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