Clare Woods is a British painter who began her career as a sculptor. She primarily paints abstracted landscapes, but humans also feature in her more recent works.

I am not a fan of these current works, (that brand of abstraction is a bit boring and I feel they lack interesting compositions or cohesion), but her landscapes from a few years ago are stunning amalgamations of shape and color with an inspiring economical abstraction of light and form.

Bleeding Cross, 2008

From the whimsy of some of her works, one would hardly guess that Woods works from photographic imagery. She photographed these scenes of undergrowth at night, where the flash of her camera would create harsh lighting effects. This means that her shapes are simultaneously quite specific yet hard to interpret due to their low key. It's an interesting type of abstraction mostly because of Woods' imaginative additions; her bright selective colors and the mixture of flat shapes with rendered ones creates a beautifully complex image.

Black Vomit, 2008.

Woods also creates wonderfully deep and immersive spaces in her painting by pushing back into the negative space with ribbon-like lines. The twisting silhouettes of vines, branches, and leaves speak to the inherent chaotic nature of her subject. And while the images are reportedly supposed to reflect anxiety, I find additions like these more beautiful and fantasy-like.

Cold Garden, 2008

Sam Vernon is an installation artist who pieces together her unsettling xeroxed drawings in a blended horror/Afrofuturist (a genre that meshes African history with mysticism, fantasy, and science fiction) aesthetic. Her work is attractively disturbing, with distorted human figures that combine the familiar with the alien. Vernon explores modern dilemmas that face African Americans such as sexism, racism, and post-colonialism, and I'm tempted to compare her downtrodden shadow-people to Kara Walker's silhouettes, yet the racial undertones of Vernon's work are much less obvious. I'd say that the visual impact of Vernon's installations precedes their ideas, but this does not make the art any less appealing. 

How Ghosts Sleep (Haunted House IV), 2009

I'm very drawn to what I call the indie-horror aesthetic, the kind that embraces crude and primitive symbols that are easily interpreted but somehow "wrong" in their delivery ("Legs" is a good example of this scary minimalist vocabulary). Vernon uses this to great effect, at once making the turmoil of her characters feel universal while also embracing symbology as a reference to dehumanization, as Africans were dehumanized throughout history.

Legs, 2009

Vernon's abstractions also create a space that focuses purely on human psychology and emotion. She writes "...My mark-making, patterns and aesthetic is in many ways otherworldly, an alternative universe. I write in my artist statement that the installations are 'fear, anxiety and memory translated on flapping sheets. Ghosts congeal and bodies form in dark corners and hang about whispering until the inflection of their voices can be heard among the living.'"

The drawings remind us of vindictive ghosts that look back at us viewers, reprimanding, resenting, mourning, and waiting to be acknowledged.

Don't Worry What Happens Happens Mostly Without You, 2012

Vernon regards her work as an artistic experiment mostly independent of financial concern, as she does not profit much from her installations. I find the lack of compensation disappointing since her work does convey a truly fascinating and mysterious world, part history and part fantasy, on the brink of our own. 

Grass, 2011

Ellen Altfest is an American painter with an obsessive penchant for realism. Her work's supreme level of detail evokes a microcosm of activity, with roads and highways represented by skimpy twigs and winding bristles of hair. Yet the work also feels very quiet and sterile in its straightforward rendering, not the least because these chaotic growths seem lacking in residents. Even her human subjects are passively objectified, displayed like a topographic map or simple anatomical study. What's interesting is that despite this, the works are hardly lacking in passion; they are a brilliant display of artistic fascination. Altfest patiently studies her subjects from life, working in seven hour increments over seven months before finishing a painting.

Gourds, 2006-2007

Though I doubt Altfest herself would agree that hyper realism is a dry approach to art-making, it's interesting to think of her work as commenting on the style's best implementation. The amount of work and skill she puts into each piece is extremely admirable, and focusing on "complexity" as a subject is very much in line with a realist's specialty. There is no narration or criticism of society, just a beautiful picture of an overlooked aspect of our world. It's comforting and mesmerizing in its straight-forwardness.

Tumbleweed, 2005

But Altfest does intend for us to see the value of her paintings beyond their technique, which I think she accomplishes by intimately cropping her works and allowing us to appreciate the un-idealized detail of their real-world counterparts. This is especially the case with her male figures, whose body hair and veiny genitalia remind us that humans are organic "things" not so different from plants.

"I think I learned to be an artist as a still life painter and then applied that language to the figure. Maybe the body is more understandable when it is broken down into knowable pieces. I also like that the parts of the body become their own things, separate from the person they belong to."

Torso, 2011

Micah Lidberg is an illustrator, designer, and typographer with a enviably clean and detailed art style. His flat spaces and colors remind me of Japanese prints, albeit with a more random doodle aesthetic.

The abundance of interesting subjects in his pieces is explained by his partially stream-of-consciousness process; "Before I set out to start working on a piece, I imagine what the general layout is going to be. In that way, I do plan an environment for hidden gems to live in. However, all the little moments and stories don’t become a reality until I get down to the actual, final drawing. They take form when I begin to address each little square inch of the piece."

Angry Cloud

The surreal and oftentimes creepy mood Micah enjoys implementing is what most draws me to his narratives. Though his wild colors and characters seem influenced by psychedelics, he clarifies that "all of my work comes from my sober imagination." And there is definitely a much more sober quality to his pristine, economically-silhouetted shapes.

Rendlesham Forest, 1980

Micah's hand-drawn details contribute a richness of texture that I find really inspiring, but I think color (which he adds digitally) is what best pulls together the atmosphere of his work.

My Favorite Things

Bobby Chiu is a Canadian illustrator with a broad array of vibrantly colored and humorously stylized digital paintings. He works as a freelancer and has created character designs for movies such as Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, but he's best known for (and funded by) his online art education project Schoolism.

My favorite aspect of Chiu's work is how he combines soft, airbrushed rendering with subtle textures that compensate for the stale cleanliness of digital painting. Furry pelts are one of his specialties.

The funny narratives Chiu is fond of depicting are also what draw me to his work (his standalone character designs are appealing but less inspirational). He maintains a childlike lens in his paintings by putting endearing characters in ominous but not explicitly threatening scenarios.

Art like Chiu's is all-age appropriate and conceptually straightforward, which makes it prime material for commercial use. So while it doesn't provoke any deeper analysis, it is definitely a standard by which I would judge the technical professionalism of my own work. I would love to steal his lighting, texturing, and coloring techniques for myself.

Alessandro Pessoli is an Italian-born American artist who creates paintings, drawings, and sculptures in equal volume. He is interested in the intangibility of history and its openness to subjective interpretation, especially in how contemporary viewpoints change and renew the past. As such, he draws on historical references in much of his work, along with meaningful symbols that represent topics from religion to sexuality.

h.d-p, 2005/06

Of all his works I prefer those that seem to be of humans partially formed; ones that lack detail in a decaying corpse kind of way. They are disturbing not only for their inhuman appearance but also because of their strange colors and patterns, like sickly and subdued psychedelic posters. The work is definitely more emotionally raw than telling of any idea (some call them narratives but I find them closer to being imaginative portraits of nobody in particular), because what's on canvas is foggy and rough to the point of being an eclectic riddle with no real context. I really love the weird feeling they give off, and I think the ability to elicit interest with shapes so unclear is an admirable skill.

Testa in Amore, 2008

Pessoli's paintings may be rough but they feel very complete, either because he establishes his focal points very well or because no one can say what the end result of his abstractions should look like. I'd like to try his method of sketching with paint to see if I also could be satisfied with something so lacking in rendering.

Assassini Che Mangiano, 2005/06

Julien Spianti is a French painter and filmmaker who merges classical figure painting with impressionistic landscapes. His work often appears to be mid-transformation, with some portions fragmented and others well-rendered. He cites dreams as an inspiration for the lack of clarity in his work. 

Embarquement, 2013

Spianti is interested in portraying the blending of myth and reality as it has been throughout human history. I enjoy that there is a romantic quality to his impressionist style and well-rendered nudes that is at odds with more modern techniques such as his fragmented compositions, unsmoothed brushstrokes, and washed-out lighting you might expect from a non-idealized studio setting. 

Open Source, 2014

His method of painting thinly, incompletely covering his canvases, is one of my favorite aspects of his work; I feel that the artist studies what he wants to from his subjects until he feels his point has been made. The paintings feel skilled and academic but not overworked due to perfectionist objectives.

LOVE IN SETTLEMENT, 2011

Justin Mortimer is a British painter who explores the visceral psychological turmoil of humankind. His imagery comes from photographs that he finds online or in books, which he cobbles together in a collage to be used as reference. What he chooses to paint is most often disturbing, the horrifying realism of his subjects pairing with impressionist marks that obscure and fragment their original contexts.

Family Dollar, 2009

My first impression of Mortimer's work was more focused on the physical than the psychological. The strange gravity of viewing corpses, abandoned facilities, and even just nude figures captured with unflattering flash photography isn't too different from the emotional weight of war photojournalism or crime scene photos. The "narratives" in his paintings may be imaginary, but his sources are not, and I find it impossible to discard the idea of their original contexts in favor of his new composition.

To combat this, Mortimer attempts to separate his paintings from their sources by "redaction." "I imagine screen writing is similar; the less you know about the character the more you want to know - my pictures have no voice over." In partially obscuring things or keeping them off frame, he preserves a sense of mystery and anticipation that doesn't explain too much of what's happening.

Tract, 2012

Mortimer also feel there's a universality in his work that relates to more general concepts of fear, conflict, and loss than specific human conflicts: he calls his scenes "paranoid landscapes" and keeps his figures faceless to show their disconnection from their surroundings, ultimately trying to depict a break down of sanity, peace, and rationality.  

"What makes me want to make art in my studio in a dingy part of East London is that story I want to tell about our fears, our anxieties, how afraid we all are, how we’re all going to die. Are we going to go mad? Am I going to lose my job? Is my body going to fail? Will my loved ones not be around for me? There’s sort of an existential anger—not to sound pretentious—but there is an anger I have in me that drives my work."

Jockey Club, 2007

Mortimer's work is depressing, scary, violent, and very real, and I think that's what attracts me to his paintings in an uncomfortable kind of way; I don't like them but I enjoy that they are scary, morbid, and different from what I'm used to seeing. Even if I don't believe there's any intellectual brilliance to his ideas, I can't help their emotional impact.

The artist himself is very aware that this kind of vouyerism is a common interest among his fans; "I do know that if you scratch the surface of us all you'll find a huge appetite for violence, cruelty, for the subversive and the deviant. Our dark, innate impulse for brutalism is a preoccupation that continually feeds my work."

Der Besucher, 2014