In these small oil paintings, Toronto-based artist Carly Waito depicts the most minute details of minerals and crystals as they sparkle and glimmer. Waito seems to have a profound understanding of how light affects an object and gives each work an amazing sense of depth and focus. From her artist statement:
As a painter, Waito has continued to pursue this inspiration, with a focus towards geology, geometry, light, and a sense of wonder and curiosity. These themes are uniquely encompassed by the tiny mineral specimens which have become her particular obsession. With each finely detailed painting, Waito focuses the eye on a specimen’s particular qualities, showing the beauty and magic that is present even in nature’s tiniest objects, if one looks closely enough and with a curious mind.
Collected here are a number of paintings spanning 2009-2015, but you can see many more through Narwhal Gallery. (via The Jealous Curator)
Blurring the line between the real and imagined, Stev’nn Hall paints and stains images he takes with his 35 mm camera, often landscapes of his rural Ontario hometown. Each mixed media work contains a collaboration of more than 40 images which are combined, blown up, and mounted on birch panel. With acrylic, ink, and pastel he further distorts each image in an impressionist style, imbuing the ponds, prairies, and rural streets with exaggerated colors one might see through a sun flare or tinted glass.
Hall is a graduate of Concordia University where he studied film, painting, and photography. Before dedicating himself full time to his mixed media works, he was an award-winning television producer and director of indie music videos. You can see more of the Canadian artist’s process and work on his Tumblr and Instagram. (viaArch Atlas)
Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Elliasson is well-known for his work in sculptures and large-scale installations, often utilizing light or other natural elements. Recently though he’s been heading into new territory,recontextualizing the paintings of landscape artist J.M.W. Turner into circular paintings, bringing the works to a pure form.
Turner’s ability to shape and frame light in his paintings has had a significant impact on my work….In the Turner colour experiments, I’ve isolated light and colour in Turner’s works in order to extract his sense of ephemera from the objects of desire that his paintings have become. The schematic arrays of colours on round canvases generate a feeling of endlessness and allow the viewer to take in the artwork in a decentralised, meandering way.
It’s an interesting idea from a conceptual standpoint, that he’s transformed the light and colors that J.M.W. Turner saw into a sweeping, endless gradient. The abstraction while seemingly simple is intensely scientific. Eliasson is analysing pigments, paint production and application of colour in order to mix paint in the exact color for each nanometre of the visible light spectrum. An ambitious project with really impactful results.
matt reilly skateboard paints through mana contemporary image by crystal gwyn / all images courtesy of mana contemporary
with a skateboard, colored paint and a half-pipe installed within the gallery walls at mana contemporary in jersey city, brooklyn-based artist matt reilly has left his creative mark on a canvas. by adding various hues of liquid chroma to wheels with saturated sponges — and attaching them to the base of his board — he was able to colorize a plain white canvass tacked to the surface of a mini ramp. gliding back-and-forth over the sheet, reilly formed ‘wall ride’, one stroke and one layer at a time. diverse shades of blue, red and brown materialized on the canvas as reilly sped around the space, each different in their thickness and pattern. following the live performance, the canvas has been detached, and a new one fixed in its place rendering each finished piece a completely unique artwork, distinct in texture and composition.
Danny Quirk’s work lies somewhere between fine art and scientific illustration. His collection of anatomical body art, some of which he paints directly on his subjects, others which he depicts in traditional painting, dares the viewer to see what’s beneath the surface. You won’t see skin the same.
Philadelphia artist Kim Alsbrooks recreates historial oil portraits on flattened beers cans and fast food containers. Titled “My White Trash Family” the series was conceived while Alsbrook was living in the south and found herself grappling with prevailing ideas of class. She shares via a statement about the project:
The White Trash Series was developed while living in the South out of frustration with some of the prevailing ideologies, in particular, class distinction. This ideology seems to be based on a combination of myth, biased history and a bizarre sentimentality about old wars and social structures. With the juxtaposition of the portraits from museums, once painted on ivory, now on flattened trash like beer cans and fast food containers, the artist sets out to even the playing field, challenging the perception of the social elite in today’s society.
Filmmaker Jesse Brass recently caught up with Alsbrook to interview her for his Making Art series. Watch it above.
Tobias Kroeger Tobias Kroeger’s portraits feel like clockwork faces, component parts revealed, the moving pieces of the mind pushed forward to make blunt countenances, spectral, scary for their hiding of nothing.
We’ve seen lots of hyperrealisticpaintings that let a painted image appear like a photograph, but does it also work the other way around? Photographer Kristoffer Axen proofs that it does. He lets his pictures look like they were painted. With the help of dark filters, and otherworldly lighting, he creates the illusion of gloomy, rainy paintings.
