created for the MacMillan Bloedel building in Vancouver (1987).

(via thecanadianencyclopedia.com)

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Photographer: Yell Saccani

I’ve been doing pics for about 2 years. I’m self-taught. All my life i’ve worked in restaurants and couldn’t keep a job for more than a year. The boredom killed me. 2 years ago i wanted to learn graphic design. i was very curious about photoshop and my teacher was busy teaching the old freehand. I wanted to alter pictures and i didn’t know anything about photography. My teacher told me “what you want to do is shit, you will never do money from this. There’s no way somebody sane will care for this crap.”

I made my first pic called scream (the oldest one on flickr). My teacher laughed, but i started to upload the pics on flickr. People surprisingly started to comment, and i started to express my self and to explore ps and my limits as an artist.

I have a friend, a great guy that i have never met in real life. He was the first one to really believe in me, and it’s been like that since then. I get support, but only on the internet.

I explore my limits with my body everyday and i’m getting comfortable with nudes, something that was unthinkable for me sometime ago. For a good pic i will do everything i possibly can.

WS: yellsaccani.com

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Artist: Lichiban

Artist Statement
Situated at the intersection of pop surrealism and fantasy art, though defying limitations, Lichiban’s work explores the concept of “shapeshifting” as a symbolic representation of the human potential to transform into other entities through the use of the imagination. Visionary and subversive, playful and esoteric, her body of work creates a new hybrid taxonomy that merges human with animal, man with machine, terrestrial with outer space creatures. Her works convey a sense of longing and magnetism intended to invite the spectators to experience themselves as imaginary characters in a world of galactic feline superheroes, time-traveling samurais and tribal warriors, gods and goddesses, nature spirits, shapeshifting mystics, tricksters, outsiders, galactic explorers or iconic pop figures.

Her subjects are the architects of a larger mythological universe she aims to manifest through the use of various media ranging from her signature studio work on wood, murals, prints, videos or animations. She has taken on the challenge to create a unique visual language that is iconic and charged with metaphysical meaning drawing inspiration from dream memories, elements of tribal & religious art & writings, comics & animations, symbolism, surrealism, erotic illustration and street art. Her passion for music, erotica and the mystical sciences reflects vividly in her work.

Her Story
Lichiban is a Brooklyn-based self-taught visual artist, illustrator, art director, curator, and full time creative hustler. She was born in a border city in Hungary and from early on she acquired a fascination with borders, limits and ambiguous dividing lines; her experiences on the margins of cities, countries and subcultures eventually formed into a semi-consistent life philosophy, which continues to inspire her creative development. Her images draw inspirations from a wide range of extraordinary life experiences and impressions, such as her childhood memories of folktales, comic books and animations, her studies in Sufism & Buddhist Tantrism, her travels to war-torn countries (Bosnia, Kashmir, Eastern Turkey), her volunteer work with refugees and trauma victims and from meeting exceptional people. Her experiences led her to a deep appreciation for people and their stories, which expresses itself best in her love for faces. Most recently, she has been working on developing a number of feline superheroes to visually narrate her mystical mythology. She has exhibited her work in New York, Washington D.C., San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Minneapolis, and in Wilmington and has been leaving her trace around at various live art events in New York City. She has been featured in Younity’s HEART & SOUL Book, Brooklyn Community Access TV, CLAM Magazine, TRACE Magazine blog, Liberating Style Magazine, PEP! Magazine blog, Leisure LAB, Wishtank, Dope Swan, Readconvention, Limite Magazine and Boys & Clothes Magazine, among others.

WS: lichiban.net

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Artist: Nimit Malavia

I was born and raised in Ottawa, Ontario. I am a graduate of Sheridan ITAL’s BAA- Illustration program and am now residing in Toronto, Ontario.

With my work I am constantly trying to create images that appear honest and true to who I am. I hope that through my work I am able to grow and gain a better understanding of the world around me, one that I hope to share with others.

WS: nimitmalavia.com

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Photographer: Wendy Bevan

Within the world of fashion photography, Wendy Bevan is an unexpected unique curiosity. Her rich and painterly works of art draw us into a world of ambiguity and uneasy narratives. Perusing her portfolio, one is led through a labyrinth of antique film sets in which dramatic silent performances are taking place, with disconcertingly beautiful femme fatales acting out their memories, bittersweet feelings and repressed emotions.

Bevan has worked for many leading magazines. Publications include; Russian Vogue, Italian Marie Claire, Harpers Bazaar, Muse, Financial Times: How To Spend It, The Independent, The Observer, Self Service, Big, 10, Lula, Nylon, V Magazine, Qvest, POP Magazine, I-D, Grey and online Magazine TEST. Through these commissions she has worked with a number of top Fashion Directors and Stylists, namely Simon Robins, Katie Felstead, Fran Burns, and Jacob K.

WS: wendybevan.com

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Artist: Franz von Stuck

Franz Stuck (February 24, 1863 - August 30, 1928) was a German symbolist/Art Nouveau painter, sculptor, engraver, and architect.

Stuck was born at Tettenweis, in Bavaria. From an early age he displayed an affinity for drawing and caricature. To begin his artistic education in 1878 he went to Munich, where he would settle for life. From 1881 to 1885 Stuck attended the Munich Academy.

He first made a name with cartoons for Fliegende Blätter, and vignette designs for programmes and book decoration…. In 1892 Stuck co-founded the Munich Secession, and also executed his first sculpture, Athlete. The following year he won further acclaim with the critical and public success of what is now his most famous work, The Sin. Also in 1893, Stuck was awarded a gold medal for painting at the Chicago World’s Fair and was appointed to a royal professorship. In 1895 he began teaching painting at the Munich Academy.

Having attained a high degree of fame by this time, Stuck was elevated to the aristocracy on December 9, 1905 and would receive further public honours from around Europe during the remainder of his life. Even as new trends in art left Stuck behind, he continued to be highly respected among young artists in his capacity as professor at the Munich Academy. Notable students of his over the years include Paul Klee, Hans Purrmann, Wassily Kandinsky, and Josef Albers.

….Stuck’s subject matter was primarily drawn from mythology, inspired by the work of Arnold Böcklin. Large, heavy forms dominate most of his paintings and point toward his proclivities for sculpture. His seductive female nudes, in the role of the femme fatale, are a prime example of popular Symbolist content. Stuck paid close attention to the frames for his paintings and generally designed them himself with such careful use of panels, gilt carving and inscriptions that the frames must be taken as an integral part of the overall piece.

(via Wikipedia)

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Artist: Pedro Matos

Name: Pedro Matos
Born: 1989, Santarem, Portugal
Lives: Lisbon, Portugal
Education: BFA Painting - Ar.Co Lisboa (currently)

Matos is equally interested in representing the abandoned surfaces often found in the run down urban areas where his subjects live. While his work is influenced by the works of the old masters, the subjects which once were religious figures are now “downtrodden, unnoticed, unappreciated and forgotten.”

(via artistaday.com)

WS: pedromatos.org

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