At Arts to Hearts Project, our Women Artists on the Rise Edition 4 is full of women who see the world in a hundred different ways. Some paint what is right in front of them. But every so often, an artist builds an entire world of her own, one you have to slow down and read rather than simply look at. That is what drew us to Maisa Mreiwed.

Maisa is a Syrian Canadian artist, designer, researcher, and educator based in Canada, and her path to art ran through many doors. She studied fashion design, religious studies, and art education, and all of it feeds the work. From design she brings structure and precision.

From her studies of history, culture, and belief she brings a deep well of stories and symbols. Every piece she makes begins with research and grows slowly from there.

She draws mostly with a quill and ink, which is a wonderfully old, patient way to work in a world that moves this fast. There is nothing quick about it. Each line is laid down by hand, stroke after tiny stroke, until an intricate world builds up on the page.

She says she tries to make the ink sing and the quill dance, and you can feel that care in every detail. For Maisa, choosing this traditional technique is a way of honouring craftsmanship itself.

Her drawings are mostly deep black, and then, here and there, she adds a touch of gold, silver, or copper, small moments of light that lift the most important symbols and stand for hope, transformation, and renewal.

Look closely and you find humans, birds, animals, and sea creatures all sharing the same space, woven together with patterns and symbols. She places them side by side on purpose, as a quiet reminder that every living thing is connected and shares the same world.

That idea really sits at the heart of everything she makes. Her drawings are stories about living together, about survival, and about how closely tied we are to the natural world. A lot of them are quietly asking us to look after the oceans, the skies, and the land we all share.

She even picks her materials with that in mind, using eco-friendly inks and paper that is handmade or recycled. But she never spells it all out for you. Every symbol is left a little open, almost like an invitation to bring your own memories and find your own story inside the work.

And people have been finding their way to that work for a while now. Her art has been shown across Canada and around the world, in galleries, at art fairs, on public walls, and even at academic conferences.

She has taken part in a residency abroad, been recognised for work inspired by climate action, and was recently named among the top hundred artists in a national competition. Through all of it, she has kept up her research into Syrian textiles and traditional costumes, and the way they hold memory, identity, and history.

Now let’s hear from Maisa about her journey to art, the quill she still draws with, and the connection between all living things.

Can you share a little about your background and how your journey as an artist began?

I am a Syrian-Canadian multidisciplinary artist, educator, and researcher. My practice grew from a passion for storytelling, history, and symbols, which continues to shape every artwork I create.

How have architecture, design, and fine art shaped the way you build an artwork?

They have taught me to think about both structure and meaning. Every artwork begins with research and evolves through layers of ink and acrylic, allowing the story to unfold naturally.

Read Full Interview Here

What role do gold, silver, and copper play in your predominantly black-ink works?

They emphasize important symbols and create moments of light that represent hope, transformation, and renewal.

How do you know when an idea has enough depth to become a finished artwork?

When the story continues to resonate through research, reflection, and drawing, I know it has enough depth to become a finished work.

What do you hope viewers take away from your work?

I hope they leave with a sense of curiosity and connection, knowing that every symbol is an invitation to reflect, imagine, and discover their own story within the work.

As our conversation with Maisa came to an end, we found ourselves thinking about how connected everything really is. About how easy it is to forget that we share this world with countless other living things, and how much changes when we remember.

That reminder is really what her work is for. In her drawings, humans and birds and animals and creatures of the sea all live in the same frame, tangled together in one intricate, shared world. Nothing stands alone. It is a beautiful, quiet argument for coexistence, for survival, and for taking care of the oceans and skies and lands that hold all of us.

And there is something in the way she makes it that matters just as much. In an age of instant, throwaway images, she sits with a quill and builds these worlds by hand, one patient stroke at a time. The care is part of the message. It says some things are worth slowing down for.

We think a lot of artists need to hear what her practice quietly teaches. That depth takes time. Maisa does not rush a piece into being. She lets an idea live through research and reflection and drawing, and only when it keeps resonating does it become a finished work. In a world that rewards fast and loud, she is proof that patience, curiosity, and real meaning still matter, and that the work is stronger for them.

For art lovers and collectors, Maisa’s work brings something rare into a room. Intricate, hand-drawn worlds lit with touches of gold, full of symbols and stories that reveal a little more every time you look. Two people can stand in front of the same piece and find completely different meanings in it, because she leaves that door open on purpose. To live with one of her drawings is to keep a whole world on your wall, and a gentle daily reminder that we are all, always, connected.

Follow Maisa Mreiwed through the links below and see her work for yourself.

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Our Big Book of Mixed Media Artists 2026 is now open for submissions, and we believe the magic lives in the mix. In what happens when different materials meet, collide, and start speaking to each other. If you layer, pour, collage, stitch, or combine in ways nobody else would think to, and your work goes beyond a single medium, we want to see it. The materials do not matter. Geography does not matter. Career stage does not matter. What matters is that something real is happening between the layers. Every artist we feature began by submitting. This could be your edition.

SUBMIT HERE

At Arts to Hearts Project, we have always been more interested in the behind the scenes than the finished frame. The part that does not make it into the caption. The hours before the work exists. The decisions nobody sees. The rituals that make no sense to anyone else but are somehow essential. The moments of clarity that arrive out of nowhere and the moments of doubt that do the same.

A few weeks ago we brought you inside the creative process of some of the artists featured in Women Artists on the Rise Edition 4. We asked them one simple thing. What does your creative process look like on a typical day? Not the polished version. The real one. The one that starts before the studio is ready and the coffee is finished and the world has any idea what is about to be made.

And what came back was more honest than we expected. More varied. More human. Early mornings and stolen moments. Practices built around pain and children and day jobs and everything else life asks for alongside the art. No two answers looked the same. And every single one of them felt true in a way that polished artist statements rarely do.

We shared some of those answers. But there were more sitting with us that we could not let go of. So we went back. We read through everything again. And we thought you should see the rest.

Because the process behind the work is just as worth knowing as the work itself.

Most people fit creativity into their lives wherever they can. Between meetings and responsibilities and everything else that fills the hours. But there is another way to live as an artist. Where the work is not something you squeeze in. It is the thing everything else is arranged around. Where eight or nine hours at the easel is not a luxury or an indulgence. It is simply Tuesday.

Shruti Maheshwari @shrumah describes her day like this:

“On a typical day, I spend eight to nine hours at my easel painting, contemplating, observing, experimenting, playing with color. I like experimenting with different techniques to create a variety of visual effects in my work.”

Shruti Maheshwari

Eight to nine hours and she still calls it playing. We love that. Because it means the work has never stopped feeling like something she actually wants to do. The easel is not where she clocks in. It is where she goes to find out what happens when she tries something she has not tried before. And apparently that is enough to keep her there all day.

There is a kind of creative practice that looks chaotic from the outside and produces work that feels completely alive. And then there is the kind that begins with complete clarity and discipline and somehow arrives at the same place. The structure is not the opposite of flow. For some artists it is the very thing that makes flow possible. When you know where you are going you can afford to stop directing and just feel your way through.

In Claire Hines’ @hinesight_studio own words:

“My creative process is very organized and intentional. I like to start with a clear concept and plan, but once I begin creating, the process becomes very fluid and intuitive. I often get completely immersed in the piece, and everything naturally starts coming together.”

Claire Hines

Everything naturally starts coming together. That phrase only makes sense if the groundwork was laid first. The concept, the plan, the intentional starting point. Without that Claire might spend the whole session finding her way in. With it she can skip straight to the part where the work takes over. Organized at the start so that by the end she does not have to think at all. Just make.

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We have all had that moment. A idea arrives out of nowhere and feels so clear that you think there is no way you could forget it. And then you do. The artists who never seem to run out of things to make are usually the ones who stopped trusting their memory and started writing everything down instead.

Natalie Jenkins @natalias_art_de2 starts there every time:

“My creative process starts with my sketchbook where I spend a lot of time writing and drawing. Any inspiration I experience gets collected there. On a typical day, I spend time drafting a pattern for my next soft-sculpture or starting a new painting while referencing my sketchbook for reference.”

Natalie Jenkins

Any inspiration gets collected there. That one line is the whole practice. The sketchbook is not just a place to plan. It is a place to keep. Every observation, every idea, every moment of inspiration that would otherwise be forgotten by morning. And when Natalie sits down to draft a pattern or start a new painting, she is never starting from nothing. She is starting from everything she has already gathered. That is not a small advantage. That is the whole foundation.

Nobody talks about this part. The version of being a full time artist that involves spreadsheets and invoices and studio management and emails that have nothing to do with painting. The teaching schedules and the travel logistics and the accounting that does not care how inspired you are feeling today. This is the reality that most artist statements leave out entirely. And most people who say they want to be a full time artist have not quite pictured this part yet.

Yanina Viland @yaninaviland_art tells it like it is:

“Being a full time artist isn’t as glamorous as many would imagine. My days are full of management, accounting, running the studio. I’m teaching as well as traveling often with my main art job. But despite all of that I always trying to find two hours a day to paint.”

Yanina Viland

Two hours. Out of a day that is already full of everything else it takes to sustain a creative career. Not two hours because that is all she wants. Two hours because that is what is left after the business of being an artist is done. And she finds them anyway. Every day. Because the painting is the reason all the rest of it is worth doing. And two hours of that is always better than none.

There is a version of art making that is about arrival. About getting to something finished and resolved and pleasing to look at. And then there is the version that is about excavation. About going into a piece and pulling something out that was not supposed to be comfortable. That resists easy resolution. That makes you feel something specific even if you cannot name what it is. These are not the same practice. And they do not produce the same work.

Bianca Daniel @biancadanielcreates works in the second way. In her own words:

'“Most days begin with collecting fragments images, gestures, tensions, conversations. The process itself is highly constructed, almost confrontational. I layer, remove, distort, and rework until the piece develops its own resistance. I’m less interested in perfection than in emotional precision. Usually, the painting tells me when to stop not me.”

Bianca Daniel

Usually the painting tells me when to stop. Not me. That last line is the whole thing. Because Bianca is not working toward a predetermined destination. She is working until the piece becomes something with its own logic, its own weight, its own way of pushing back. And when it does that is when she knows it is done. Not when it looks finished. When it finally feels honest.

What we noticed reading through all of these was not how different the practices were. It was how committed every single artist was to their own particular way of working.

Some begin with a sketchbook full of collected fragments. Some carve two hours out of a day that has no room for them. Some start with structure and end somewhere completely unexpected. Some build tension into the work on purpose and wait for it to push back. And some simply show up to the easel for eight hours and call it playing.

No two creative days looked the same. And that is exactly the point. Because there is no single right way to make art. There is only the way that is honest to you. The practice you return to. The hours you protect. The rituals that make no sense to anyone else but are somehow essential to everything.

Women Artists on the Rise Edition 4 is full of artists exactly like this. One hundred women. One hundred practices. One hundred ways of showing up for the work every single day. The book is available now at the link below.

Order the Book Here

One more thing. The Big Book of Mixed Media Artists 2026 is officially open for submissions. If your practice lives across mediums and materials, if you layer and experiment and work in ways that do not fit neatly into one box, this is the book that was made for you.

Submit Here

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At Arts to Hearts Project, our 100 Emerging Artists of 2026 is full of people chasing very different things through their work. Some chase beauty, some chase truth, some chase a feeling they cannot quite name. Stavri Georgiou chases the feeling of a film that does not exist. Her photographs look like single frames pulled from a movie you will never get to watch, and that is what made us stop.

Stavri is a photographer and filmmaker based in Larnaca, Cyprus. Her love of images started long before she owned a camera. Her father was a painter, and she grew up surrounded by color and light and the idea that a picture could hold a feeling words could not reach.

When she finally saved up for her first camera as a teenager, she never wanted to simply record what was in front of her. She wanted to recreate the feeling of a dream, or a memory, something you cannot quite explain.

That is still what drives her. She does not so much take photographs as build scenes, one frame at a time, shaping the light, the mood, and the emotion the way a director would. But she is far more interested in questions than answers.

She never wants to tell you exactly what you are looking at. She leaves space, a held silence, a moment that feels like something has just happened or is about to, and lets you fill in the rest with your own memories. That mystery is what keeps her images alive long after you look away.

You feel this most in her portraits. They are intimate, but never fully open. With a little light, a shadow, the tilt of a body, a look that gives away just enough, she suggests an emotion instead of explaining it. Her people often seem to hold two feelings at once, strength and uncertainty, confidence and vulnerability, which is, she believes, where we are all at our most honest.

Her father taught her that art is less about getting it technically perfect and more about seeing the world differently, and it shows. She approaches every photograph like a painting, thinking first about light, color, and atmosphere. Even without a camera in her hand, she is always collecting quiet, in-between moments, the way light falls across a room, the silence between two people, the small gestures most of us miss. She holds on to the belief that beauty does not only live in the big events, but in the tiny fragments that quietly become our memories.

That belief grew into an award-winning short film, a gentle reflection on the ordinary moments that shape who we are. Her photographs have been published in magazines like Vogue Greece and i-D and shown in exhibitions internationally, and now she is moving further into filmmaking, curious to see what happens when her still frames finally begin to move, without losing any of their mystery.

Now let’s hear from Stavri about the painter father who shaped her eye, why she trusts a feeling over a plan, the power of leaving a story unfinished, and why the work that lasts is the work only you could make.

Your work feels cinematic rather than traditionally photographic. What first drew you to visual storytelling?

I think it started long before I ever held a camera. My father was a painter, so I grew up surrounded by images, colors, and the idea that emotions could exist without words. That stayed with me. When I finally saved enough to buy my first camera as a teenager,

I wasn’t interested in documenting reality—I wanted to recreate the feeling of dreams, memories, and moments that couldn’t be explained. Over time, I realized I wasn’t making photographs in the traditional sense. I was building scenes, directing emotions, and telling stories one frame at a time. Cinema became a natural influence because a single image can carry the same emotional weight as an entire film. Photography became my language the moment I understood that one photograph could make someone feel something they couldn’t quite put into words.

What attracts you to storytelling through suggestion rather than complete narratives?

I’ve always been more interested in questions than answers. I don’t want to tell people exactly what they’re looking at—I want to leave space for them to bring their own memories, emotions, and interpretations into the image. That sense of mystery is what keeps a photograph alive long after you’ve looked away. I love the idea that a single frame can suggest an entire world without revealing everything.

My photographs often feel like scenes from films that don’t exist because I’m drawn to moments that seem suspended in time, where something has just happened or is about to happen. That ambiguity invites the viewer to become part of the story, completing it in their own way, and I find that far more powerful than presenting a complete narrative.

What emotional tension were you exploring in The Girl with Cigarette?

The Girl with Cigarette was never about the cigarette itself—it was about the emotional contradiction it represents. I was drawn to the space where vulnerability and confidence coexist, because I think that’s where people are at their most authentic.

We often carry strength and uncertainty at the same time, and I wanted the image to reflect that complexity without forcing a clear explanation. I wasn’t trying to tell a complete story. Instead, I wanted to capture a single moment that feels as though it belongs to a much larger narrative.

Is she waiting, remembering, escaping, or simply existing in silence? I deliberately left those questions unanswered because I believe mystery invites a deeper emotional connection. The unresolved tension allows each viewer to project their own experiences onto the image, making the story personal rather than fixed.

Read Full Interview Here

How has photography changed the way you experience everyday life?

Absolutely. Photography has taught me to slow down and pay attention to things that might otherwise go unnoticed. I find myself observing the way light falls across a room, the silence between conversations, or the small gestures people make without realizing it. Even without a camera, I’m constantly collecting moments in my mind.

It has also changed the way I experience emotions. Instead of seeing ordinary moments as insignificant, I’ve come to appreciate them as the building blocks of our lives and memories. I think that’s why my work is drawn to quiet, in-between moments—they remind me that beauty doesn’t always exist in extraordinary events, but often in the fleeting details we almost miss.

What lasting lesson would you share with the next generation of artists about staying true to themselves?

The most important lesson I’ve learned is that your greatest strength is your own perspective. It’s easy to compare yourself to others or feel pressured to follow trends, especially in a world where we’re constantly surrounded by images. But the work that truly lasts is the work that could only have been made by you. I’ve also learned that creativity isn’t about having all the answers it’s about staying curious, embracing uncertainty, and allowing yourself to grow.

Every project, every success, and every setback has taught me something new. If I could say one thing to the next generation of artists, it would be this: protect your curiosity, trust your intuition, and don’t be afraid to create work that reflects who you are rather than what you think people expect to see. Authenticity will always outlive trends.

As our conversation with Stavri came to an end, we found ourselves thinking about mystery. About how little of it is left in the images we see every day, and how much we have lost by explaining everything.

We scroll through hundreds of pictures a day, most of them trying to tell us exactly what to think and feel in a single glance. Stavri’s work does the opposite. It holds something back. It gives you a mood, a shadow, a suspended moment, and then trusts you to finish the story with your own life.

And there is something generous in that. She is not chasing the loudest, biggest moments either, but the quiet, in-between ones, the small gestures and passing glances we barely notice until, years later, we realise they were the memories all along. Her photographs ask us to slow down and feel, which in a world moving this fast is its own quiet gift.

We think every artist needs to hear the lesson she keeps coming back to. That your own perspective is your greatest strength. It is so easy to compare yourself to everyone else, to chase whatever is trending, especially when you are surrounded by images all day.

But the work that truly lasts, she says, is the work that could only have been made by you. Protect your curiosity. Trust your instincts. Make the thing that is honestly yours, not the thing you think people want to see. Because trends fade, and authenticity does not.

For art lovers and collectors, Stavri’s work brings a rare kind of feeling into a room. Photographs that behave like scenes from a film, full of atmosphere and emotion and unanswered questions, the kind you keep returning to and reading differently each time. They do not hand you their meaning. They stay with you, quietly, long after you have looked away. To live with one is to keep a small, open-ended story on your wall, and a reminder that the most powerful images are the ones that simply let us feel.

Follow Stavri Georgiou through the links below and see her work for yourself.

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The countdown is on. Our 101 Art Book: Faces Edition closes on 10 September 2026, and we would hate for you to miss it. We are looking for artists who know that a face is never just a face. It is a doorway into identity, memory, emotion, and everything a person hides beneath what the world sees.

Whether you paint, draw, photograph, sculpt, stitch, or collage, if your work goes deeper than the likeness, it belongs here. Medium, geography, and career stage mean nothing. A face that holds something worth a second look means everything. There is still time, but not much. Take a breath, and submit.

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At Arts to Hearts, some of the most compelling practices we encounter are the ones built across decades quietly, consistently, without anyone watching until one day the world catches up. Our Best of the Art World editorial was built to find exactly those artists. And today we are so genuinely excited to introduce you to one whose entire practice is a testament to that kind of patient, unwavering commitment.

Leo Rebolledo was born in Chile in 1980 and is now based in New Haven, Connecticut and his story is one of the most quietly moving we have encountered in this series. He is an architect and an oil pastel painter, and both of those things are equally true and equally essential to understanding who he is and what he makes.

Architecture shaped his eye for structure, proportion, space, and the relationship between people and their environments. And painting, which he never abandoned through all those years of designing buildings, became the space where he could explore something architecture never quite allowed the poetic, the psychological, the dreamlike world that lives just beneath the surface of the visible one.

His technique is unlike anything else working in this space today. Over more than three decades, Leo has pushed oil pastel beyond what most people believe the medium is capable of achieving textures, luminosity, and depth that rival oil on canvas, while developing a tactile, intimate relationship with the surface that is entirely his own.

His work combines classical tradition with elements of magical realism and symbolism, creating meticulously composed scenes where the everyday becomes mysterious, where recognisable spaces are charged with psychological weight, where figures are caught in moments of quiet contemplation that suggest entire interior worlds the viewer is invited to complete for themselves.

The recognition has been significant. He is a member of the American Artists Professional League and Poets Artists a leading international association of figurative artists based in the United States. His work has been exhibited at the Salmagundi Club in New York and the European Museum of Modern Art in Barcelona.

And in one of the most extraordinary milestones we have come across in this series one of his works has been incorporated into the Lunar Codex project, the most important art collection to be deposited on the surface of the lunar south pole, scheduled for launch via SpaceX and NASA’s Polaris mission in December 2026. His work is going to the moon. And we are so glad we got to introduce him to you first.

Let’s get to know Leo through our conversation with him and discover the practice he has been quietly building for decades.

Can you share how your journey into art began and how architecture shaped your practice?

My path into art began early, as drawing and painting were always a natural part of my life. Although I pursued architecture professionally, I never stopped painting, and both disciplines evolved together. Architecture taught me to observe structure, proportion, space, and the relationship between people and their environments.

Those principles continue to influence my paintings, where I often approach composition almost architecturally, searching for a balance between structure, light, and emotion. Over time, painting became the space where I could explore more personal and poetic aspects of experience. Today, I see architecture and art as complementary languages: one helped me understand the visible world, while the other allows me to explore what lies beneath it.

Your figures often appear caught in quiet, reflective moments. What draws you to these kinds of scenes?

I’ve always been fascinated by the inner lives of people. I’m less interested in what a figure is doing than in what they might be thinking, remembering, fearing, or longing for. A quiet moment can often reveal more than a dramatic event. Many of my paintings begin with ordinary situations, but I look for ways to suggest that something deeper is taking place beneath the surface.

I’m interested in that threshold where reality and the inner world meet—where memory, emotion, and imagination begin to shape our experience. Ultimately, these scenes are about creating space for reflection. I want viewers to slow down, enter the painting, and perhaps recognize something of their own lives in the silence and ambiguity of the image.

In On the Margins, the title suggests ideas of distance or belonging. What conversations were you hoping to open through this work?

*On the Margins* was inspired by a question that has become increasingly relevant in contemporary society: what does it mean to belong? We live in cities that are more connected than ever, yet many people experience a profound sense of isolation, invisibility, or disconnection. The painting is set in Bethesda Terrace, one of the most visited and iconic spaces in New York City. People constantly pass through it, crossing paths without truly seeing one another. I was interested in that contrast between physical proximity and emotional distance.

The young woman occupies the foreground, absorbed in her own thoughts, while blurred figures move around her, suggesting the relentless pace of urban life. At the same time, a homeless figure sits quietly in the background, almost unnoticed. For me, that presence is important because it raises questions about who is seen and who remains invisible within our shared public spaces.

Rather than offering answers, I hoped the painting would open a conversation about belonging, exclusion, and human connection. We have all experienced moments of feeling at the center of things and, at other times, on the margins. What interested me was exploring that fragile boundary between being part of the world and feeling separate from it, even when surrounded by others.

Read Full Interview Here

Do your paintings usually begin with a written idea, sketches, photographs, or simply an image in your mind?

My paintings almost always begin with a reflection rather than a visual plan. Ideas tend to appear unexpectedly during everyday life, often triggered by something I encounter in my surroundings—a fleeting gesture, a particular quality of light, an interaction between people, or a moment that carries an emotional or symbolic weight beyond what is immediately visible. Those moments are usually brief, so when I recognize them, I take photographs.

Photography allows me to capture the raw material of an idea before it disappears. I often take many images from different angles and perspectives, not because I intend to reproduce them literally, but because they help me anchor a feeling or impression that first caught my attention. From there, the painting gradually takes on a life of its own.

The photographs become references rather than prescriptions. Elements are added, removed, rearranged, or transformed as I search for a composition that communicates the original idea more clearly. In that sense, my work begins with observation, but it ultimately evolves through imagination, memory, and reflection.

You’ve said your figures and settings usually come from your own life. How literal is that real people, real rooms?

There is usually a connection to my own life, but it is rarely literal. I don’t have access to many professional models, so I often use my wife as a starting point. I might borrow a pose, a gesture, or a particular expression, but I am not trying to portray her as a specific person. The figure gradually transforms into a character shaped by imagination rather than biography. I also gather a large number of photographic references, including images from social media, to help me develop these characters.

My goal is not to reproduce real people but to create believable fictional individuals who can carry the emotional or psychological ideas I want to explore. The settings work in a similar way. Many of them begin with real places—rooms, buildings, or locations that I encounter in everyday life. But as the painting develops, those spaces are altered, combined, or reimagined to serve the narrative.

I think of them less as records of actual places and more as stages where the story of the painting can unfold. So while my work is rooted in reality, it ultimately lives somewhere between observation and invention.

You’ve said nothing is wasted, not even your years in architecture. What would you tell an artist who feels time spent elsewhere was lost?

I would tell that artist that nothing is truly lost if it has contributed to shaping who they are. I don’t see my years in architecture as a detour from painting, but rather as a fundamental part of my visual language. Architecture taught me about structure, composition, space, light, and the relationship between humans and their environments all elements that are deeply present in my work today.

Sometimes we look at our path expecting it to be a straight line, but artistic development is rarely linear. Every experience, even those that seem unrelated at the time, can become a resource later. The important thing is to remain attentive and allow those experiences to transform into something meaningful. I believe an artist’s life is not a collection of separate chapters, but a continuous process of accumulation.

The things we learn, the places we go, and even the years we spend exploring other fields eventually find their way into the work. Nothing is wasted; everything becomes part of the story we are trying to tell.

As we wrapped our conversation with Leo, we found ourselves sitting with something that felt genuinely reassuring in the best possible way.

That nothing is truly lost if it has contributed to shaping who you are. That the years in architecture were not a detour from painting they were part of the painting. That every experience, even the ones that seem unrelated at the time, eventually finds its way into the work. That is such a simple idea. And such a difficult one to actually believe when you are in the middle of a path that does not look like the one you imagined for yourself.

Because most of us have a version of that story. The years spent doing something else. The detour that felt, at the time, like a loss. The creative identity we carried quietly and privately because the world around us was pointing somewhere more practical.

Leo carried his for decades painting through all of it, never stopping, never quite calling himself a painter until the practice itself made the declaration unnecessary. And the visual language that came from all of those year, the architectural eye, the childhood oil pastels, the classical training, the contemporary psychological themes is something that could not have arrived any other way. It needed all of it. Every single year.

There is something genuinely important in that for anyone who feels like they have lost time. Like the path has not been direct enough. Like the work they are making now is somehow behind where it should be. Leo’s entire career is the answer to that feeling.

Nothing is wasted. Everything accumulates. And the practice that emerges from a life fully lived with all its detours and disciplines and years of quiet commitment is almost always richer and more distinctly personal than the one that arrived in a straight line.

For those who collect work that carries that kind of depth work built across decades of genuine dedication, rooted in a visual language that could only have come from one particular life Leo’s paintings offer exactly that. The kind that reward every return visit with something new.

Follow Leo Rebolledo through the links below. Some practices are worth the wait.

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In Los Angeles, an old hospital building has been given a completely unexpected second life. Its corridors, patient rooms, operating rooms, nurses’ stations, and other clinical spaces have been transformed into an immersive art experience exploring something we all have, but rarely know how to put into words: our emotions.

Welcome to the Hospital of Emotions.

Set inside the former St. Vincent Medical Center at 2131 W 3rd Street in Los Angeles, this temporary exhibition brings together more than 70 artists across four floors and more than 80 hospital rooms. Instead of presenting art on the familiar white walls of a gallery, the exhibition asks artists to transform entire spaces into emotional worlds. Joy, love, fear, anger, hope, sadness, gratitude, resilience, and other deeply human experiences become the subjects of these rooms.

And perhaps that is what makes this exhibition especially interesting for anyone thinking about artist wellness. Because sometimes we don’t need another reminder to be productive, create more, post more, sell more, or turn our creativity into something useful. Sometimes we simply need a place to feel.

About the Project: A Hospital for the Heart

Hospital of Emotions is presented by the curatorial and creative team behind House of Art and Dreams, together with ROYVA Group and the St. Vincent Behavioral Health Campus.

The idea is wonderfully simple: take a former hospital and allow artists to turn it into a living museum of human emotion. But the simplicity of the idea is exactly what gives it so much room to breathe.

Hospitals are places where some of our biggest and most vulnerable experiences happen. They are associated with fear, uncertainty, waiting, relief, loss, recovery, birth, exhaustion, hope, and care. They are places where people are often reminded just how fragile and precious life can be. Hospital of Emotions takes that existing emotional history and places contemporary art inside it.

The building isn’t simply being used as a venue. The building becomes part of the artwork.

Artists work with the existing architecture and, in many cases, the traces of what the building once was. Patient rooms remain patient rooms. Corridors remain corridors. Medical spaces become unexpected canvases. Walls, floors, ceilings, furniture, and hospital fixtures are incorporated into immersive environments.

When Every Room Has a Feeling

Hospital of Emotions is divided into different emotional “departments,” including Joy, Love, Fear, Anger, Hope, Sadness, Gratitude, and Resilience.

It is a clever way of organizing an exhibition that could otherwise feel overwhelming. You aren’t simply walking through a collection of installations. You are moving through different parts of being human.

One room might make you laugh. Another might make you uncomfortable. Another might remind you of something you’ve forgotten. You might walk into one expecting something playful and discover something unexpectedly tender instead.

There is no single correct way to experience it. And that feels particularly important. We often talk about emotions as if they should be sorted neatly: happiness is good, sadness is bad, anger should be controlled, fear should be overcome.

But real life doesn’t work that way. We can feel hopeful and exhausted at the same time. We can be grateful while grieving. We can love someone and still be angry with them. We can be afraid and still move forward. Art has always had a way of making those contradictions feel less strange. Hospital of Emotions gives those contradictions physical rooms.

The Hospital Rooms Become the Art

One of the most fascinating parts of the exhibition is the relationship between the artists and the rooms they were given. Instead of starting with a blank gallery, the artists had to respond to a building that already had its own personality and history.

Some installations are playful and colorful. Others are quieter, stranger, darker, or more emotionally intense. The result is an exhibition where turning a corner can completely change your experience.

The former hospital’s operating rooms, patient rooms, ER spaces, nurses’ stations, and corridors have all been transformed. Artists have worked across walls, ceilings, floors, and furniture, creating environments that you don’t simply look at from a distance. You physically enter them.

Meet the Artists Behind the Emotional Worlds

The exhibition brings together a remarkably broad group of artists.

What makes the roster particularly interesting is its variety. The exhibition doesn’t seem interested in creating one uniform visual language. Instead, artists from different backgrounds and disciplines bring their own ways of thinking about emotion into the building.

And that variety is important because there is no universal visual language for feeling. One artist may respond to fear through darkness and abstraction. Another may turn it into something playful. Someone else might approach grief through memory, while another artist might think about resilience through humor.

That is the beauty of giving artists the freedom to interpret an emotion for themselves.

A Few Rooms That Stay With You

Some of the exhibition’s installations demonstrate just how differently artists can approach the same broad question: What does this emotion feel like?

In the Fear Department, artist Kamil Cazpiga, working as Cosmodernism, created a room filled with television screens displaying strange, fluid, maze-like imagery. The imagery comes from paint drops viewed under a powerful microscope, revealing something almost biological and otherworldly within something as familiar as paint.

In the Resilience Department, Israeli street artist Guy “Dioz” Bloom created a scene involving a sick patient and anxious family members, represented through colorful, horned creatures known as Techno Trolls. The work is playful in appearance while carrying a much heavier emotional reality underneath.

Then there is a completely different kind of tenderness in the Sadness Department.

These examples make one thing particularly clear: An emotion doesn’t have to look the way we expect it to.

Joy can exist inside a hospital. Fear can be strangely beautiful. Sadness can be full of color. Resilience can have a sense of humor.

Why This Exhibition Belongs in an Artist Wellness Conversation

There is something very comforting about seeing emotions given space. Especially for artists.

Creative people are often encouraged to turn difficult experiences into something beautiful. But there is a difference between creating from an experience and feeling pressured to make every difficult experience productive.

Hospital of Emotions offers another possibility…

Continue to Read Here

Art Outside the White Cube

Hospital of Emotions also asks us to reconsider where contemporary art belongs.

The project was deliberately created outside the traditional museum and gallery environment, with the aim of making contemporary art more accessible and approachable to a wider public. You don’t need an art history degree to walk through these rooms. You don’t need to know the “right” interpretation. You don’t even have to be someone who regularly visits exhibitions.

A Temporary Place to Slow Down

Hospital of Emotions opened to the public on May 27, 2026, and was originally expected to close at the end of July. Following a strong response from visitors, the exhibition has been extended and will now remain open through September 30, 2026.

The exhibition is located at 2131 W 3rd Street, Los Angeles, California, inside the former St. Vincent Medical Center. Visitors enter at a scheduled time and then explore the exhibition at their own pace rather than following a guided tour.

That unhurried aspect feels fitting. Because if the exhibition is asking us to pay attention to our emotions, rushing through it would almost miss the point.

Maybe We All Need a Hospital of Emotions

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from constantly trying to be okay.

As artists, as professionals, as friends, as family members, as people simply trying to make it through ordinary days, we can become very good at moving forward without checking in with ourselves.

Hospital of Emotions offers a playful, colorful, sometimes strange reminder that there is more to wellness than simply keeping ourselves functioning.

That is what makes this exhibition worth paying attention to. It isn’t asking art to solve our emotions. It is allowing art to sit beside them.

For a temporary moment, an old hospital in Los Angeles becomes something completely different: not a place where we are expected to arrive with answers, but a place where we can arrive exactly as we are. And perhaps that is the loveliest prescription of all.

Come as you are. Feel what you feel. Stay for a while.

At Arts to Hearts Project, our Women Artists on the Rise Edition 4 is full of women telling their stories in a hundred different ways. But every so often, an artist tells hers through a single, tender relationship, the wordless bond between a person and an animal. That is what drew us to Nancy Boisvert.

Nancy is a self-taught painter from Montreal, and she has been at this for more than twenty years now. She works mostly in oil, on linen and canvas, and there are almost always two of them in the frame, a person and an animal, caught together in one still, quiet moment.

The animal is never just sitting there to look nice. It carries as much of the story as the person does. Sometimes it feels like a friend, sometimes like a witness, and sometimes like a piece of whatever the person is feeling but not saying.

What hits you first is how quiet everything is. Nobody is doing anything big. It’s a tilt of the head, where someone is looking, the way a hand is resting, an animal simply standing close by. She keeps the background down to almost nothing, so your eye has nowhere else to wander, and the whole painting ends up resting on that one small, loaded moment between the two of them. With Nancy, what she leaves out matters as much as what she keeps in.

She usually doesn’t begin with the whole story worked out. It starts with a feeling, or some small idea, and she plays around with poses and expressions until something finally feels true. A few ideas sit with her for months before they ever make it onto the canvas.

She isn’t trying to tell you what to think. She’s trying to hold a single paused moment, like something just happened, or is about to, and then she hands the rest over to you.

Here and there she’ll add a little gold leaf or a soft pattern, a quiet nod to Gustav Klimt, but never just for decoration. She keeps it sparing, and only reaches for it when it lifts the mood or marks something as precious. Her work lives somewhere between the real and the imagined.

The people and animals are painted with genuine care and skill, but what’s actually going on between them stays open, symbolic, a little unresolved. It looks familiar at first, and then it quietly refuses to leave your head.

She got here entirely on her own terms. No art school, no set path, just years of painting, experimenting, and slowly learning to trust her gut, and that freedom is a big part of why the work feels so completely hers. These days her paintings hang in private collections across Canada, the US, and Europe, there’s a residency in France coming up, and she’s found a warm circle of fellow Canadian women artists along the way.

Now let’s hear from Nancy about her self-taught path, the bond between people and animals, and finding a voice that’s truly her own.

Before we talk about your paintings, could you tell us a little about your journey and how you found your way to becoming an artist?

I’ve always been drawn to creative things, but becoming an artist wasn’t something I planned. It happened gradually. What started as curiosity became a passion, and over the years I found myself wanting to paint more and more. I’m largely self-taught, and my work has evolved through a lot of experimentation, curiosity, and simply painting consistently.

Every piece has taught me something. I don’t come from a traditional fine arts background, so I wasn’t following a set path. I was finding my own voice through trial and error. Today, creating art feels less like something I do and more like who I am. I love building quiet, thoughtful narratives that invite people to pause, look a little longer, and discover their own meaning in the work. That journey is still unfolding, and I think that’s one of the most rewarding parts of being an artist.

What makes the relationship between humans and animals so important to your practice?

I’ve always felt a strong connection to animals. They communicate so much without words, and I think people naturally project emotions and stories onto them. There’s an honesty about animals that I find incredibly compelling. When I pair them with human figures, I’m not trying to illustrate a specific narrative. Instead, I’m creating space for interpretation.

Sometimes the animal acts as a companion, sometimes as a witness, a guide, or even a reflection of something happening within the person. The relationship shifts from one painting to the next. I hope viewers bring their own experiences to the work.

Those quiet, open-ended connections are what interest me most.

Read Full Interview Here

What does a minimal background make possible in your paintings?

I’ve found that the less I include, the more intentional every element has to be. By simplifying the background, the viewer’s attention naturally stays on the relationship between the figure and the animal, along with the subtle expressions and gestures that carry the story. I also like the sense of quiet that minimal backgrounds create.

They give the paintings room to breathe and leave space for imagination rather than defining every detail of a place or time. For me, what’s left out is just as important as what’s included. That simplicity helps create an atmosphere where the emotional connection becomes the focus.

Contemporary figurative painting is constantly evolving. Where do you see your work fitting within today’s art world?

I think my work sits somewhere between realism and imagination. The figures and animals are painted realistically, but the relationships between them are symbolic rather than literal. I’m interested in creating paintings that feel familiar at first glance, yet encourage viewers to pause and discover something unexpected. In a time when so much imagery is scroll-driven, I’m drawn to making work that asks people to slow down.

I hope my paintings invite quiet reflection and leave room for personal interpretation rather than delivering a single, fixed message. If my work has a place in today’s art world, I hope it’s as a reminder that simplicity, curiosity, and emotional connection still have the power to resonate.

What do you think collectors connect with most when they encounter your work?

From the conversations I’ve had, I think people connect with the sense of emotion and mystery in the paintings. They’re often curious about the relationship between the human figure and the animal, and they begin creating their own story. I love hearing those interpretations because they’re often completely different from my own.

I also think the quietness of the work resonates with people. The paintings don’t demand attention, they invite it. They ask viewers to slow down, spend time looking, and notice the small details. If someone walks away still thinking about one of my paintings, or sees something new each time they return to it, then I feel I’ve achieved what I hoped for.

What advice would you give to artists who are trying to develop a visual language that feels authentic to them?

I would tell them not to rush the process. Finding your own visual language takes time, and it’s something that develops through making the work, not by searching for a style. Be curious. Experiment with different ideas, techniques, and subjects, and don’t be afraid to make paintings that don’t work. Every piece teaches you something, even the ones that never leave your studio.

Most importantly, paint what genuinely fascinates you, not what you think people want to see.

As our conversation with Nancy came to an end, we kept coming back to how rare quiet has become. How much of it we lose simply because we never slow down enough to notice it is gone.

The world runs on speed now. Images rush past us all day, most of them shouting for a second of attention before we scroll on to the next one. Nancy’s paintings just refuse to play that game. They don’t shout. They wait. They ask you to stop for a minute and sit with something small, a person and an animal, close together, until you start to feel whatever is quietly passing between them.

And there’s something honest about putting the two side by side. Animals don’t pretend or perform, and next to one, a person somehow looks more real too, softer, more open, closer to the parts of themselves we usually keep tucked away. By keeping things quiet, Nancy is really just asking us to feel a little more.

There’s another part of her story we think a lot of artists need to hear. There isn’t one correct way to become an artist. Nancy never set foot in an art school. She found her voice the slow way, one painting at a time, making mistakes and learning to trust herself over more than twenty years.

And what she says about it is simple, but not easy. Don’t rush. A voice that’s really yours doesn’t come from copying a style or chasing whatever is popular. It shows up on its own, gradually, when you keep making the work that actually means something to you. The honest work is the work that lasts.

For collectors, her paintings bring a kind of calm into a room that’s genuinely hard to find. They never grab at you, they just quietly earn their place, and they hold a little mystery you find yourself going back to. People tend to see their own story in them, often something totally different from what Nancy had in mind, and that’s exactly how she wants it. To live with one of her paintings is to keep a small, tender moment on your wall, and a gentle reminder to slow down and actually look.

Follow Nancy Boisvert through the links below and see her work for yourself.

INSTAGRAM

Time is running out. Our 101 Art Book: Faces Edition closes on 10 September 2026, and we are looking for artists who know that a face is never just a face. It is a doorway. Into identity, memory, emotion, and everything a person carries beneath the surface.

Paint it, draw it, photograph it, sculpt it, stitch it, or collage it, however it comes to you, as long as your work goes deeper than the likeness. Medium, geography, and career stage do not matter. A face that holds something worth looking at twice is everything. The clock is ticking, and every featured artist once submitted before it ran out. This could be your edition.

Submit Here

At Arts to Hearts Project, we see a lot of art. Every week, every medium, every possible way of making something and putting it into the world. Paintings, drawings, photographs, ceramics, textiles it all finds its way to us, and we love every bit of it.

But this week we are dedicating our heart list entirely to sculpture. Because sculpture done well is one of the most extraordinary things in contemporary art right now and the artists we kept coming back to this week were all working in three dimensions in ways that we simply could not look away from.

There is something about a sculpture that gets you differently from anything flat. It is not just something you look at it is something you are in the presence of. It breathes. It occupies the same space you do. It has weight and shadow and a physical reality that a canvas never quite has.

You walk around it and it changes. The light on it shifts. What you see from one angle disappears from another. And the best sculptors know exactly how to use that how to make something that rewards every angle and holds something true from every direction.

This is our heart list for this week.

1. Reflexiones Silenciosas by Inés Lara @ineslara_sculpture

First on our heart list this week is this quietly extraordinary ceramic sculpture by Inés Lara, called Reflexiones Silenciosas Silent Reflections. It is the bust of a woman with her eyes closed, completely calm, a scattering of flowers set into her hair. She is glazed in deep blue-black and streaks of metallic gold, with a weathered, almost molten finish that makes the clay look ancient and alive at the same time. And then you notice the quietest part of all: three smaller faces, eyes closed too, surfacing gently from her chest like thoughts, or memories, or the selves she carries around inside her.

It is high-temperature fired ceramic, and not a large piece but it holds an enormous amount of stillness. Inés Lara is a sculptor from Tlaxiaco, Oaxaca, now based in Oaxaca de Juárez, who trained at the Centro de Arte Saúl Serrano and the Centro de las Artes de San Agustín. She works clay into these figures of women, nature and quiet mythology pieces about the space between the body and everything it holds and has shown her work across Mexico and beyond.

Find her work and give her a follow, there is a real depth to everything she makes.

02. An anatomy in formation by Neta Bachrach @netabachrach

An anatomy in formation by Neta Bachrach earns its place on our heartlist this week, a piece that feels less made than grown. It hangs on the wall like a creature caught halfway through becoming itself: a rounded hood folds over at the top, and beneath it a tangle of limbs spills downward in browns, rust and cream, each one twisting a little differently from the last.

The surface is felted and fibrous, warm enough that you almost want to reach out and touch it less like an object and more like an organism. There’s a sea-creature logic to it, but the title keeps you honest: this is a body still forming, an anatomy that hasn’t quite finished deciding what it is.

Neta is a Tel Aviv–based mixed media artist working in contemporary sculpture, and that instinct for shapes sitting right between the familiar and the invented runs through everything on her page.

Follow along, her feed is full of forms you won’t have seen anywhere else.

03. The fold by Regardt van der Meulen @regardtvandermeulen

Third on our heart list this week is The fold by Regardt van der Meulen and it’s one you feel before you understand. It’s a tall figure wrapped in a hood, cloaked from head to toe, the face hidden in shadow. But look closer and the whole thing is full of holes and gaps, like it’s slowly falling apart while it just stands there.

That’s the strange bit: it’s made of steel, but it feels soft, almost breakable. Even the way it stands adds to it the weight shifted onto one leg, the other easing forward, so the whole figure feels caught mid-step rather than frozen in place.

Regardt is a sculptor based in Johannesburg, and he trained at the University of Cape Town. For years he’s been making these broken, unravelling human figures about memory, time and how fragile a body really is and this one sit right at the heart of that.

Follow him and scroll a while every piece carries this same quiet weight.

For more visit our website

4. CHARLY by Paula Pons @paula_pons

Our fourth pick this week is CHARLY by Paula Pons and you have to look twice before it hits you that the whole thing is made of newspaper. It’s a life-size seated figure, one leg crossed over the other, a cigarette held up in one hand, glasses and moustache and that unmistakable hair a portrait of Charly García, the legendary Argentine rock musician.

What gets you is the material: it’s all newspaper and packing tape, the trousers built from bright magazine pages, the shirt and face from soft grey newsprint. Out of crumpled paper she’s somehow caught a real pose and a real presence he looks like he’s mid-sentence, about to say something back to you.

Paula is a Buenos Aires artist who came to sculpture from painting, and started working with newspaper almost by accident in 2012 — she’s been building these big paper figures ever since, and shows regularly around the city.

Follow her and watch what she pulls out of a stack of old paper is its own reward.

5. Autism by Bartek Śnieciński @bartek_sniecinski

Last on our heart list this week and honestly our favourite of the whole list is Autism by Bartek Śnieciński. It’s one of the smallest pieces here, but easily one of the quietest and heaviest: a little bronze form standing on thin, delicate legs, its body opening outward in the middle like a shell or a small dress.

The head at the top is rough and broken open, as if you’re being quietly let in on whatever is happening inside it. There’s a real tenderness to how closed-off and self-contained the whole thing feel, a full inner world folded into 31 centimetres of bronze.

Bartek is a Polish artist from the woods just outside Warsaw, who came to sculpture after years of working as a photographer. His work tends to take something ordinary and turn it into something strange and deeply felt, and this piece is a good example of exactly that.

Take a look through the rest there’s a lot going on beneath the surface with him.

Five sculptures this week that proved something we already knew but needed to be reminded of that art made with your hands, shaped from real material, existing in real space, hits differently than anything else. Go show these artists some love. Follow them, share their work, leave a comment that actually says something.

And if you work in mixed media The Big Book of Mixed Media Artists 2026 by Arts to Hearts Project is open for submissions right now.

This is a hardcover publication bringing together 100 artists whose practices move across materials, techniques and disciplines collage, assemblage, painting, textiles, found objects, photography, printmaking and beyond. No prescribed subject, no single visual language.

Just your work, exactly as it is. 100 selected artists each receive a dedicated two-page spread, a certificate, and promotion through Arts to Hearts Project. There is also a $500 cash award and a glass trophy for the winner. Submissions close September 21st, 2026.

Apply here

The Thomas Crown Affair (1999) is very much the second kind.

Directed by John McTiernan and starring Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo, this sleek art-heist romance follows Thomas Crown, a self-made billionaire who has reached the slightly unusual problem of having too much of everything. Money? Plenty. Luxury? Everywhere. Beautiful women? Certainly. The next challenge, then, is to find something money cannot simply buy.

His answer is a Monet.

Crown steals Claude Monet’s San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk from a New York museum in an elaborate scheme that is less about financial gain than the thrill of getting away with something impossible. Enter Catherine Banning, an insurance investigator hired to recover the missing painting. She quickly suspects Crown, but proving it is another matter entirely.

What follows is part art heist, part detective story, part romance and, perhaps most interestingly, a meditation on why humans become so emotionally attached to objects that can be worth millions.

If you love art, this is one of those films you really should watch. Not because it teaches you art history. It doesn’t. Watch it because it understands something artists, collectors and museum-goers already know: sometimes we don’t just want to look at art. We want to possess it.

Thomas Crown: When Buying Art Is Not Enough

Thomas Crown is introduced as a man who can buy almost anything. That is precisely his problem. He lives surrounded by beautiful things. His home is filled with paintings, his wardrobe is immaculate, his money gives him access to spaces most people never enter. But ownership has stopped feeling exciting because almost everything is accessible to him.

So he chooses something that cannot simply be purchased. A masterpiece.

Crown’s theft of Monet is deliberately extravagant, but his motivation is surprisingly personal. He isn’t trying to sell the painting. He doesn’t need the money. He wants the experience of taking something extraordinary and making it his.

Why do people spend enormous amounts of money on paintings when they could buy perfectly attractive objects for much less? Why does owning an original matter when we can see high-resolution reproductions online? Why does a painting become more desirable when we are told it is rare, historically important or almost impossible to acquire?

Crown takes this desire to an extreme. He isn’t simply collecting art. He is collecting the experience of possession. And that makes his relationship with art fascinatingly uncomfortable.

The film never really asks us to approve of his theft. Instead, it makes us understand the seduction of it. The museum becomes a playground, the painting becomes a prize, and Crown becomes the kind of person who sees the art world not as a collection of rules but as a collection of games.

His wealth gets him close to art. His boredom makes him want to break the rules around it.

Catherine Banning: The Woman Who Sees Through the Game

If Crown represents possession, Catherine Banning represents pursuit. Played by Rene Russo, Catherine is an insurance investigator brought in to recover the stolen Monet. She is sharp, confident and completely unwilling to be impressed by Crown’s wealth. And this is what makes their chemistry work.

Catherine doesn’t fall for Crown because he is rich. In fact, one of the most enjoyable things about the film is watching her treat his wealth almost like background noise.

She is interested in the puzzle. She studies the theft. She notices inconsistencies. She understands that the elaborate robbery was designed as a distraction and eventually connects Crown to the missing painting. But Catherine is also fascinated by him. Because Crown gives her something her job rarely does: a worthy opponent.

Their relationship becomes a strange extension of the art heist itself. They are constantly trying to figure out who is watching whom, who has the upper hand and who will make the next move.

In that sense, Catherine is not simply the investigator chasing the art thief. She becomes another collector of sorts. She wants to collect evidence. Crown wants to collect experiences. Both are obsessed with the chase.

And the film cleverly blurs the line between professional pursuit and attraction until Catherine has to confront a much more difficult question: if she catches him, what exactly is she going to do with the person she has come to understand?

Her character also gives the film some much-needed balance. Crown can afford to treat the world like a game. Catherine cannot. She has a professional responsibility, a reputation and a very real case to solve.

Yet she is also tempted by the game. That tension is what makes her more interesting than simply being “the woman who catches the thief.”

The Paintings Are Characters Too

One of the reasons The Thomas Crown Affair is such a treat for art lovers is that the paintings actually matter. They are not random background decoration.

Monet’s San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk is the obvious star. It is beautiful, recognizable and valuable enough to justify the entire plot. But the movie keeps introducing us to other works, creating a visual world around Crown and Catherine.

There is René Magritte’s The Son of Man, Camille Pissarro’s The Artist’s Garden at Eragny, Edouard Manet’s The Banks of the Seine at Argenteuil, and other paintings woven into Crown’s home and the museum.

The selection tells us something about him. Crown doesn’t surround himself with art because he needs empty walls filled. He has an eye for works that carry cultural weight, visual intrigue and a certain intellectual prestige.

And then there is the brilliant use of the fake Monet. The stolen painting is eventually revealed to be an imitation, part of Crown’s elaborate deception. The film turns authenticity itself into a plot twist.

What makes something an original? What makes a copy valuable? And how much of our response to art depends on what we believe we are looking at? These questions are particularly delicious for artists.

Because artists spend their lives thinking about originality. About influence. About imitation. About what makes a work unmistakably their own.

The Thomas Crown Affair takes those ideas and turns them into a thriller. The fake painting isn’t merely a clever plot device. It becomes a reminder that in the art world, authenticity can be as powerful as appearance.

Read the Full Article Here

Why Artists and Art Lovers Should Watch This Movie

If you’re an artist, there is something particularly useful about watching The Thomas Crown Affair with the art world in mind. Look beyond the romance.

Look at the way paintings are framed, displayed and discussed. Notice how a museum changes the meaning of a work. Notice how Crown’s home becomes an extension of his identity through the art he chooses to live with. And pay attention to the difference between seeing art and owning it. Artists spend years making objects that eventually leave their hands.

A painting begins in a studio, becomes a finished work, enters an exhibition, gets photographed, perhaps gets sold, and then continues its life somewhere else.

The artist creates it. The collector possesses it. The museum protects it. The public experiences it. Who does the work ultimately belong to? The film doesn’t answer that question, but it makes you think about it. And that is where The Thomas Crown Affair becomes much more than a stylish 1999 thriller.

It understands that art has a peculiar power because it sits at the intersection of beauty, money, identity and desire.

The Final Game

Without giving away every delicious twist, the film’s ending brings everything together beautifully.

Crown’s final game involves disguises, replicas, museum crowds, sprinklers and another painting. Catherine eventually has to decide what matters more: catching the man she has been chasing or understanding the game he has been playing with her.

And that is really the heart of The Thomas Crown Affair. Thomas Crown doesn’t steal art because he needs it. He steals it because it makes him feel something. Catherine doesn’t pursue him simply because she has a job to do. She pursues him because he finally gives her something worth chasing.

And the paintings sit between them, silently absorbing all of this desire. Maybe that is the most interesting answer the movie gives us to its own question: Why do we want to own art?

Sometimes it is because we love beauty. Sometimes because we want status. Sometimes because we want history inside our homes. Sometimes because owning something rare makes us feel rare ourselves. And sometimes, perhaps, we simply want something that still has the power to make us feel.

That is what makes The Thomas Crown Affair such a delicious watch for anyone who loves art. It isn’t really a movie about stealing a Monet.

It is a movie about wanting something you cannot have, and discovering how much more exciting the desire can become because of it.

At Arts to Hearts Project, our 100 Emerging Artists of 2026 is full of artists who found their voice in unexpected places, gathered from every corner of the world and every stage of a creative life. Some found it early, some found it after everything else fell away.

Monica Bergquist found hers in the middle of loss, returning to painting after twenty years and discovering a whole new way of seeing, one where rivers, cells, and galaxies all seem to speak the same language. The moment we saw it, we knew.

Monica is an abstract artist based in Montana. She lives close to open land, rivers, and mountains, and you can feel all of that in her work. She paints with mixed media, and the first thing that pulls you in is the surface itself. These are not flat, neat pictures. They are built up and broken down, layer over layer, until they feel less like paintings and more like something that grew on its own.

That look is not an accident, and yet a lot of it is. Monica works almost like a force of nature herself. She starts by pouring thin paint and letting it run, guiding it into shapes that copy the way water moves earth around. Then she works against that softness.

She carves into thick paint with sharp tools, sprays and splatters, draws into it with charcoal, and sometimes puts the paint on so thick that the top dries and cracks while the layers underneath are still wet. Every mark is a choice, but the final look always belongs partly to chemistry, physics, and time.

She calls herself the “steward” of each painting instead of its boss, and that one word tells you a lot. She is not trying to control every inch. She gets things moving and then reacts to what the paint does, leaving room for the accidents and surprises she could never have planned.

She often lays a clean, straight grid over the wild, flowing shapes underneath, so the finished piece feels like a talk between order and chaos. For her, the accident and the plan are not enemies. They need each other.

It helps to know that Monica is also a scientist. Along with her training in Fine Arts, she has a degree in Nutritional Science and works as a Registered Dietitian, and she sees these two sides of herself as partners, not opposites. Science looks for the patterns.

Art is happy to sit with everything that cannot be fully explained. Her paintings live right in that space, which is why they can look like a river seen from high above one moment and something alive under a microscope the next. She is glad to let you decide which one you are seeing.

What holds it all together is a simple belief that beauty comes from disruption, not perfection. She is drawn to the cracks, the scars, and the places where something breaks or changes direction, because that is so often where the truth is.

Maybe that makes sense for someone who found her own way back to art through loss, after twenty years away, in the middle of a busy life. Whatever the reason, you can feel it in the work. A deep acceptance that the messy, layered, unpredictable path is the real one, and that it holds its own kind of beauty.

Now let’s hear from Monica about her return to art, her love of chance, and why imperfection is where the beauty lives.

Monica, can you take us back to the beginning of your journey and what brought you back to painting?

After grieving the loss of my mom, my soul needed to create. It became both an escape and a way to move through my grief, a practice that grounded me and deepened my connection to the present. The idea that humans are nothing more than a slow, complex biochemical reaction has always felt incomplete to me. We carry something that cannot be measured or quantified. Whether we call it consciousness, spirit, love, or simply the essence of being alive, there is a depth within us that exists beyond chemistry alone. Creating became my way of listening to that mystery and finding my way and purpose through loss.

How has studying nutritional science shaped the way you understand painting?

“You are what you eat.” We’ve all heard that saying, and there is truth in it. Our physical, mental, and emotional well-being is shaped by the food, information, media, and energy we absorb every day.

Allowing space for something unexpected reminds me that I am alive. It reminds me that growth, transformation, and creativity all begin with what we take in and how we respond to it.

What has being a “steward” of your paintings taught you about creativity?

I leave room for chemistry, physics, and time to introduce unplanned elements into my work. This approach helps me stay present during making, as each decision shapes the painting’s evolving system as a whole. There is intention, but also space for the unexpected to emerge, something that can feel like a kind of magic. I can become fully absorbed in this process when I allow it to unfold.

What has working between science and art taught you about creativity?

I see both scientists and artists as observers, recognizing patterns others may not immediately notice, and both rely on creativity and problem-solving to push the boundaries of current understanding.

Science often approaches questions as problems with answers to be discovered, while art accepts and works within the possibility that some things may remain unknowable from our limited perspective. For me, in painting especially, there is room for emotions and experiences that don’t translate easily into words or clear definitions. Yet a painting can still evoke a shared, almost universal response.

I am drawn to the idea that something greater can emerge through artistic practice, including forms of understanding that sit outside of what can be fully explained through science.

Read Full Interview Here

Why is it important to you that abstraction remains open-ended?

Abstraction offers the most coherent language for openness to evolution. If paintings functioned like punctuation, abstract work depicts question marks, expressionistic work, maybe an ellipsis, representational work as a period, and surrealist work feels a bit like an exclamation point. Years spent studying science reinforce the sense that increased knowledge often expands uncertainty rather than resolving it.

Representational painting, when it states exactly what it depicts without storytelling, can feel like a closed statement rather than an ongoing exchange. Abstract work, by contrast, sustains a dialogue by refusing to settle into a single answer. Its openness draws the viewer into interpretation, reflection, and self-inquiry. Meaning emerges through sustained attention rather than immediate recognition. Over time, the work can shift alongside the viewer, changing as perception and lived experience evolve. In that sense, the painting grows alongside the viewer.

What would you say to artists who feel it’s too late to begin again?

It’s never too late to begin again. Many artists find their voice later in life, and what matters most is showing up for yourself, whenever it works. As the proverb says, “The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now.

Talking with Monica left us thinking about second chances. About the parts of our lives we quietly set aside, and whether it is ever really too late to pick them back up.

Monica’s whole way of working goes the other way. She gets the paint moving and then steps back. She lets it pour and crack and do its own thing, and she trusts that something beautiful will come from the parts she did not plan. Spend a little time with her work and this starts to feel like more than a painting method. It feels like a way of living.

Most of us are taught that perfect is the goal, that a smooth, tidy, controlled life is the one to aim for. Monica’s paintings gently disagree. They say the cracks and the wrong turns and the accidents are not mistakes. They are where the real beauty is.

And there is something else in her story that we think a lot of people need to hear. It is never too late to start again. Monica stepped away from art for twenty years, and she came back after loss, in the middle of a full and busy life, and she is making some of her best work right now.

The world loves to tell us there is a right time for everything, and that once it passes, the door is closed. Her journey says the opposite. As the old saying she loves goes, the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago, and the second best time is today.

For art lovers and collectors, Monica’s work brings something rare into a room. A painting that can look like a river from a plane one moment and a living cell under a microscope the next. Layer upon layer of pour and scratch and grid, holding science and feeling in the same frame, and quietly reminding you that we were never really separate from nature at all. Live with one, and it keeps showing you new things, changing a little each time you look, the way the best things in life tend to.

Follow Monica Bergquist through the links below and see her work for yourself.

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The surface is never just a surface. Our Big Book of Mixed Media Artists 2026 is now open for submissions, and we are looking for artists who treat their materials as partners, not just tools, layering and combining until the surface itself becomes part of the story.

However you build your work, if something real happens between the layers, we want to see it. Materials, geography, and career stage do not matter. Every artist we feature once took a breath and submitted. This could be your edition.

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Then comes the uncomfortable question: is it finally time to raise your prices?

For many artists, the fear is not really about the number itself. It is about what might happen after it changes. What if people stop buying? What if your regular customers think you have become too expensive? What if you suddenly price yourself out of the market?

These are reasonable concerns. Raising prices does carry some risk. But keeping your prices frozen forever carries a risk too: eventually, you may find yourself producing work that simply isn’t financially sustainable.

The good news is that a price increase does not have to be dramatic. In fact, artists who build sustainable careers usually treat pricing as something that develops alongside their practice. They watch what sells, keep their prices consistent, make gradual adjustments and give their buyers time to move with them.

The goal is not to suddenly become an expensive artist. The goal is to build a price structure that makes sense for the artist you are becoming.

First, Know Whether You Actually Need to Raise Your Prices

Before changing anything, look at your sales rather than your feelings.

Are your works consistently selling? Are collectors returning? Are new people buying without needing a huge discount? Are certain sizes or series selling much faster than others? Have you had a significant exhibition, award, gallery representation or other career development since you last set your prices?

These are much better indicators than simply deciding that you “deserve” to charge more.

Recent sales are particularly useful because they tell you what buyers have actually accepted, rather than what you hope they will accept. Art pricing has no universal formula, and market context, previous sales, experience, materials and demand all play a role.

You should also look at your costs. If canvas, paint, framing, shipping, studio rent or other essentials have gone up significantly, keeping the same price means your actual income from every sale has gone down.

And there is a very practical test: calculate what you actually take home from a sale. If you sell a painting for $500, but materials cost $100, shipping costs $40 and a gallery takes 50 percent, you are not earning $500. You are receiving far less than that for the hours of work that went into the piece.

A price increase may not be about becoming more successful. It may simply be about making the business viable.

Don’t Double Your Prices Overnight

One of the easiest ways to frighten your existing buyers is to make a huge jump without a corresponding reason.

If your paintings have been selling at $400, moving immediately to $1,200 is a very different proposition from moving to $475 or $500. Small, deliberate increases are easier for both you and your collectors to absorb. A 10 percent increase may not look dramatic on paper, but repeated over time it can make a meaningful difference.

There is no rule saying that every artist should increase prices by exactly 10 percent. The point is to make the change proportionate to your actual growth.

If your work has been selling consistently for a year and you have developed a stronger exhibition record, a modest increase can make sense. If you have just had your first sale, raising the price five times because another artist with a similar style charges that much probably does not.

Think progression, not reinvention.

A Very Practical Trick: Raise the Prices of New Work First

You do not necessarily have to go through your entire catalogue and change every number on the same day.

One of the simplest approaches is to introduce your new work at a higher price while allowing existing pieces to remain at their current prices for a while.

Say your 18-by-24-inch paintings are currently $600. You have been selling steadily and feel ready to move up. Instead of changing every listing immediately, you might price the next series at $675 or $700.

Now you have real information. If those paintings sell, you have evidence that buyers are accepting the new level. If they sit for considerably longer, you have something to examine before making another increase. This also creates a natural transition in your catalogue. Over time, older work sells and the new price becomes your normal price.

Artists and pricing advisers commonly recommend this kind of gradual approach because it lets the market catch up rather than forcing it to catch up overnight.

Keep Your Prices Consistent

This is one of the least glamorous parts of pricing and one of the most important.

If three paintings are roughly the same size, medium and level of complexity, they should not have wildly different prices simply because you felt differently on the day you listed them.

Create a system. You might price paintings according to size, with adjustments for particularly complex works. A 12-by-16-inch painting could have one standard range, a 16-by-20 another, and a 24-by-36 another. You can also factor in medium, framing, edition size or other meaningful differences. The exact formula matters less than having one.

Consistency makes your prices easier for galleries, collectors and even you to understand. It also prevents the awkward situation where a collector discovers that they paid considerably more for a comparable piece simply because you priced it differently six months earlier.

If you work with galleries, remember that your direct prices and gallery prices need to be coordinated. Do not undercut a gallery by offering the same work privately for substantially less. Your buyers should not have to figure out which version of your business gives them the “real” price.

Give Buyers Different Ways to Enter Your Practice

Raising the price of your originals does not mean every piece you make has to become inaccessible.

This is where having different price points can be extremely useful.

An artist might have small studies at $150–$300, medium originals at $600–$1,200, larger works at $2,000+, and prints or editions at a lower price point. Another artist might use drawings, sketches or smaller works as their entry-level pieces.

This does not mean making cheap versions of your art just to get sales. It means recognizing that collectors have different budgets. A person who cannot afford your $2,500 painting may still be able to buy a $250 drawing. That first purchase can become the beginning of a collecting relationship rather than the end of the conversation.

Saatchi Art similarly recommends maintaining a range of prices because different price points can widen the group of potential buyers.

Reward Existing Collectors Without Undercutting Yourself

You do not want to tell loyal collectors, “Everything is getting more expensive, good luck.” But you also do not want to permanently discount your work for them. Instead, give them an opportunity before the increase.

For example, if you know prices will increase on October 1, you can privately let your existing collectors know that they can purchase currently available work at the existing price until September 30.

Read the Full Article Here

What Not to Do

There are a few mistakes worth avoiding.

• Do not copy another artist’s prices. Their career, audience, gallery relationships, location, exhibition history and sales record may be completely different from yours.

• Do not price purely according to hours worked. Time and materials matter, especially when establishing a baseline, but a painting that took you 40 hours is not automatically worth twice as much as one that took 20. Your skill, experience, demand and market position matter too.

• Do not keep changing your prices based on your mood. A buyer should not encounter three different prices for similar paintings across three platforms.

• Do not slash prices because something has not sold quickly. Try better photography, stronger presentation, a different audience, more visibility or a new context before assuming the number itself is the problem.

And perhaps most importantly, do not raise prices simply because you are embarrassed by your old ones. A higher number does not automatically make the work more valuable.

Price is part of the story around the work. It is not the whole story.

Your Prices Should Grow With Your Practice

Raising your prices is not about suddenly deciding that you are a “high-priced artist.” It is much quieter than that.

You sell consistently. You learn what your buyers respond to. Your work develops. Your exhibition history grows. Your costs change. Your audience changes. You become more confident in your practice. Eventually, the price needs to change too. And some buyers may leave. That is the uncomfortable truth.

Not everyone who likes your work at $300 will be able to follow you to $900. That does not necessarily mean you made a mistake. Your job is not to keep every possible buyer forever at your old price. Your job is to build a sustainable practice that allows you to keep making the work in the first place.

Raise gradually. Keep your structure consistent. Give loyal collectors a little consideration. Create different entry points when you can. Watch actual sales rather than obsessing over hypothetical ones. Most of all, remember that a price increase should be a reflection of an evolving practice, not a performance of confidence.

Your collectors do not need you to become someone else. They simply need to see that the artist they believed in is continuing to grow.

At Arts to Hearts Project, we love getting behind the finished work. The part nobody photographs. The hours before the painting exists, the doubt in the middle of it, the specific relief or disappointment when it is done. That is the part we are always most curious about.

100 Emerging Artists of 2026 brings together 100 of the most compelling emerging artists from around the world. A premium hardcover coffee table book featuring voices from every discipline, gender, and creative background, making work that is bold, original, and impossible to ignore. Not artists who have arrived. Artists who are in the middle of arriving. Still discovering what they are capable of. Still surprising themselves. And for anyone who loves art, that is one of the most exciting places to be.

We wanted to know them a little differently. So we asked them something personal. What part of your creative process do you love the most? And what part still challenges you? Not the version from their artist statement. The honest one.

What came back stopped us. Because these are artists who are still close enough to the beginning that they have not yet learned to be guarded about it. The joy was real. The struggle was real. And the honesty sitting between the two was the kind you do not always get to see.

A few days ago we shared some of those answers. But more came in that deserved the same space. So we went back. Because this conversation was not finished. And honestly, with artists this good, we hope it never really is.

Here is what some of them told us.

Most artists will tell you that starting is not the hard part. The blank canvas is intimidating but it is also full of possibility. It can become anything. The hard part comes later. When the piece is mostly there but not quite. When you keep finding small things to adjust and cannot tell anymore whether you are improving it or just changing it. When the decision to stop feels less like a choice and more like a surrender.

Rocio Koizumi @rociokoizumiart puts it this way:

The part of the process I enjoy the most is drawing, choosing color palettes, and painting itself. I love seeing an idea slowly come to life through colors, textures, and small details. It’s the moment where I feel most connected to what I’m creating. What I struggle with the most is knowing when a piece is truly finished. If I keep looking at it, I always find new details to adjust or change. I also sometimes struggle with balancing my time between painting and all the other things that come with being an artist outside the studio.

Rocio Koizumi

The moment where she feels most connected to what she is creating. That is the part every artist chases. And for Rocio it lives in the colors, the textures, the small details slowly becoming something real. The struggle comes after. When the making is mostly done and the looking begins. Because a piece that you care about will always give you something else to find. And learning to trust it enough to stop is one of those things that does not get easier. You just get better at deciding.

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There is a kind of creative practice that begins long before the canvas is touched. That lives in libraries and old texts and the kind of deep research that most people would not recognise as art-making at all. But for the artists who work this way, the research is not preparation. It is the first and most essential part of the process. The painting is just where it finally surfaces.

Anguilla Ink @anguillaink reads before she paints. She told us why:

What I enjoy the most in my creative process is creation and research. I love reading, so I try to collect as much information as possible about characters belonging to myth and this kind of stuff, put them all together, and then I paint. While I don’t really like the advertising part, appearing in videos and this kind of stuff, because I think that the artist is not so important. It’s the artwork that matters.

Anguilla Ink

The artwork is what matters. Not the artist. That is a quietly radical thing to say in a world that increasingly asks artists to be their own brand, their own content, their own face. Anguilla would rather disappear into the myth and let what comes out of it do the talking. And honestly, for an artist who reads that deeply and research that obsessively before a single brushstroke is made, we think the work probably has plenty to say.

There is a particular feeling that comes with sitting down to begin a new piece. Not excitement exactly. Something closer to friction. A heaviness that does not quite make sense given how much you want to be doing this. The blank canvas does not always welcome you. Sometimes it just sits there. And you sit with it. And you wait for something to shift.

Yothin Kanokbanpot @yothin_kanokbanpot knows that feeling well:

The part of my process I enjoy the most is entering a flow state, when I stop overthinking and become fully immersed in the painting. In those moments, time feels slower and more intuitive. The part I struggle with the most is the beginning. Starting a painting often comes with uncertainty and resistance. Sometimes it takes patience before the work begins to reveal its own direction and energy.

Yothin Kanokbanpot

Yothin has learned that staying with the uncertainty is what eventually opens the door to something deeper. As he gives the painting time, the process becomes slower and more intuitive. The overthinking begins to fall away, and the painting starts to speak back. Decisions feel less like decisions and more like listening. He has learned to trust that this state will come, and that the uncertainty at the beginning is not a warning. It is simply the door. And patience is the only way through it.

The best ideas rarely arrive when you are sitting at your desk with a sketchbook open and a clear head. They come in the evening when you are supposed to be winding down. In the middle of a conversation. Right before you fall asleep. And for a fraction of a second they feel so clear and so obvious that you think there is no way you could forget them. And then you do.

Alessandra Nunziante @alessandra__nunziante describes it like this:

The part I love most about my creative process is the initial concept. Often it comes in the evening or at the most unexpected moments: it is something instinctive, almost impossible to control. I especially love the transformation process, that is, seeing what comes from my initial idea take concrete shape through work and observing how it evolves. The part that creates the most difficulty for me, however, is not losing that inspiration; avoid distraction and not just say: ‘Yes, I’ll mark it’, and then end up forgetting it.

Alessandra Nunziante

Yes I’ll mark it. And then end up forgetting it. We felt that deeply. Because that is not a failure of discipline. It is just what inspiration does. It arrives fast and leaves faster. And the gap between catching it and losing it is smaller than anyone would like. Alessandra loves the moment an idea starts becoming something real. The whole struggle is getting it far enough along to survive

Every artist who takes their practice seriously eventually faces this. The tension between staying in the comfortable place where the work feels good and pushing into the uncomfortable place where the work gets better. Neither extreme serves you. Too much safety and the work stops moving. Too much pressure and the thing that made you want to create in the first place quietly disappears. Finding the line between the two is not a problem you solve once. It is something you negotiate with every single piece.

Dawn Howell @dawn_howell_art puts it in a way every artist will recognise:

The part I love most is the meditative flow when I can zone out, paint intuitively, and lose all sense of time. Layering color after color, watching a world slowly come to life on the canvas. In those moments I am completely in my element, feeling at home in myself in a way nothing else quite matches. The greatest challenge is knowing how far to push myself. I have to challenge myself just enough to grow and evolve, without pushing so hard that I lose the joy that brought me here. That balance between safety and expansion is something I navigate with every single painting.

Dawn Howell

Feeling at home in herself in a way nothing else quite matches. That line stopped us. Because that is what the meditative flow actually is for Dawn. Not just a productive state. A place where she is most fully herself. And the challenge she carries into every painting is making sure that place stays accessible. That the pursuit of growth never costs her the very thing that makes the work worth doing.

The joy is real. So is the struggle. And every artist who shared with us this week was honest about both. That honesty is not a coincidence. It is what happens when artists are still close enough to the beginning that they have not yet learned to hide the difficult parts. The resistance at the start. The doubt in the middle. The inability to let go at the end. The ideas that arrive at midnight and disappear by morning. Nobody left any of that out. And we think that is one of the most valuable things you can read as someone who makes things or loves things that are made.

Because the polished version of a creative practice is easy to admire. The honest version is what actually helps. It reminds you that the struggle is not a sign you are doing it wrong. It is just part of what it means to care enough to keep going.

100 Emerging Artists of 2026 is full of artists exactly like this. If you want to discover them before everyone else does, the book is at the link below.

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And if you are an artist who recognised something of yourself in these answers, we want to see your work. 101 Art Book: Faces Edition is now open for submissions. A curated international collection celebrating the human face through contemporary art. If portraiture or figurative work is part of your practice, this is your space.

Submit to 101 Art Book: Faces Edition

At Arts to Hearts Project, our Women Artists on the Rise Edition 4 is a portrait of women shaped by very different lives, from every corner of the world. A hundred stories of women who make things, told through the work they couldn’t stop making.

And every now and then, one story holds two whole worlds inside it. Tree Tree Tes carries two at once, one built in Hong Kong and one begun again in Canada. The pull between them is what makes her paintings feel so alive. That is what drew us in.

Tree Tree is a Hong Kong-born artist now living in Winnipeg, Canada. She works mostly in watercolour and mixed media. More than anything, she is a storyteller. Her paintings are made to make you feel something and to start a conversation. They look playful and dreamlike at first, full of wonder and odd little characters. But stay with them a moment and you feel the weight underneath. Resilience. Hope. Healing. The quiet strength it takes to keep going when life is hard.

It is easy to miss how much she has already done. Tree Tree is not new to this. She studied art and design in Hong Kong, and she has been working since 2002. For years she worked in design and illustration. Her early work appeared in newspapers like Sing Tao Daily and The Standard.

She even worked with Visit Britain and painted an ecological map. She started her own galleries and studios, and she is a professional member of the Hong Kong Society of Illustrators. She had already built a whole life in art.

And then she left it to build another. Arriving as a newcomer to Canada’s art scene, she rebuilt from the ground up, and a mentee place in MAWA’s mentorship program in Winnipeg became the turning point that led her back to her own work.

What she makes now is more personal than anything before it, rooted in the honest stories of starting over that so many people quietly recognise as their own.

Watercolour is her favourite, but she rarely uses it on its own. She adds ink, pencil, and anything else a painting needs. She loves to play with materials and see what happens when she mixes things together. Her paintings are also full of small symbols. These are little details from her own memories and hopes, and they show up again and again in different paintings. Over time, they turn her work into a world you can step into.

She is a rising artist whose reach keeps growing. She shows her work often, paints live for audiences, and stays close to her art community. What began in one small corner of the world is quietly finding its way to people everywhere.

Now let’s hear from Tree Tree about starting again, experimenting with materials, and what it takes to keep going as an artist.

Can you share your journey from Hong Kong to Canada and how it shaped your art?

Moving from Hong Kong to Canada was one of the hardest decisions I have ever made. Before immigrating, I worked as a Creative Director and Art Director for multiple companies, including media and advertising agencies, as well as art galleries. My career was well established, but I wanted to give my family a new beginning. When I arrived in Winnipeg, Manitoba, I quickly realized that opportunities in the creative industry were very limited compared to Hong Kong.

Because I came to Canada on a work permit with a limited timeframe, finding stable full time employment became my family’s top priority. Instead of working in the creative field, I started from the very beginning in a restaurant, washing dishes before gradually becoming a sushi chef who prepared sashimi. I stayed in the restaurant industry for almost three years. Although I was grateful for the opportunity to support my family, I always felt that something was missing. After my first year in Canada, I could not ignore the feeling that I needed to reconnect with my artistic identity.

I began searching for an art mentor who could help me rebuild my career in a new country. That was when I found MAWA, Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art. Joining their mentorship program was a turning point in my life. It did not just help me develop professionally. It reminded me who I really was.

The move to Canada also transformed the way I create. In Hong Kong, much of my work revolved around commercial projects, branding, and creative direction. During my final years there, I spent more time leading creative teams than making artwork for myself.

While I enjoyed that work, my own artistic voice gradually became quieter. Living in Canada gave me the space to rediscover it. Today, I create by listening to my heart, observing the world around me, and connecting with the stories within my community. My work has become much more personal. I paint about resilience, hope, healing, and the quiet strength that helps us move forward through difficult times.

Rather than creating for the market, I create to tell honest stories that resonate with people who have experienced similar struggles. One of the most rewarding parts of this journey has been discovering that there are people who truly connect with my work. I found my community in Canada, and from there my artwork has gradually reached audiences around the world. That is very different from my experience in Hong Kong, and it has taught me that the more authentic I become as an artist, the more meaningful those connections are.

Watercolour is one of your favourite mediums. What keeps bringing you back to it?

I love how watercolour is both unpredictable and predictable at the same time. In the beginning, I actually disliked watercolour because I found it difficult to control. But after truly learning and understanding the medium, I started to appreciate its unique character and beauty. Watercolour is an unforgiving medium. It requires planning, patience, and a clear understanding of what you want to create. Every decision matters, from which area to paint first, to how you combine it with other mediums such as pencil or ink. It is also a conversation between the artist, the paper, the brand of watercolour, and most importantly, the water itself.

The water is the heart of the medium. You need to learn how to control it, observe it, and feel its movement. To me, it is similar to the concept of Chi in Tai Chi. There is a natural flow and balance that you cannot force. You have to understand it, work with it, and allow it to become part of the creative process. There are always new things to discover, and that is what makes watercolour so exciting. Beyond its artistic qualities, I also love its simplicity and accessibility.

It is a medium I can easily bring outdoors, whether I am hiking, travelling, or simply observing the world around me. The convenience of carrying a small set of watercolours allows me to capture moments whenever inspiration appears. After so many years of creating, watercolour feels like a close friend to me. It is a medium I can trust, learn from, and continue having conversations with.

Q4. Your paintings feature recurring symbols. How do you decide which ones return?

The symbolic details I include in my paintings are deeply connected to my inner world. They represent the fears, hopes, memories, and emotions within my soul. When I first created these symbols, I did not expect so many viewers to connect with them so deeply. It has been surprising and meaningful to see people recognize their own feelings and stories within these small details. In today’s fast paced world, where people often experience images through a quick social media scroll or spend only a short moment with an artwork at a gallery or art fair, I am always amazed by how much emotion viewers can discover within a painting in such a brief encounter.

For me, these symbols are not limited to a specific series. They return naturally whenever they are needed. For example, the door from my The Wayout series represents hope and the possibility of a future beyond our current situation. If I feel that same message is needed in another artwork, such as in my Ink.n.Poem series, the symbol can appear again. Similarly, the Starchild, with its distinctive tall head, first appeared as a symbol in one body of work but later became part of my RGB (Ready To Go Beyond) series as well. I do not decide where symbols belong based on categories or series boundaries. Instead, I ask myself during the creative process:

Does this symbol need to exist in this piece? Does it help express the emotion or story I want to share? If the answer is yes, then it naturally becomes part of the artwork. To me, symbols are like a visual language. They continue to evolve with me, carrying different meanings at different moments, while always remaining connected to the core emotions behind my work.

Q5. What does mixed media allow you to express beyond watercolour alone?

This is a very interesting and challenging question. I truly enjoy working with watercolour alone, and I believe the medium itself has endless possibilities. However, when I combine watercolour with different materials, it opens up another layer of creative exploration. Mixed media allows me to play with different textures, lines, surfaces, and visual sensations.

Each material has its own personality and way of communicating, and when they come together, they create a new conversation within the artwork. To me, it is similar to a fusion cuisine. Each ingredient has its own character, but when combined thoughtfully, they create a new experience that cannot be achieved with just one ingredient. The same happens in my creative process.

Ultimately, mixed media gives me more freedom to express the complexity of the stories and feelings I want to share.

Q6. How do you create paintings that encourage viewers to pause and look longer?

I always try my best to create the most engaging composition, colour relationships, and visual experience within each artwork. I agree that capturing people’s attention today is challenging because we are surrounded by an endless flow of images, especially through social media. However, one of the most meaningful pieces of feedback I have received from my collectors and audience is that they do not need to see my name or account before recognizing my work.

The moment they see an artwork, they know it is mine. To me, that connection comes from developing a consistent visual language and an authentic artistic voice. I love exploring different styles and experimenting with new ideas, but at the same time, I am always building cohesive bodies of work that share a common emotional foundation. I believe an artist’s voice is not only created by repeating the same visual style, but by consistently expressing a unique way of seeing and understanding the world. Sometimes people may not immediately connect with an artwork the first time they encounter it.

However, when an artist continues creating, sharing, and developing their vision over time, viewers begin to notice the journey. They become curious about why this artist continues to create in this way, and that curiosity can invite them to slow down and take a deeper look. For me, encouraging people to pause is not only about creating a visually striking image. It is about building a relationship with the viewer and creating a visual world they want to return to.

Read Full Interview Here

Is there a series that best represents where your practice is today?

My latest series, RGB (Ready To Go Beyond), which consists of 39 pieces, best represents where my artistic practice is today. This series reflects many different parts of my current creative journey. It includes figurative works that I once felt too vulnerable to share, as well as more abstract pieces that represent the quiet moments, emotions, and reflections within my heart. It also contains some powerful and expressive works that feel almost like a voice calling out, asking viewers to stop, look, and truly experience what is in front of them.

The title RGB carries a deeper meaning. The letters represent Rebirth, Growth, and Breakthrough, which are experiences that I continue to go through as both an artist and as a person. I believe every artist is constantly evolving, searching, questioning, and looking for new breakthroughs in their creative journey. Although this series began from my own personal experiences, I believe its message extends beyond myself.

Many people are also continuing to pursue their dreams, overcome challenges, and find the courage to move forward. Through RGB, I hope viewers can see a reflection of their own journey and feel encouraged to keep going beyond their own limits.

Rebirth 02, 2026, 36”X36”, Mixed Media on Canvas

What advice would you give artists still searching for their own style?

Never stop trying. I believe an artist’s voice is not something we suddenly discover. It is something we gradually build through continuous exploration, experimentation, and self-reflection. Sometimes, the medium or style we dislike at first can teach us something unexpected. If you hate a particular material or feel frustrated by a certain approach, try pushing it further and exploring its possibilities before giving up. Sometimes, what challenges us the most can open our eyes to a new way of creating. For artists who enjoy exploring different styles and find it difficult to create a consistent body of work,

I would suggest giving each direction enough time to develop. For example, instead of creating only one piece in a particular style and moving on, try creating a small series of four or five works, or even at least two pieces. A single artwork may only show an experiment, but multiple works begin to reveal patterns, emotions, and connections.

That is often where an artist starts to recognize their own visual language. Finding your style is not about forcing yourself to become consistent too early or limiting your creativity. It is about creating enough work, paying attention to what feels authentic, and noticing which ideas continue to return naturally. The most important thing is to keep creating. Your artistic voice will become clearer through the process.

As our conversation with Tree Tree came to a close, we found ourselves thinking about reinvention. About how rare it is for someone to give up a whole life they have built and be brave enough to start again from nothing.

Most of us are taught to protect what we have. To pick a path, stay on it, and never look too far off the road we know. Tree Tree did the opposite. She let go of an entire career and a whole identity, and trusted that the artist inside her was worth rebuilding for. And what strikes us most is that the work never turns that struggle into something heavy or bitter.

It turns it into wonder. Into play. Into strange, gentle little worlds you actually want to spend time in. That, to us, is its own kind of strength, choosing joy on the other side of something hard.

We think every artist needs to see this. Because so much pressure in the art world pushes you to pick one lane, to be one recognisable thing, to decide early and never change. Tree Tree’s whole journey says something braver. That you can carry more than one world inside you.

That illustration and fine art, East and West, playfulness and depth, do not have to compete, they can live in the same painting and make it richer. There is real freedom in an artist who refuses to shrink herself to fit a category.

For art lovers and collectors, her work brings something rare into a space. It rewards the people who slow down and look twice, who notice the small things hidden in plain sight. Living with a piece like hers is like keeping a little window open onto someone’s imagination, and a quiet reminder that the hardest chapters of a life can still become the most beautiful things we make.

Follow Tree Tree Tes through the links below and see her work for yourself.

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There is a woman behind every piece of art, and a whole life behind her. Our Art and Woman edition wants the work that carries it, and there are only 4 days left to share yours before submissions close on 30 August. The victories, the doubts, the quiet years, the moments that changed you, we want to see how it lives in your work. Medium, geography, and career stage are irrelevant. A real woman and a real story are everything. Every featured artist once submitted before the deadline passed. This is your last chance to be one of them.

SUBMIT HERE

You do not need a mansion, a private museum, or a six-figure collection to think about conservation. A person with one painting above their desk has many of the same preservation questions as someone with an entire room of art. Where should it hang? Is the sunlight too strong? Is the room too damp? Is it safe to lean another frame against it? What happens when the air conditioner is switched on and off every day?

These questions matter because art does not remain unchanged simply because we want it to. Every material ages. Paint, paper, canvas, wood, metal, photographs, textiles, plastics and adhesives all respond to their surroundings. Preventive conservation is essentially about slowing that process by reducing the risks around an object. Museums commonly identify light, pests, pollutants, temperature, humidity, physical forces, water, fire, theft and neglect of documentation as major threats to collections.

That may sound intimidating, but caring for a collection is not about turning your home into a museum. It is about making a few thoughtful decisions before damage becomes visible.

“Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories.”

Walter Benjamin, Unpacking My Library

For many collectors, that is exactly what is at stake. A work is rarely just an object. It might mark the first artist you bought, a gift from someone you love, a trip, a particular period of your life, or simply the moment you saw something and knew you wanted to live with it. Preserving it means preserving part of that story.

Light: The Damage You May Not Notice Until It Is Too Late

Light is one of the most underestimated threats to art because it does not usually look destructive while it is happening. A painting can sit beautifully in a bright room for years while colours slowly shift. A photograph can gradually lose density. Paper can yellow or become weaker. Dyes and some pigments are particularly vulnerable.

The important thing to understand is that light damage is cumulative. Turning a lamp on for one afternoon is not the issue; repeated exposure over years is. Ultraviolet radiation can accelerate fading and deterioration, but visible light itself can also damage sensitive materials.

This does not mean every artwork needs to live in darkness. It means the brightest window in your home is probably not automatically the best place for your most light-sensitive work.

Damp, Humidity and the Problem of Constant Change

For collectors living in humid climates, moisture deserves particular attention. High relative humidity can encourage mould, corrosion and biological activity, while materials such as paper, canvas, wood and other hygroscopic materials can absorb and release moisture as conditions change. The problem is not only “too much humidity.” Rapid fluctuations can also cause materials to expand and contract, putting stress on layers that were never meant to move at exactly the same rate.

This is why a damp wall, a room with persistent condensation, or a storage area that becomes humid during rainy weather should not be treated as harmless simply because the artwork looks fine today.

If you live somewhere with strong seasonal changes, you do not necessarily need to create a perfectly controlled museum environment. Stability is the more useful goal. Museum guidance commonly discusses moderate, stable relative humidity, with 40–60% often used as a general range for many collections, while noting that different materials require different conditions.

Heat and Temperature Swings

Heat can quietly speed up chemical deterioration. High temperatures accelerate chemical reactions and can also cause some organic materials to dry out, lose flexibility and become more prone to cracking. But constant switching between very different temperatures can be a problem too, especially when it causes corresponding changes in relative humidity.

This is where everyday habits matter. Placing art directly above a radiator, next to a heater, against a heat-producing appliance, or in a room that becomes extremely hot every afternoon creates unnecessary stress. The same goes for storing art in a hot attic, uninsulated garage or enclosed space that experiences dramatic temperature changes.

Air, Dust and Invisible Pollutants

Not all damage comes from something you can see.

Dust can settle into textured surfaces, corners and frames, while airborne pollutants and volatile chemicals can contribute to deterioration. Some materials used in furniture, construction, adhesives, paints and display cases can release chemicals that are harmful to sensitive objects over time. Museums therefore pay attention not only to what an object is made from, but also to what surrounds it.

This is particularly relevant when framing or storing art. A cheap backing board, acidic material, unsuitable adhesive or freshly manufactured material placed directly against an artwork may create a problem that is invisible at first.

Framing and Storage Can Make or Break a Work

Framing is not only about presentation. It can be part of the artwork’s protection.

A suitable frame can help reduce physical damage, limit contact with dust and provide a safer barrier between the work and its surroundings. But poor framing can do the opposite. Art should not be forced into an unsuitable frame simply because the dimensions match. Works on paper, photographs, textiles and other sensitive materials may need specific mounting, glazing, backing and spacing considerations.

Storage deserves the same attention. Do not place works directly on damp floors, squeeze them into overcrowded cupboards, or stack objects where their weight will press against fragile surfaces. The ideal storage solution is not necessarily expensive. It is clean, stable, dry, physically safe and appropriate to the material.

Read our guides on how to preserve paintings and 3D sculptures for more detailed, medium-specific care.

How Do You Actually Make Art Last?

The good news is that preservation is usually less about buying expensive equipment and more about building good habits.

1. Learn what you own

Before deciding how to care for a work, find out what it is made of. Oil painting, watercolour, photograph, print, textile, ceramic, metal sculpture and mixed-media work do not all respond to their environment in the same way. When you buy a work, keep its artist information, medium, date, dimensions and any care instructions provided by the artist or gallery.

2. Watch the environment

A simple thermometer and hygrometer can tell you far more than guessing. Monitor rooms where you keep sensitive works, especially if you live in a climate with significant heat or humidity. The aim is not to obsess over a perfect number but to notice problematic extremes and fluctuations. Environmental monitoring is considered a foundational part of preventive conservation.

3. Control sunlight before buying expensive solutions

Use curtains, blinds, shades or UV-filtering glazing where appropriate. Keep particularly light-sensitive works away from direct sunlight. Remember that reducing cumulative exposure matters; you do not have to eliminate every source of light.

4. Give art breathing room

Do not crowd works together so tightly that you cannot inspect them. Leave enough space to clean around them and check for signs of pests, moisture or physical damage. Good arrangement is also good conservation because you can actually see what is happening to your collection.

5. Clean the room, not the artwork

Regularly dust shelves, floors, frames and surrounding surfaces. But do not automatically wipe or spray the artwork itself. Cleaning an artwork is not the same as cleaning furniture, and an apparently harmless household product can cause permanent damage. When a surface needs actual treatment, ask a qualified conservator rather than experimenting.

Read The Full Article Here

Collecting Is Also Caring

There is a tendency to imagine collecting as the moment when an artwork becomes yours. But ownership is only one part of the relationship. Once a work enters your collection, you also become responsible for the conditions in which it will spend its next chapter.

That responsibility does not have to look the same for everyone. A new collector with two prints can start by framing them properly and keeping them away from direct sunlight. Someone with a larger collection might invest in environmental monitoring, professional storage or periodic condition assessments. What matters is not whether your collection looks like a museum. It is whether you understand the needs of the things you have chosen to keep.

The best collections are not necessarily the biggest ones. They are collections that are lived with, understood and cared for. An artwork can outlive its first owner, move into another home, enter another collection, or eventually find its way into an institution. Good collecting leaves that future possible.

So before you buy the next piece, look around at the ones you already own. Ask where they are sitting, what they are exposed to, and whether they are actually as protected as you think they are.

Because collecting art is not only about bringing beautiful things home. It is about making sure those things can remain beautiful, and meaningful, for much longer than we will.

What if the most famous night sky in art never actually existed?

Look closely at Van Gogh’s The Starry Night and the scene feels almost familiar: a crescent moon glowing over a sleeping village, stars burning through deep blue, a dark cypress rising into the sky, bands of light sweeping across the night. It reads like a landscape, until you learn it isn’t quite one.

Van Gogh began the painting in June 1889 at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, inspired by the view from his window. But what ended up on the canvas isn’t a record of what he actually saw, the village came from somewhere else, the cypress was dragged dramatically closer, and the sky was reworked until it barely resembled the one outside his room.

One of the world’s most famous paintings, in other words, started with a real view. Then Van Gogh changed it.

The View From the Window

Van Gogh arrived at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole in May 1889, seeking treatment after the crises he’d been through in Arles. He told Theo in a letter shortly after that the change of surroundings was doing him good, and he hoped to keep working, which he did, almost immediately, returning again and again to the fields, orchards, and mountains visible from the asylum grounds.

Then the sky took over his attention. In a letter to Theo, he described looking out before sunrise and seeing “nothing but the morning star, which looked very big” a reference to Venus, the bright point of light that sits just left of center in The Starry Night.

That detail changes how you read the painting. The sky wasn’t invented from nothing, Van Gogh really was looking at it. He just wasn’t copying it.

Read more : The Strange Beauty of Cats in Art

The Night He Painted Wasn’t the Night on the Canvas

There’s something almost paradoxical about the painting: Van Gogh painted a night scene during the day. MoMA notes that although the vision it depicts took place at night, the canvas itself was worked on across several daytime sessions, under completely different light, meaning Van Gogh was translating a remembered experience rather than reproducing a view in real time.

And he changed plenty in the process. The village beneath the mountains wasn’t visible from his window at all, its pointed church steeple looks more like Dutch architecture from his native Netherlands than anything local to Provence. The cypress in the foreground was made far larger and closer than it would have actually appeared.

The result is neither pure observation nor pure invention. It’s Van Gogh’s reconstruction of a place he knew, which might be the painting’s first real secret.

When the Sky Became the Main Character

The landscape only occupies the lower slice of the canvas; the sky claims the rest, roughly three-quarters of the composition, built from short, thick brushstrokes that make the whole atmosphere look like it’s moving. The stars sit inside rings of color, the moon glows almost electrically, and two great currents of blue curl through the top of the frame as if the sky itself is turning.

This wasn’t new territory for him. Van Gogh had been fixated on nighttime for years, and once wrote that he found the night “much more alive and richly coloured than the day.” That line matters here because it undercuts the easy reading of this painting, darkness, for Van Gogh, wasn’t the absence of color. It could be as vivid and active as anything in daylight. The Starry Night is that idea, made visible.

Read more : Elsa Schiaparelli, the Designer Who Put Surrealism on a Dress

The Stars Were Real. The Sky Wasn’t.

Venus really was visible in the pre-dawn sky around the time Van Gogh was painting, the bright object left of center in the composition. But he wasn’t working like an astronomer charting a real sky. He distorted the shapes of the stars and wrapped each one in exaggerated halos of light; researchers have also noted the swirling forms echo contemporary illustrations of nebulae, clouds of cosmic dust and gas, without the painting ever functioning as an actual scientific record.

This is really the crux of the whole piece: Van Gogh wasn’t choosing between reality and imagination. He was running both at once, observing the world closely, then letting the paint take it somewhere observation alone couldn’t reach.

Why Is the Cypress So Huge?

Then there’s the tree. The cypress on the left rises almost to the top edge of the canvas, dark and flame-shaped, cutting straight through the boundary between earth and sky.

Van Gogh had grown genuinely obsessed with cypresses during his time in the south of France. In a letter to Theo, he described their lines and proportions as beautiful, “like an Egyptian obelisk”, and called them one of the most difficult subjects he could imagine painting. By late June 1889, he was making dedicated studies of these “very tall and massive” trees.

It’s tempting to insist the cypress must symbolize something specific, death, most commonly. Van Gogh never gave a definitive explanation for any of it, so the symbolism is left for us to argue about. What we do know for certain is simpler: the cypress had become an obsession, and in this painting he blew it up in scale until it became the bridge between the grounded world below and the restless one above.

Van Gogh Didn’t Know He Was Painting a Masterpiece

There was no guarantee, when he painted it, that The Starry Night would become inseparable from his name. After his death in 1890, the canvas stayed with his brother Theo, then passed through a long chain of owners, Theo’s widow Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, the poet Julien Leclercq, the painter Claude-Émile Schuffenecker, back to Johanna, a Rotterdam gallery, a private collector named Georgette P. van Stolk, and finally the Paul Rosenberg Gallery, before the Museum of Modern Art acquired it in 1941.

For most of that history, it sat largely outside public view in private hands, nowhere near the fame it has today. The painting millions of people now recognize instantly spent decades as just one more Van Gogh, quietly changing owners.

So, What Does The Starry Night Mean?

That might be the wrong question to lead with. There’s no single sentence from Van Gogh explaining what every star, hill, or brushstroke is supposed to mean. What exists instead are his letters, his repeated fascination with night, his studies of the landscape around him, and the painting itself, which tells a more interesting story than a tidy symbolic answer would.

The Starry Night is really a painting about looking, and then transforming what you saw. Van Gogh started with an actual view outside an asylum window, the morning star, the hills, the cypresses, the countryside around Saint-Rémy, then rearranged nearly all of it: bringing some things closer, inventing others, swapping the architecture, intensifying the stars, and turning the sky into something that looks alive.

What’s on the canvas was never the night as it existed outside his window. It’s the night as Van Gogh imagined it, and more than a century later, that invented version may feel more real to us than the original ever could.

Explore the current open calls and submit your work: apply.artstoheartsproject.com

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At Arts to Hearts project, we have always believed that the most important art education is the kind you give yourself. Our Best of the Art World editorial exists to celebrate exactly those artists the ones who did not wait for permission, who learned by doing, who built their practice from the ground up through sheer curiosity and determination and an absolute refusal to stop. And this week we are so excited to bring you one such artist.

Manuel Zamudio gave himself that education on walls, in the dark, with spray cans and built something that no classroom could have produced.

Born in Mexico City and raised in McAllen, South Texas from the age of five, Manuel grew up straddling two worlds. The energy and scale of a city built on centuries of history and murals and culture on one side. The quieter, slower pace of South Texas on the other.

That duality never left him. And if you look at his paintings long enough, you feel it the cinematic scale of vast imagined environments, and somewhere inside them, a quiet intimate human moment that asks you to slow down and stay a while.

He found his way to art not through a gallery or a school but through graffiti. Through friends who were writers. Through magazines like Juxtapoz and Hi-Fructose that showed him a world of art that had more energy and more imagination than anything he had encountered before.

Through cans of Ironlak and Montana and whatever spray paint he could find at a local hardware store learning colour relationship, contrast, composition, and how light behaves, all before he ever picked up a paintbrush. Graffiti gave him the confidence to create. And then oil painting gave him the space to discover his voice.

The turning point came when he walked out of a cinema after watching Blade Runner 2049. He left feeling inspired and frustrated at the same time because the cinematography, the atmosphere, the emotional weight of that film made him realise he was not yet making work that came close to saying what he wanted to say. That feeling became a turning point. He stopped chasing individual paintings and started building a world.

That world is called Neon. A fictional city atmospheric, cinematic, neon-lit that began as a backdrop and has since become a living character in its own right. A place full of people experiencing hope, fear, loss, and quiet moments of revelation.

A place that has evolved across three solo exhibitions Neon at Arch Enemy Arts, Return to Neon, and the upcoming Neon Memory each one expanding the city, deepening its stories, and asking new questions about memory, reality, and what it means to carry a version of a place inside you long after you have left it.

His technique is extraordinary. The neon glow that defines his work is not a filter or a trick it is a philosophy of light built across layers, colour temperature, and the same principles he learned painting letters on walls years ago. His portraits are grounded in a startling realism. The worlds that surround his figures grow increasingly surreal and symbolic. And the tension between those two things the human and the imagined, the real and the psychological is where all of his most interesting work lives.

He has shown with Arch Enemy Arts, built a dedicated international collector base, and developed one of the most immediately recognisable visual languages in contemporary narrative painting. And the most exciting part is that the work is still evolving still building, still becoming, still surprising even him.

Let’s get to know Manuel through our conversation with him and step into the city he has been building, one painting at a time.

Can you share your journey from graffiti to fine art, and how that transition shaped your creative voice?

Graffiti was my introduction to making art in a serious way. Growing up in South Texas, I was searching for an outlet that gave me creative freedom, even if I didn’t yet know where it would lead. At the time, there wasn’t much of a gallery scene around me, but I was constantly inspired by magazines like Juxtapoz and Hi-Fructose. Once I met friends who were graffiti writers, I jumped right in. What I appreciate most is that many of them didn’t come from formal art backgrounds, yet they taught me lessons I still use today.

Through graffiti I learned about color relationships, composition, contrast, framing, and how different paint behaved from Ironlak and Montana cans to whatever spray paint you could find at a local hardware store. Those experiences trained my eye long before I ever picked up a paintbrush. As I grew, I realized I wanted to do more than create individual pieces.

I wanted to build a body of work that could tell stories and communicate something deeper over time. That curiosity led me to oil painting, where I had to start over learning how to mix color, understand light, and develop my own visual language. Graffiti gave me the confidence to create, but painting gave me the space to discover my voice.

Your painting Gehenna references a place with powerful historical and spiritual associations. What drew you to the title, and how did it shape the painting?

The title Gehenna came after I had already spent time living with the painting. As I reflected on what it was really about, I realized it wasn’t simply depicting suffering it was exploring the emotional and spiritual weight of the moment we’re living through. It felt as though the world was entering a period of collective reckoning. No matter where we stand politically, socially, or personally, there seems to be a shared awareness that something is shifting.

Truth often feels close to the surface, but the possibility of confronting it can be both hopeful and unsettling. I wanted the painting to exist within that tension. The figure isn’t experiencing only physical or emotional pain. To me, she’s carrying something more existential, the burden of witnessing imbalance, division, and the darker aspects of humanity while still choosing to endure.

The dismantled serpent across her face symbolizes the breaking apart of old systems and beliefs, while the dagger at her neck reminds us that change doesn’t arrive from somewhere else. It begins with our own willingness to confront ourselves. Ultimately, Gehenna wasn’t meant to be a comfortable painting. It was created out of a need to respond honestly to the world around me. Rather than offering answers, I wanted it to ask whether we’re willing to look inward with the same intensity that we look outward. I think meaningful change begins there.

Your portraits are highly realistic, while the worlds around them become increasingly surreal. How do you decide where reality ends and imagination begins?

I think one of the biggest questions we can ask ourselves is, what is reality? It’s a question that has fascinated philosophers, writers, filmmakers, and artists for centuries, and it’s one that continually finds its way into my own work. I often question not only my own perception of reality but also the reality we all seem to share. That curiosity naturally influences the way I paint. Just as I use contrast to create the illusion of neon light, I also use contrast between realism and imagination. The portraits are grounded in a recognizable human presence, while the worlds surrounding them become increasingly symbolic and surreal.

That balance allows me to explore ideas that feel difficult to express through realism alone. The surreal elements aren’t there simply to create fantasy they’re a way of visualizing memory, emotion, belief, and the unseen psychological landscapes that shape our lives. As I’ve continued developing my work, especially for my upcoming exhibition Neon Memory, that relationship between reality and imagination has become even more important. I don’t see them as opposites. Instead, I think they exist alongside one another, and my paintings try to inhabit the space where the two begin to blur. I imagine that idea will continue to evolve with my work for years to come.

The faces in your paintings often feel illuminated from within. How do you use light to shape their mood?

Light is probably the most important tool I have as a painter. It’s one of my biggest creative weapons because it has the ability to shape not only the mood of a figure, but the emotional experience of the entire painting. I tend to use light in a dramatic and highly saturated way. Sometimes it’s there to reflect what a figure is feeling internally, and other times it’s meant to contrast with that emotion or even tell a story that exists beyond the figure itself.

Depending on the painting, the light can feel as though it’s coming from within the subject or from the world surrounding them. It always serves the narrative first. Colour temperature plays an equally important role. Small shifts between warm and cool light can completely change how a viewer experiences a painting emotionally. It’s also become an important way of connecting my work. Rather than treating each painting as an isolated image with its own completely different palette, I’ve become much more interested in developing bodies of work that share related colour relationships.

That continuity helps tie the paintings together visually while reinforcing the larger story I’m trying to tell. At the same time, light is incredibly fragile. Even though it’s one of my favorite tools, it’s also one of the hardest things to get right. There are times when I have a very specific quality of light in mind, and it takes multiple attempts before it finally feels believable. When it does, though, it has the power to transform an image in ways that drawing or composition alone never could.

Read Full Interview Here

Your paintings bring together realism, street art, and speculative fiction. Do artists today have more freedom to move between genres?

I do think artists have more freedom today, but I also think collectors have changed just as much. Over the past couple of decades, collectors have become increasingly open to supporting work that blends influences and doesn’t fit neatly into a single category. That’s been just as important as the freedom artists have to experiment. Artists have been borrowing from different genres for a very long time. What’s changed is that those combinations are now more widely embraced. Today, a painting can draw from realism, street art, speculative fiction, illustration, or cinema without being dismissed simply because it doesn’t fit within a traditional definition of fine art. I think that’s healthy for the art world. It allows artists to build a more personal visual language instead of feeling pressured to stay within established boundaries. At the same time, it gives collectors the freedom to connect with work based on its ideas and emotional impact rather than whether it belongs to a particular movement. Ultimately, I think it’s been a two-way evolution.

Artists have become more willing to take creative risks, and collectors have become more willing to embrace those risks.

That relationship has opened the door for a much broader and more diverse conversation about what contemporary painting can be.

What advice would you give self-taught artists who want to build a sustainable career while staying true to their vision?

The best advice I can give is simple: don’t stop. There will be moments when you feel like you’re not making enough work, improving fast enough, or getting the opportunities you hoped for. Those feelings are part of the process. What matters is continuing to show up not only in the studio, but in your imagination. Some of the most important work happens away from the canvas. Learn to cultivate your curiosity. Pay attention to the things that move you emotionally, the ideas you keep returning to, and the worlds that begin forming in your mind.

Creativity doesn’t begin the moment you pick up a brush; it’s something you carry with you every day.

There will also be people who don’t understand your vision. Sometimes they’ll try to protect you by encouraging a safer path, and other times they’ll simply be unable to see what you see. Don’t let that discourage you. Stay true to the work that feels honest to you, and keep moving forward. Above all, work hard, stay persistent, and believe in your own vision. Building a career takes time, and there are no guarantees, but if you continue learning, keep creating, and refuse to give up, you’ll give yourself every opportunity to build something meaningful. I truly believe that we’re capable of far more than we often allow ourselves to imagine.

By the time our conversation with Manuel came to a close, one thing had become completely clear to us. That this is an artist who has never once stopped pushing not because what he has built is not extraordinary, but because he genuinely believes the work can always go further.

And honestly? That is one of the most exciting things you can say about a painter right now.

Because the contemporary art world has a complicated relationship with ambition. It tends to reward consistency over growth. The artist who has found their lane and stays in it. The recognisable style delivered reliably to a market that knows what it is buying. And there is a logic to that. But it produces a very different kind of career and a very different kind of work than the one Manuel is building.

He is not interested in delivering the same painting twice. He is interested in building something that keeps expanding. A city with its own light and its own stories and its own people and its own ongoing evolution. A body of work that is more alive today than it was two years ago and will be more alive two years from now than it is today.

That is genuinely rare. And collectors who have been paying attention already know it. Because what Manuel is building is not just a collection of individual paintings it is a world. And owning a work from that world at this stage of its development is the kind of decision that collectors look back on years later and feel quietly proud of. Not because the market told them to buy it.

Because something in the work stopped them and would not let go. Because the light felt different. Because the figure in the painting felt like someone they had seen before somewhere they could not quite place. Because the city felt real.

That is what great narrative painting does. And Manuel Zamudio is building something within it that is entirely and unmistakably his own.

And the next chapter of that world is almost here. Manuel’s upcoming solo exhibition Neon Memory opens this November at Arch Enemy Arts in Philadelphia and if his previous shows are anything to go by, it is not something you will want to miss.

Follow Manuel Zamudio through the links below and see for yourself.

INSTAGRAM

And now, suddenly, they are out in the world.

People are going to look at them. They might ask questions. They might compliment them. They might misunderstand them. They might stand in front of one piece for five minutes or walk past another without giving it a second glance. There may be collectors, curators, fellow artists, friends, strangers, or simply a room full of people you have never met before.

Of course that can kick in anxiety.

Sometimes we talk about pre-show nerves as if they are something we need to get rid of completely. But maybe feeling nervous is not always a bad thing. Sometimes it is simply a sign that something matters to you. You are not nervous because you are incapable of being there. You are nervous because you are about to put something personal in front of other people and let them have their own response to it.

The goal, then, does not have to be to walk into an opening feeling perfectly calm. It can simply be to feel present.

Grounding exercises can help with that. They bring your attention back to your body, your surroundings, and the moment you are actually living rather than the hundred possible scenarios your mind has already imagined.

Here are five simple grounding exercises you can use before or during your next show.

1. Press Your Feet Into the Floor

When anxiety takes over, it is very easy to get stuck in your head.

You are thinking about what someone might say. Whether people will like your work. Whether you will know what to say when someone asks about a particular piece. Whether anyone will come. Whether too many people will come. Whether you will look awkward standing alone in the room.

Sometimes the simplest way back is through your body. Stand still for a moment and press both of your feet firmly into the floor. Notice where your feet meet the ground. Feel the weight of your body moving through your heels and toes. Notice your shoes around your feet. Notice the floor underneath you.

Stay there for a few seconds. You do not have to close your eyes or sit down or make it obvious that you are doing an exercise. You can do this while standing beside your work, waiting for the doors to open, or even while someone is talking to you.

The idea is simply to remind yourself: I am here. I am standing on solid ground. This is happening now.

Your mind might be somewhere ten minutes into the future, imagining everything that could possibly go wrong. Your feet are a quiet reminder that, right now, you are simply here.

2. Use Your Five Senses

When your thoughts are moving too quickly, deliberately bring your attention to what is around you.

This is the familiar 5-4-3-2-1 grounding exercise, and it can be especially useful before entering a busy gallery or exhibition space.

Look around and name:

5 things you can see.
Maybe it is a painting, a chair, a window, someone’s shoes, or the light falling across the floor.

4 things you can feel.
Your feet inside your shoes. Your phone in your hand. The fabric of your clothes. The coolness of a glass.

3 things you can hear.
People talking. Music playing. Footsteps. The sound of a door opening.

2 things you can smell.
Coffee, perfume, flowers, paint, the room itself.

1 thing you can taste.
Water, coffee, a mint, or simply the taste already in your mouth.

There is nothing complicated about it. You are just asking your brain to stop running ahead and pay attention to the room you are actually in. And an exhibition is already full of things to notice.

Instead of wondering who is looking at your work, notice the way the light falls on it. Instead of wondering what someone is thinking, listen to the conversation happening beside you. For a few moments, let the room exist without asking it to tell you anything about yourself.

3. Give Yourself an Artist’s Scan of the Exhibition

This one is particularly useful because it turns the exhibition itself into a grounding exercise. Before the opening gets busy, take a slow walk through the space.

Look at your work. But do not critique it. Do not ask yourself whether you should have changed something. Do not start noticing the tiny detail you suddenly wish you had painted differently. Do not compare your work to the other artists in the room. Just look.

Notice the colors. The textures. The frames. The spacing between pieces. The shadows. The lighting. The way one work looks beside another. Look at the exhibition as a visitor might.

You have probably spent so much time thinking about how to make the work that you rarely get to simply experience it once it is finished. This is your chance to do that. You might even notice something you had forgotten.

A detail that took you hours to make. A color you loved when you first started. The way two pieces unexpectedly speak to each other when they are finally hanging on the same wall. The point is not to judge what you see. It is to let yourself experience what you created.

That small shift can make a difference. Instead of entering the room thinking, “Everyone is going to judge my work”, you can remind yourself, “I made this. It is here. I get to see it too.”

Explore More Ways Here

Before You Walk Into the Room

You do not need to stop being nervous before an opening. You do not need to become the most confident person in the room. You do not need to know exactly what you will say to every person who walks up to your work.

You made something that mattered enough to you to share. It is okay if your heart beats a little faster because of that.

Save these five exercises somewhere you can easily find them, even in the Notes app on your phone. Read through them before your next opening and choose whichever one feels most useful in that moment.

Press your feet into the floor. Notice your senses. Take a slow walk through your own exhibition. Hold something familiar. Follow your small pre-show ritual. They only take a few minutes.

And they may be all you need to remind yourself that you are not there to control everyone’s reaction to your work. You are there to experience the moment, too.

At Arts to Hearts Project, our Women Artists on the Rise Edition 4 brought us one hundred women painting in every possible register, the bold and the experimental, the raw and the deeply personal. But every so often a body of work arrives that asks you to slow down, to stop and simply stand in front of it. That is what happened with Nadia Klionsky’s paintings.

Nadia is one of our selected artists in this edition, a classically trained painter born in St. Petersburg and taught first by her father, the renowned artist Marc Klionsky, who remained her mentor until his passing in 2017.

After her family immigrated to the United States she carried that training into Cooper Union, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the Philadelphia College of Art. But the reason her work stays with you has less to do with her pedigree than with what actually happens on the canvas.

She works in oil, and she works patiently, building light and atmosphere until a scene stops being a scene and becomes something closer to a feeling you can step inside. By her own account she is trying to bring traditional technique together with contemporary concerns, using the shifting conditions of weather and light to hold both the passage of time and a sense of timelessness.

You can feel that intention everywhere. In the way she paints water as pure energy and life, drawn to how it ebbs and flows regardless of anything we want from it. In the quiet corners of the winter woods she is always looking to disappear into, transfixed by snow and its textures and the long blue shadows the trees throw across the ground.

But it is the in-between that she loves most. That fragile threshold where something solid begins to dissolve and you are no longer quite sure what you are seeing. She is endlessly drawn to fog and mist and drifting cloud, to the moment a familiar thing turns strange and dreamlike.

Painting fog, she says, is like writing a fairytale. She is transfixed by the unknown depth in every misty perspective, the way it feels as if time stops to make room for our feelings, leaving each viewer to decide for themselves what lies beyond.

That feeling of mystery is an important part of her work. Nadia does not want to tell viewers exactly what to feel or see. Instead, she creates the mood and leaves space for each person to bring their own memories and emotions to the painting. Her landscapes become personal experiences rather than simply pictures of nature.

Now let’s hear from Nadia about the father who taught her to paint, why fog feels like a fairytale, and why she believes a strong foundation is what truly sets an artist free.

Can you tell us a little about your background and how your journey as a painter began?

I was born in St. Petersburg, Russia. My father was an artist, and my mother was a former actress and linguist. As far back as I can remember, I always knew I would become an artist. There was never any doubt in my mind. I grew up in the 1960s, when Abstract Expressionism began making its way into Russia and became a lively topic of conversation—especially in our home, where my parents often gathered with artist friends. Those discussions left a lasting impression on me. One of my earliest memories happened when I was about five or six years old.

While on a walk with my mother, I picked up a small rock with sharp edges. When we got home and she was in the kitchen, I quietly went into the living room and scratched three sides of our brand-new, high-polished mahogany wall unit as high as I could reach. When my horrified mother asked what I was doing, I calmly replied, “I’m making abstract art.”

Fortunately, she found it funny years later. I began my formal art education at the age of ten at the Intermediate Art School affiliated with the St. Petersburg Academy of Fine Arts. After my family immigrated to the United States in 1974, I continued my studies in New York, eventually attending Cooper Union, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Philadelphia College of Art.

Your practice has moved from conceptual works to landscapes and seascapes. What led to this shift?

One summer, while traveling through the American Northeast, I found myself unexpectedly transported back to my earliest memories of the fields and untamed forests of Eastern Europe. The landscape awakened something deeply familiar, bringing my childhood vividly back to me. It felt as though I had come full circle. It was in those early landscapes that I first experienced the brilliance of winter light, the fleeting warmth of long summer days, and the quiet transitions between the seasons.

Those moments shaped my sense of time, change, and the passage of life. Returning to those memories inspired me to look more closely at the natural world, and my work gradually shifted toward landscapes and seascapes rooted in direct observation.

Read Full Interview Here

Has your oil painting technique changed as your work has moved toward landscapes and seascapes?

Yes, my technique has evolved along with the direction of my work. My current landscapes and seascapes are rooted in careful observation and are painted with a greater level of realism and detail. In contrast, my earlier conceptual paintings were much freer in their execution more expressive, partially abstracted, and built with energetic brushwork and rich textures. Although the techniques are quite different, both bodies of work are driven by the same desire to express an idea or an emotional experience.

Landscape painting has a long history. What can contemporary painters still bring to this tradition?

I believe that contemporary landscape painters must first study and understand what has come before them. The long tradition of landscape painting deserves respect and appreciation, as it provides a foundation for future generations of artists. By learning from the past, artists can develop their own unique vision and bring a personal interpretation and new perspective to this enduring tradition.

What advice would you give artists who want to build a lasting practice while allowing their work to evolve?

The most important advice I can give artists is to build a strong foundation—to learn their craft, study art history, and understand what has been created before them. Once you have developed and mastered your skills, you can move into the world with confidence and begin creating work that is truly your own.

Whether your path leads you toward abstraction, conceptual art, installation, or any other direction, a strong foundation will give you the confidence, knowledge, and discipline to express your ideas with clarity and create work that feels authentic and professional.

By the time we finished talking with Nadia, we kept circling back to memory. To the strange way a certain light, or a quiet field, or a wall of fog can reach into you and pull up something you thought you’d long forgotten.

Her paintings work exactly like that. You look at a snow-covered wood or a harbor going soft at dusk, and before you know it you’re somewhere in your own past, some place you can’t quite name but somehow recognize. She isn’t really painting scenery.

She’s painting a feeling, and handing it to you, and letting it become yours. Stand with one of her canvases for a minute and something in you settles. You slow down. You start noticing things you’d normally walk right past.

And there’s a lot to take from the way she has built her life in art, most of it passed down from her father. Learn the craft first, she says. Really learn it. Study the painters who came before you, put in the years, and only once the skill is truly yours should you go off and make something nobody else could.

Then the hard part: keep at it. She’s honest that a life in art is mostly perseverance, showing up through the dry spells and the doubt, trusting that the real work is the staying. Wherever you end up going, that early foundation is what lets you go there freely.

There’s also hopefulness in everything she makes. She really believes we need beauty right now, maybe more than ever, and her flowers say it best, delicate things that somehow keep blooming, that keep starting over after the worst of it. It isn’t a soft or naive hope. It’s the kind you only earn by living a while, the kind that knows how heavy things can get and still bets on better days.

For collectors, her work brings something a lot of art doesn’t: stillness. These are patient, beautifully made paintings, full of light and air, the kind that keep revealing more the longer you live with them. Hang one in your home and you’ve opened a small window onto somewhere calmer, a daily nudge to slow down and a quiet reminder of both how fast time goes and how much of us stays.

Follow Nadia Klionsky through the links below and see her work for yourself.

INSTAGRAM

This is the final week to submit to our Art and Woman edition. Submissions close on 30 August. And we are looking for women artists who understand that the art is never the whole story. It is a doorway. Into a life, the victories and the struggles, the dreams and the doubts, the quiet years nobody witnessed and the moments that changed everything.

If you paint, draw, photograph, sculpt, stitch, or build in ways nobody else would think to, and if your work carries the truth of the life behind it, we want to see what you are doing. Medium does not matter. Geography does not matter. Career stage does not matter. What matters is that there is a real woman, and a real story, inside the work.

The window is almost closed. Every artist featured in our publications was once someone who took a breath and submitted before the deadline passed. This could be your edition, but only if you do not wait.

Submit Here

At Arts to Hearts Project, art is pretty much part of our everyday life. We see it all day, every day, paintings arriving in our inboxes, artists appearing on our feeds, new work being shared from studios around the world. There is always something to discover, and with so much incredible art out there, we’re constantly finding new artists who deserve to be seen.

But even when you see a lot of art, certain works still manage to stop you.

You know the feeling. You’re scrolling through, taking everything in, and suddenly a painting makes you pause. You look at it again. Then again. Maybe you love it immediately, maybe you’re trying to figure it out, or maybe you just can’t explain why you’re still looking.

Those are the paintings we want to put on our Heart List.

This week, five works stood out to us in exactly that way. Five paintings that made us pause, look twice, and want to share them with you.

So, let’s get into this week’s Heart List.

Our Favourite No. 5 is Light of Wisdom by Mitra Zeinali @mitra_mantus

Our No. 5 on this week’s heart list is this huge, glittering acrylic painting by Mitra Zeinali. a whole cast of pale, theatrical figures gathered in the dark, cheeks marked with heavy circles of rouge, wine lifted, and the strangest, most beautiful chaos going on around them. And honestly, it took us a minute to even work out what we were looking at, which is exactly why we loved it. A woman in an embroidered dress gazes up on one side. A figure in a black-and-white striped jacket sits in the middle with a coupe of red wine and a big red bow at the throat. Another face rests on a hand at the edge, just watching. Around them the scene bursts into life a lit candle, an open birdcage with a little bird still perched on it, thick tropical leaves, a pink flamingo curving its long neck up through the middle of everything.

That single candle flame is the light the title is talking about: one small, steady point of it in the middle of all that lush, decadent noise. Mitra is a Dubai-based visual artist, and this is exactly what her work does she builds these dense, jewel-toned worlds where people, animals and plants crowd in together until you simply cannot look away. The painting stands two metres tall, and it fills every inch.

Go visit her page and see everything she has been making, it is absolutely worth your time.

Our Favourite No. 4 is Simbiyoz by Tuna Özkaragöz @tunaozkaragozz

So, our No. 4 is Turkish for symbiosis a stunning oil painting by Istanbul artist Tuna Özkaragöz, and she means that title about as literally as a painting can. Two figures lie tangled together, both fast asleep, their heads resting into each other, one with red hair and one with pink, wrapped in the same soft lavender cloth. Their arms and legs overlap so completely you can barely tell them apart a hand cradling, legs crossed, one foot still in a blue sock, a bare foot slipping out at the bottom. A wide swathe of golden fur spreads across the middle, warm against the deep blue behind them. Nothing is happening, and that is the whole point: two people so close they have become a single thing.

What really got us is the way it is painted smooth, rounded, almost sculptural, every fold and finger given this soft, heavy calm. Tuna is represented by Sevil Dolmacı Gallery, and she works mostly in this register: hushed, intimate, faintly surreal scenes of bodies and closeness. It is a very still painting, and honestly very hard to walk away from.

Visit her page and see everything she has been working on, it is absolutely worth your time.

Our Favourite No. 3 is I’ll Be Your Mirror by Meghann Stephenson @meghannstephenson

Our favourite at number 3 is I’ll Be Your Mirror by Meghann Stephenson. At first, you might notice just one woman but look a little closer and you’ll see her appear three times one leaning toward us in the foreground, another sitting in a soft white dress and applying red lipstick, and a third appearing as a reflection in the round mirror beside her.

They all have the same face and wear the same pale, ruffled cotton, while the warm browns and creams of the painting are broken up by that one beautiful touch of red.

There’s something quietly intimate about the work. It captures those little moments of looking at yourself, getting ready, and simply being alone with your own reflection. By showing the same woman in different places, Meghann makes the scene feel like a glimpse into several versions of the same person.

Born in 1990 in McLean, Virginia, Meghann earned her BFA from Parsons in 2013 and is now based in Los Angeles. I’ll Be Your Mirror was also the title piece of her solo show at Half Gallery. It is calm, warm, and completely sure of itself, and we could not stop coming back to it.

Find her work and give her a follow, she is the kind of painter you discover once and keep for good.

For more visit our website

Our Favourite No. 2 is Drover Under Loony Sky by Phil Meatchem @philmeatchem

Climbing to No. 2 this week is this realistic painting Drover Under Loony Sky by Phil Meatchem, and it is about as gloriously Australian as a painting gets. A lone drover sits easy on a chestnut horse, hat pulled down low, a soft pink shirt against all that heat, riding at a walk across dry golden grassland. Behind him the sky is a flat, blazing red with a few pale clouds the “loony” sky of the title and horse and rider throw one long shadow across the scrub. It is a simple scene, but that red does something to it, turning an ordinary ride home into something big and strange and a little dreamlike.

Phil is an Australian painter based on the Central Coast of New South Wales, working in acrylic, and he is best known for his portraits and caricatures a repeat finalist in prizes like the Doug Moran, the Percival and the Bald Archies. But he keeps returning to Australian life and its characters: drovers, stockmen, old bushrangers, the odd surfer. He painted this one as a nod to a musician he loves, and you can feel that ballad quality running all through it.

See more of his work and give him a follow, you will want to keep an eye on what he does next.

Our Favourite No. 1 is Lost and Confused by Josh @joshuniverse

And our favourite of the week goes to Josh’s Lost and Confused. It’s the kind of painting that gives you something new to notice every time you look at it. It is a lot to take in all at once, and that is exactly the point. A young man stands at the centre, bare-chested, head tipped back and a hand thrown up near his face, and the whole natural world seems to be pouring out of him at once blue feathered wings on one shoulder, orange monarch butterflies on the other, a tiger’s face pressing through, bright birds and koi and flowers, a clear bubble on his chest with something moving inside it, all of it wrapped in thick green jungle with a little patch of deep space up in the corner. It is beautiful and completely overwhelming, both at once.

Josh did not want to over-explain this one. His only note was that it is about being busy, anxious and uncertain, but having just enough faith to keep going and he said the title covers the rest. It is oil on canvas, every inch crammed with colour and life and noise. You come away feeling a little like the man in it: swamped but still standing. That is why it sat with us the longest.

Find his work and give him a follow, this is an artist whose next piece we will absolutely be watching for.

And that’s our Heart List for the week. Five paintings we loved, and five artists we think deserve a little extra attention. If one of these stayed with you, head over to their page and tell them. Leave a comment, share their work, or send a little encouragement their way. It only takes a moment, but for the person on the other side of the artwork, it can mean a lot.

One more thing before you go. So much of this week came back to the human figure the face, the body, the feeling sitting just under the surface which makes it exactly the right moment to mention the 101 Art Book: Faces Edition by Arts to Hearts Project. It is the 14th edition in the 101 Art Book series: a hardcover, published and shipped worldwide, bringing 101 artists together around one subject, the human face. It is open right now every medium, every background, 101 spots. If that sounds like your work, go and submit.

Submit Now

At Arts to Hearts Project, our 100 Emerging Artists 2026 edition is full of artists chasing the new, the loud, the immediate. So it means something when a body of work arrives that moves in the other direction entirely. Work that is unhurried, atmospheric, and interested less in capturing a moment than in holding onto what is quietly disappearing. That is exactly where Will Corvara’s photographs live.

Will is one of the selected artists in this edition. He is a photographer and writer from Madrid, and his eye was shaped by an unusual inheritance. He grew up between his father’s antique print shop, full of old engravings, and his mother’s film productions.

Art on one side, cinema on the other. Long before photography was a conscious choice, he was already absorbing the two things that would come to define his work, the aged physical surface of an image and the way light builds an entire world.

His route to fine art was not a straight one. He worked as an art director and a graphic designer, shot stills on film sets, and spent years in commercial photography before his own artistic work took shape. That long apprenticeship gave him complete command of his craft. But at a certain point he wanted photography to stop selling and explaining, and to start doing something quieter and more open instead.

What defines his images now is the way he uses darkness. He lets shadow take almost everything, then allows light through only where it matters, so a photograph becomes less a record of what was there than a vessel for something hidden. In a portrait, that something is the inner psychology of the person; in a landscape, a mood pressed into the place itself.

Critics have reached for Caravaggio to describe how he handles light and shadow, and one curator called his work photographic poetry. Both feel right. Light, for Will, is not there to help us see. It decides what exists.

He thinks and writes about images as seriously as he makes them. In a recent book he argues that photography is not a technique but a way of thinking and paying attention, and that in an age saturated with pictures, the world does not need more images, only better ones. That belief runs straight through his work. He has no interest in images that give themselves away at a glance. He wants images that ask for time.

And what stays with you is how quietly it all works. His photographs never raise their voice. They hold their shadows and their silences, and reward you only if you slow down and stay with them. His work has earned international recognition, exhibited from the Canary Islands to Madrid to Boston, and Forbes España has counted him among the Spanish photographer-artists to watch.

Now let’s hear from Will about the eye behind the work, his love of shadow, and why really looking has become a radical act.

Can you share how your journey into photography began and what first drew you to light, memory, and time?

My relationship with images began before my conscious relationship with photography. I grew up surrounded by old prints in my father’s shop, among aged papers, historical scenes, landscapes, portraits, and botanical images. That taught me that an image is not only what it represents: it is also accumulated time, matter, wear, and memory.

Over time, I understood that light is not only there to help us see better; it reveals what is about to disappear. There is also a very strong personal dimension. My life has been shaped by a physical awareness of time, the body, and fragility. When you have felt that the body can fail, time stops being an abstract idea. It becomes something concrete. I think that is why I photograph so often what resists, what exists between appearing and disappearing.

Many of your images feel painterly. How has painting influenced the way you compose a photograph?

Painting has influenced the way I look enormously. I am especially interested in chiaroscuro, not as an aesthetic effect, but as a language. In Caravaggio, for example, light does not decorate: it decides what exists. In Vermeer, light seems to hold time inside a room. When I compose a photograph, I think a lot about that. About what I allow to be seen and what I conceal.

About how a shadow can be more active than an illuminated area. About how a black background can function almost like matter, not as emptiness. I am also interested in the tradition of still life and vanitas. Flowers, objects, remains, worn textures. Apparently still things that, in reality, speak about the passing of time, beauty, and disappearance.

You grew up surrounded by art through your father’s antique print shop. How did those early experiences shape your way of seeing?

My father’s shop was my first visual school. There, I learned to look at images that had already survived other lives. Prints, papers, frames, stains, small marks of time. That taught me to value not only representation, but also surface, matter, and aging. An image was not something clean and perfect; it was something that had passed through the world. I think that experience is still very present in my work. I am interested in images that seem to have physical memory. Images where beauty is not separate from wear.

Read Full Interview Here

Has your definition of success become more about recognition or creating work that feels true to your vision?

Recognition matters, of course. It would be hypocritical to say it does not. One wants one’s work to circulate, to reach others, to have a life outside the studio. But I am less and less interested in success understood as noise. What matters more to me is making work that goes hand in hand with my way of seeing and understanding the relationship between the outer world and my inner world.

What advice would you give photographers who are still learning to trust their own way of seeing?

I would tell them to pay attention to what calls them, even if it does not seem important to anyone else. We are all drawn to certain things that another photographer might ignore completely. Our lives leave deep marks on our subconscious, shaping interests and attractions that we often do not understand at first. Many great photographers never fully knew why they were making certain images. Some are lucky enough to discover it over time: they begin to recognize their obsessions, their recurring subjects, the things they cannot stop looking at.

And very often, that is where their path begins. So I would tell young photographers not to run away from what attracts them, even if it seems strange, ordinary, or difficult to explain. Trusting your own way of seeing means listening to those impulses before you know exactly what they mean. The work often understands before we do.

As our conversation with Will wrapped up, we found ourselves thinking about how little we actually look at anything anymore. How much of the world slips past us in a second, glanced at and gone.

Because we live surrounded by images that ask nothing of us, and Will’s ask for the one thing nobody seems to have. Time. A good photograph, he says, does not need to shout. It can be quiet at first, and then, the longer you stay with it, it begins to beat. In a world where everything is consumed in an instant, an image that refuses to be rushed becomes something close to an act of resistance.

And what his pictures hold, so often, is fragility, the sense of something caught between being here and being gone. Because we are drawn to what does not last. Maybe because we recognise ourselves in it, in that heartbeat that keeps going but was never promised to us.

We think every artist needs to hear the thing he believes about finding a voice. That it does not arrive when you are trying to prove something. It arrives when you stop and let your real impulses through. Pay attention to what calls you, he says, even when it seems ordinary or strange or impossible to explain to anyone else. Trust the things you cannot stop looking at, long before you understand what they mean. Because the work tends to understand first. A picture you made years ago can turn out to have known exactly what you were trying to say.

There is a quieter lesson in his path too. Will spent years in commercial photography, where an image has to convince and sell and explain itself. His own work began the moment he wanted the opposite of all that, images that open a question instead of closing one. Anyone can make a striking image now, he points out. The tools are everywhere. The hard thing, the thing still worth chasing, is not the well-made image. It is the necessary one.

For art lovers and collectors, Will’s work brings a rare kind of stillness into a room. Photographs that hold light as if it were a material, that keep their shadows and their secrets, that turn ordinary things into presences you find yourself returning to.

They do not give themselves away on the first look. They reward the slow gaze, and they keep shifting, because you keep shifting, and your life reaches them from somewhere new each time. To live with his work is to be gently reminded, every day, to slow down. To find more mystery in the ordinary, more beauty in what is fragile, more presence in what looked, at first, like empty space.

Follow Will Corvara through the links below and see his work for yourself.

INSTAGRAM

There is a woman behind every piece of art, and a whole life behind her. Our Art and Woman edition is now open for submissions, and we want the work that carries it, the victories, the struggles, the quiet years, and the moments that changed everything. Paint it, draw it, photograph it, sculpt it, stitch it, or build it however you like. Medium, geography, and career stage are irrelevant. A real woman and a real story are everything. Every featured artist once took a breath and submitted. This could be your edition.

Submit Here