Alexander Maw’s drawings and paintings bring to mind the historical tradition of memento mori images but with a contemporary twist. Skillfully rendered and deeply thoughtful, the current theme of his work explores mortality in art. All that lives must die. Max is a self-representing artist, born in Cheltenham, UK, in 1990. Self-taught and mentored by his father.
April Coppini’s drawings with charcoal are an act of reverence, giving simple and immediate access to her work. In her visceral yet delicate renderings of animals and insects, particularly bees, show how they move in space, how they breathe and how the air is around them. By bringing forward images of the creatures around us believes this helps the viewer appreciate and understand them and our own place in the world.
Brett Harvey’s dynamic figurative sculptures display the concepts of masculinity and beauty as well as an incredible understanding of anatomy. His works present both intimidating physical strength and pensive vulnerability. A dominant theme in his work is that “it all goes back to the Greeks”, and Harvey is particularly adept at capturing hands and feet which convey an individuality as distinct as any portrait.
The portraits of Cayce Zavaglia, originally from Australia, are hand sewn using cotton and silk thread or crewel embroidery wool. Her meticulous attention to detail means that from a distance they read as hyper-realistic paintings, and only after closer inspection does the work’s true construction reveal itself.
The portraits she weaves of family, friends and fellow artists have created fabric paintings that glow with life and personality with sewn threads mimicking the way brush marks are layered within a painting. Her “versos” — the reverse side of her embroidered works — are a work of art themselves.
Darren Reid, a self-taught acrylic painter from Derby, UK creates local scenes with incredible photorealistic detail at first glance, though he can cleverly change angles so that on second glance you can see the angle of the bridge or the narrowness of the street is not entirely accurate, so that whilst photographs inform the works, Reid allows himself the freedom of interpretation. They're composites that tell whatever story he wants them to, but you will still be in awe of the exquisite detailing.
In his masterful portraits, the direct gaze of Golucho’s subjects are almost disarming in their honesty, yet there is also a sense of compassion, luminosity and poignancy. His main focus is on the human being and how the soul is manifested in the physical body. His characters are marked by life, which gives them great power.
With an early inclination toward imaginative art through to the digital innovations of PlayStation, Gennari has recently been bringing together all the pieces of her artistic identity into a fuller expression of her art. Gennari’s paintings have a beautiful clarity that captures animals in moments of tenderness and awareness and portraits that can be compared to the old masters.