About Nick:

Nick Lepard studied at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in 2008.

His most recent paintings explore the physicality of painting – both its application and its dependence on space in the real world. It does so through color, scale and gesture. The images are bright and playful in color, but macabre and grotesque in other aspects.

Lacking any clear spacial or formal boundaries, his images rest between creation and destruction. The intention behind this is to convey a kind of mortality, a symptom of the organic and traditional. In an increasingly digital world, painting is an evermore engaging art form, says Lepard.

His work has been exhibited across British Columbia and in California.

About Sean:

Sean E. Avery is a sculpture and an author and illustrator of children’s books.

His sculptures are made from exclusively recycled materials which are processed to appear more organic than they are. Apart from sculpture, his main focus is writing and illustrating stories for children. One of these stories, titled All Monkeys Love Bananas, has been picked up by Fremantle Press and is scheduled for release later this year.

Avery has won numerous local awards and created displays for Woodside Plaza, Remida, Scitech, and others.

About David:

David Peterson was born in 1979 in Grand Rapids and received his BFA from Center for Creative Studies, Detroit, in 2001.

He is inspired by product design, graphic design, and architecture. ‘If I see an amazing new sneaker that someone is wearing, a design for an ad in a magazine, or an incredible new building, I immediately start figuring out how I can make a work out of this inspiration,’ he says.

During his art process, he feels as if he is analyzes the perceptual elements of his observation, deconstructing its perceptual elements and then reconstructing these elements in a new composition. This calls upon very basic principles and elements of design and leads to a precise art object which he believes to exist perfectly with its own system of rules.

His work has been exhibited in New York.

About Catherine:

Catherine Brooks holds a BFA from Pratt Institute of Art and Design and more recently completed a residency at Campus Hanoi in Vietnam.

Her paintings are made on various scale and using various media, but share her own distinctive “personal vocabulary,” made up of esoteric fables and often psychological undertones.

Influenced by legends passed down in an oral tradition, the prevalent themes of her work are love and memory. She believes in the human tendency to personify the external world while relinquishing responsibility for life and its manifestations. In her paintings, Brooks aims to reflect that.

Her work has been exhibited nationwide, from the Japanese American National Museum and Thinkspace Gallery in Los Angeles and Proposition Gallery in New York, and has been sold worldwide.

About John:

John Bernhard was born in Switzerland and traveled around North America extensively before finally settling in Houston, Texas.

The prevailing themes of his work are climate change and planet pollution. Bernhard uses NASA archive images taken by astronauts from the International Space Station and adjusts their contrast and the brightness. Then, he superimposes portraits of children he has taken himself. The contrast between their faces and these perilous landscapes is intended to convey his message about the way we are mistreating our planet.

Bernhard has been a photographer for over two decades now and continues to devote all his energy to bringing them together to enhance the meaning of his photographs by way of visual interplay. He has authored seven monographs, including Nudes Metamorphs, Nicaragua, Diptych, Evanescence, Drift, China. His most recent book, Body Work, is a retrospective on nudes.

His work has been exhibited nationwide and in Europe. It has been featured in numerous publications and was included in Body Work, a permanent collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts curated by Christian Peterson: Most recently Bernhard staged a retrospective of his work at the Musée des Suisses dans le Monde in Geneva.

About Kevin:

Kevin Ledo was raised a devout Catholic and educated to be an illustrator and is presently neither one nor the other. His paintings is a reaction to the two, tangled in idealism; mythology and mysticism; beauty v. divinity.

Ledo is a Portuguese Canadian who grew up in a mix of urban and ethnic cultures in Montreal. While art and painting have always been in this his life, he only set out to become a full time painter in 2005.

His work has been exhibited internationally at ModeMuseum in Hasselt, Belgium, En Masse at Art and the San Diego Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal. It has been featured in Juxtapoz, Cool Hunting and numerous other publications.

About David:

David Kracov is a sculptor, painter, and animator, who received a BFA from studied at Rhode Island School of Design.

He has worked at art since he was twelve, and was among the youngest artists to have been showcased at Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

His proudest commission is a sculpture he made for the Holocaust Museum of St. Petersburg, Florida of a Tasmanian devil is tearing the roof off of a boxcar, releasing one million butterflies, one for each of the children who lost their lives in the Holocaust.

Butterflies are a continued theme in his work and every piece he makes includes at least one, sometimes visible and other times hidden. Kracov regards it as his signature.

About Sean:

Sean Mahan is a painter based in Neptune Beach, Florida.

His latest works are part of a larger series of social-realist graphite renderings on oak and birch, colored with thin washes of acrylic. They depict a sense of wonder at the simple inherent sweetness of the human character and its connflict with structures of power and control.

In this series, Mahan uses the symbol of a ‘shadow person’ to pose questions about those of us who exist in the shadow of power. He means to discourage the popular but insulated view of how much impact consumer culture has on the world.

Most recently his work has been exhibited at Subtext Gallery, San Diego; Display Gallery, Gainesville; Art Basil, Miami; Museum of Contemporary Art, Jacksonville, and; Brooklyn Collective, New York.

About David:

David Patchen was born and raised in New York and studied at Pilchuck Glass School in Seattle, Washington.

He describes glass as a seductive as well as challenging and particularly unforgiving medium. Its ability to hold elements in suspension, bend light, and layer color in three dimensions, not to mention its mallability in a liquid state, is what first attracted Patchen to glass.

His latest work is an exploration of detailed patterns, colors and transparency, all created through multi-layered cane and murrine. Each project begins with meticulous planning and designing of colors and patterns. He starts by pulling the cane and murrine, then carefully composes these elements to design the final work, all days prior to blowing it.

Patchen is Chairman Emeritus of the Board of Directors at Public Glass and former member of the Glass Alliance of Northern California’s board of directors. In addition to being exhibited nationwide, his work is also collected in Canada and Europe.

About Ramona:

Ramona R. Mitchell received an MFA from University of Kassel, Kassel, Germany. Prior to that she studied in Athens, Georgia, and Cairo, Egypt.

Mitchell describes painting in philosophical terms as an intuitive journey on which one is always reconsidering the definitions of “truth” and authenticity. She has no interest in interpreting the visible world on behalf of the viewer, and hopes that the viewer will make his own associations for a unique experience.

Her work has been exhibited nationwide, most recently Muñoz Waxman Gallery jointly sponsored by New Mexico Committee of the National Museum of Women in the Arts and Center for Contemporary Arts.

About Travis:

Travis Pond creates elaborate sculptures and bespoke pieces of furniture from scrap metal.

About Kai:

Kai McCall was born in 1968 and received a BA from University of Western Ontario in 1991.

Influenced by 17th century Dutch Masters, literature and film, he likes to envision his painted figures as characters caught in a work of fiction, confronted with challenges and conflicts as they navigating the settings he has created for them.

He doesn’t make detailed drawings before he start painting, so his paintings evolve gradually and directly on canvas. His meticulous style of layering thin coats of paint, borrowed from Golden Age painters, produces the illusion of shimmering fabrics and translucent flesh.

His work has been exhibited across Canada and in London, England.

About Nadia:

Nadia Wicker is a photographer and makeup artist from France.

Ursides is a series of self-portraits created that relies on makeup, rather than Photoshop, for its fireworks effect. Wicker is secretive about her exact method.

Her work has been exhibited in Paris.

About Alberto:

Alberto Pancorbo was born in Soria, Spain, in 1956. He took an early interest in painting and at the age of eighteen moved to Barcelona to further his studies and begin exhibiting his work.

His chief influences are Salvador Dali and classic masters such as Velasquez and Bosco. Pancorbo himself paints relies on painstaking attention to detail, inspired by fantasy of medieval craftsmanship. His present style of romantic realism is the result of various technical and creative skills combined.

Pancorbo’s work has been exhibited in Spain, Colombia, New York, and his present home Miami, Florida. It has been collected publicly and privately across America and Europe. In 1985, he was awarded Artist of the Year by Correo Del Arte de Madrid.

About Caitlin:

Caitlin Karolczak was born on the Iron Range of Minnesota and received a BFA from University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, in 2005.

Karolczak aims to explores the fragility of the human mind and body. Many of her paintings are contemporary reinterpretations of classical painting themes. Her source material comes from her collection of vintage medical photographs – images which blur the line between artistic portraiture and scientific illustration.

Her aim is to confront the viewer with sensations of the unconventional “other” and of human commonality. By incorporating painting techniques from eras classical and modern, she blends detailed figure renderings with abstract backgrounds and other representational details.

Karolczak works as a professional artist and is co-owner of Spinario Design, a design and fine art gallery. Her own work has been exhibited locally.

About Tony:

Tony Orrico is a visual artist, performer, and choreographer.

Penwald Drawings are a series of bilateral drawings in which Orrico explores his body as a measurement tool and inscribes geometries through various movements.

His work has been staged worldwide, attracting attention from prominent collectors and institutions alike. A former member of Trisha Brown Dance Company and Shen Wei Dance Arts, he has performed at Sydney Opera House, Teatro La Fenice, New York State Theater, Théâtre du Palais-Royal, and many others.

Orrico was also among the performers to represent the work of Marina Abramovic during her retrospective at MoMA.

About Egene:

Egene Koo is an illustrator based in South Korea.

Her detailed oil paintings are a fusion of nature, fashion, and portraiture. In an unusual combination of elements that is both dreamy and unsettling, richly colored wildlife is crossed with over-sized high heels, well-dressed models, wide-eyed cats, and rabbit heads.

About Lisa:

Lisa Nilsson was born in Masschusetts in 1963 and received a BFA in illustration from Rhode Island School of Design in 1985.

She makes sculptures from Japanese mulberry paper and the gilded edges of old books by a technique of rolling and shaping narrow strips of paper called quilling or paper filigree.

Quilling was first practiced by Renaissance nuns and monks using the edges of worn out bibles, and was later adopted by ladies in the eighteenth century as a decadent pastime. Nilsson finds rendering the densely squished paper very satisfying and Inspired by her recent medical training has quilled a series depicting cross sections of the human body.

Her work has been exhibited nationwide, including most recently at Lavender Door Gallery in her native Massachusetts.

About Rosie:

Rosie Hardy is a photographer based in Manchester, England, who has shot pictures worldwide.

Her clients include Samsung, Penguin Books, and Maroon 5.

These are two of her self portraits.

About Steven:

Steven Spazuk received a BFA from Université Laval, Quebec, in 1983. He has since become an experienced designer of sets, advertising, and other graphics. But apart from these conventional mediums, he is also a soot artist, who paints and draws with fire.

Soot painting is a technique whose first practitioners were cave dwellers, he says. By a mix of accident and intent, Spazuk has developed his own method method of creating elusive and haunting portraits entirely from the residue of smoke and fire.

His subjects, human body parts, are sometimes only suggested and other times depicted very literally. He will sometimes leave the remains of insects or rain in his work, etching upon them with minuscule brushes.

Spazuk has designed over twenty stamps for Canada Post.

About Matteo:

Matteo Pugliese was born in Milan in 1969. In 1978 his family moved to Sardinia and lived there for the next 12 years. During this time he developed a strong love for drawing and sculpture and practiced without formal education.

After finishing his secondary school studies in classics in Cagliari, he returned to Milan to attend university. In 1995 he was awarded his degree in modern literature at the University of Milan with a graduation thesis on art criticism.

In 2001, with encouragement from friends, Pugliese organized and financed his first solo exhibition, renting private exhibition space in the center of Milan. Only eighteen months later his first official exhibition was held in a gallery in Brera, Milan, and a few months after that he had a solo show in Brussels.

Today his works are on permanent display in galleries in Italy and major cities throughout the world including Rome, Hong Kong, London, Brussels, Lugano, and The Hague.

About Sarah:

Sarah Esteje is an illustrator and photographer born in 1987. She studied art in Paris at both LISAA and Gobelins School of the Image, Paris. Her series of animal portraits is drawn entirely in ball point pens.

About Robert:

Robert Bissell was raised in rural Somerset, England, and received an MFA in design from Royal College of Art, London.

Bissell started documenting his surroundings at a young age, and his love of art, rural life, Celtic legends and panoramic landscapes has never lessened. After graduating, he moved to San Francisco to start a successful career in retail advertising. Fifteen years later, he decided to devote all his time to painting.

His paintings explore the idea that animals have a metaphysical importance to our own spiritual well-being. In a world devoid of animals, we as humans would be compelled to reconsider our relation to nature. While whimsical at first glance, there is underlying tension and precariousness in his images.

Bissell currently lives in Northern California and regularly exhibits in museums and galleries across the United States and Europe.

About Randall:

Randy Fischer was born in Jackson, California, in 1985. He’s currently studying illustration at Pasadena Art Center College of Design.

About Nancy:

Nancy Loughlin was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1946. She received an MFA from Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles in 1970.

Her latest body of work explores a perceived growing discord between an increasingly unhappy human race and nature. depicting complex problems through chaotic compositions, densely populated by animals, plants, machines, and meta-environments. Loughlin uses many layers of paint and distorted representations space, size, and perspective to emphasize this concept.

The series emerged from questions about encroachment, dominion, pollution and destruction. She hopes to strike a balance between meaning and beauty. All her paintings are intended as important commentaries about our shared existence, she says.

Her work has been awarded several prizes and exhibited nationwide.

About Josie:

Josie Morway is a self-taught artist who has been painting most of her life.

Her paintings are fragmented narratives, inspired by everyday words and phrases that bombard us – old signage, broken billboards, overheard conversations.

Morway is of the opinion that omissions tell half the story. Substituting animals for human characters in her visual narratives, she explores gestures, postures and expressions that are familiar and universal but at the same time ambiguous.

For the last year she has been working steadily on a series of paintings about symbols that she considers relevant to both wildlife and civilization, titled Untame vs. The Domesticati.

About Ryan:

Ryan Reynolds received a MFA in art practice from UC Berkeley Department in 2003. Before that he studied at University of California, Santa Cruz.

His paintings document places he has an established relationship with. A number are located on the dirty industrial shore and amid the suburban sprawl of California’s East Bay. Each of his paintings documents a specific place and time as he remembers them.

His work has been exhibited across California.

About Carles:

Carles Gomila was born in Ciutadella de Menorca in 1978.

His tender but sometimes disturbing paintings are influenced by both Mediterranean art and European Surrealism. Many of his works depict classical subjects, such as the with a contemporary twist.

The subjects of his paintings range from small (weather dials, cocks) to monumental (Medusa, Virgin Mary). While clearly rooted in the figurative tradition, his figures seem to owe as much to his imagination as anatomical studies.

His work has been exhibited in Spain, Italy and England.

About Joel:

Joel Cooper is an and origami artist specializing in tessellation techniques, and paper mask designs in particular.

Each of his pieces is constructed from a single sheet of paper. Parallel folds make pleats that open up to form the contours of the face and intersect with each other around the face. Where they intersect, twist folds are formed on the back of the piece which help to keep the pleats closed.

The pleats are tightly packed together, and where they run parallel the space between them looks like an individual strip of paper from the front. Where twist folds occur on the back, it appears that the “strips” of paper are crossing under and over one another, creating a basket-weave effect.

Cooper describes his process as consisting largely of trial and error. His inspiration comes from other origami artists as well as two-dimensional work, such as patterns in Islamic art.

He also works as a librarian.

About Jeff:

Jeff Simpson received a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver, Canada, in 2007.

His work borders on the surreal. In his digital paintings, Simpson strives to create sci-fi characters that are both smoothly rendered and full of sharp detail.

His work has been awarded 20 Gold Awards by CGHub. He currently works as a concept artist at Ubisoft in Montreal.

About Kumi:

Kumi Yamashita was born in Japan and lives in New York City. She received an MFA from Glasglow School of Art in the UK in 1999.

Her work is mostly constructed from everyday objects: building blocks, thread, nails, credit card rubbings, lights. The aim of her process is to explore art beyond the confines of traditional media, and turn ordinary objects into arresting images. Even a simple sheet of paper, if carefully arranged and lit, can create an endless variety of profiles, says Yamashita.

Her work has been exhibited at Seattle Art Museum, Boise Art Museum, Yerba Buena Centre, San Francisco, Esplanade in Singapore, Hillside Gallery in Tokyo and the Kent Gallery in New York, among others.

About Luis:

Luis Toledo is an illustrator from Madrid, Spain.

Ever since he was young he has explored the hidden meanings of images, dissecting the mystery of beauty he recognized in them. A meticulous collector, he would gather grain by grain illustrations, textures, and fragments, where he found them.

His collections have been invaluable to his later digital collage work. Toledo began his career as a graphic designer for music projects. He currently works as an art director.

About Jeremy:

Jeremy was born in Ormoc City, Philippines and moved to the United States at the age of four.

In 2008, he received my BFA in illustration at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland.

Enecio currently lives in New York City and works as a freelance illustrator. His clients include Imagine FX, Playboy, and EA.

About Andre:

Andre De Freitas holds a BA in degree in computer animation from Full Sail University.

Since his graduation De Freitas has focused mainly on illustration and photography. Songs is a series of women’s portrait illustrations with lyrics laid out on their hair. In a similar vein, Double Exposures comprises of portraits with some form of added interest – cityscapes, plants, trees.

His other illustration subjects include Wonder Woman, Cat Woman, and Katy Perry.

About Soey:

Soey Milk is studying at the Pasadena Art Center College of Design.

Her portraits are of lone women, often engaging with simple, symbolic objects: an apple, red string and a bleached skull. These inclusions add to a deeper understanding of the woman depicted, often lending the portraits with a romantic context.

Her work has been featured in Blue Canvas Magazine and various blogs.

About Edie:

Edie Nadelhaft is a sculptor and painter. She received an BFA from Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, in 1995.

Flesh & Biters is a series of paintings about skin as a barrier, a conduit, and a physical sensor. As the largest human organ, skin is quite literally how we interface with the world, says Nadelhaft.

Her paintings of skin are detailed, enlarged images of the surfaces of her own hands and mouth, and they range from close-up to extreme close-up. The work addresses issues of consciousness, personal identity, and physical and psychological presence, as well as the disappearance of touch in the increasingly digital landscape of modern life.

By examining these sensory hot spots, Edie is attempting to depict a state of pure consciousness that is uncomplicated by qualitative evaluation or mediated distance, and the strangeness of that experience. In paintings that swing from hyper-realism to near abstraction, she is exploring the vulnerability and vitality of the body, and the dual nature of what it means to exist only temporally.

Her work has been exhibited across the East Coast.

About Ben:

Ben Frost defines his kaleidoscopic Pop Art as mash-up paintings whose broad range of influences includes graffiti, collage, photo-realism and sign-writing.

By subverting mainstream iconography from advertising, entertainment and politics, he creates a visual framework that is bold, confronting and often controversial. Frost turns an ingrained disrespect for signifiers into multi-layered, artwork.

His work has been exhibited across Australia over the past ten years, as well as in London, New York, San Francisco, Beijing, Mongolia, Amsterdam, Berlin and Singapore.

About Khoa:

Khoa Le was born in Vietnam and received her BFA in Fine Art from Ho Chi Minh City Fine Arts University.

She is currently employed as Art Editor at Kim Dong Publishing House and works as a freelance illustrator.

About Joe:

Joe Black creates detailed portraits from thousands of badges, each depicting images and icons, that range from the Vietnam War to Elvis Presley.

Made in China, a portrait is of a young Chinese soldier, was constrcuted using more than 5,500 toy soldiers. Most of the badges he makes himself and relate to the final product in some way. For example, his Superman portrait is made up of fast food corporation logos, to convey the idea that goodness has been defeated by our ever-growing need to consume.

‘If it’s small enough I’ll stick it down,’ says Black, who is a also a painter.

About Jon:

Jon Foster received his BFA in illustration from Rhode Island School of Design in 1989. He also learned informally from collaborations with Rick Berry and Dave Dorman, a respected Star Wars artist.

Foster has a process of oil on canvas, scanning in his paintings and finishing them on his computer using digital effects. His fondest subjects are good v evil, adventure and anger, frequently accompanied by dark or muted color schemes.

Foster has notably illustrated cards for Magic: The Gathering, a collectible card game. His other clients include DC Comics, Dark Horse Comics, Dungeons & Dragons, and Alternity. His work has been awarded multiple times by Spectrum, a fantasy art publication.

About Max:

Max Zorn is a street artist based in Amsterdam. His primary material is tape.

It was never uncommon to see colored tape on walls and streets, says Zorn. But more recently, it has been ‘conquering the streets’ as a new form of urban art.

In his case, the idea to create street art with tape instead of paint came from a friend working in car design. ‘These guys often use slim tapes to outline their ideas on large boards. I was surprised to see, how fast they could create stunning sketches with it,’ he says.

Tape as a street art material has the added benefits of being lightweight, easy to use, and relatively inauspicious. He got his start by decorating the old street lamps that are ubiquitous in Amsterdam. With their golden glow, they proved the perfect open gallery space for tape art experiments.

Over time and with practice, Zorn learned to apply more layers of brown translucent tape for greater impact and illusion of depth. It is a simple process of slapping tape on the lamps, he says. What’s more, it’s self-illuminating.

About Heather:

Heather Jansch is a primarily self-taught sculptor based in Devon, England.

Jansch struggled in school, but had a passion for drawing and horses. This girlhood hobby became her main focus in later life.

Today she makes life-size sculptures of horses out of driftwood, and occasionally cork. Her chief artistic influence is Leonardo da Vinci.

Her work has been exhibited across Europe.

About Hsiao:

Hsiao Ron Cheng is an illustrator and painter based in Taipei.

Her creative practice is influenced by Surrealism and Medieval art. ‘I love the ways Medieval artists told stories are always fascinated me, and this work was inspired by many of them,’ she says.

About Toyin:

Toyin Odutola was born in Nigeria. She is currently in her second year of an MFA program at California College of the Arts.

Odutola prides herself on her ability to capture rainbow-like striations of her subjects. Using ink and a tightly cropped style, she hopes to offer the viewer a deeply personal insight.

Her work has been exhibited nationwide and won several awards.

About Matt:

Matt Wisniewski was born in 1990 and lives in New York.

He creates digital collages by blending fashion and nature photographs together. The aim of his work is to create surreal images.

About Melanie:

Melanie Authier was born in Montreal in 1980 and now lives in Ottowa. She holds a BFA from Concordia University and completed her MFA at University of Guelph in 2006.

Her chief aim to create visual contradictions, or ‘improbable environments’ for the viewer to bring order to. She employs various strategies of representation and abstraction. One of these is to regard color, texture, line and shape are competing forces.

Her work has been exhibited across Canada.

About Gina:

Gina Kiel is an artist and illustrator based in Wellington City, New Zealand.

Her work was recently shortlisted for two Desktop Create Awards. She was one of 30 illustrators involved in ONE NIGHT ONLY on the subject of Success. She was also recently part of the 11Eleven Project launch exhibition in Sydney.

Kiel is represented by Sydney based Illustration agency The Drawing Book Studios.

About Luca:

Luca Mantovanelli is a young Italian architect and illustrator, currently based in London.

He illustrates in pencil and oils. His latest series is an erotic set of compositions of young gay men and birds.

About Veronica:

Veronica Fish is an illustrator and comic book artist based in Boston, Massachusetts.

In 2008, she curated Pop Euphoria!, the largest compilation of contemporary international illustration in Central Massachusetts, which received much national acclaim.

Her work has been exhibited in Los Angeles, Boston, New York and most recently London. Her illustration clients include The Girl Scouts of America, HalfPrice Books, Quarto + Quintet Publishing, Wired Magazine, Seltzer Goods and Colombia Magazine.

Last year she and writer JJ Kahrs self-published a graphic novel called Pirates of Mars . Fish is currently working on a comic book adaption of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, set for release in 2012.