All in Painting
As I approach my 74th year, various happenings have brought about big changes in my art involvements. I now concentrate more on solo exhibitions and have increased time spent on mailart and the making of art books. I prefer solitude, retreating more and more into the silence of my studio. Art continues to soothe the soul, providing a comforting balm for both mind and body.
Katinka Lampe paints portraits. Or at least, you can clearly recognise the representation of a person. Yet, this is not the main motive of the painting. The portrait merely serves as reason to make the painting. The portrait is the imagery concept. Her paintings greatly appeal to the beholders.
I conceive of roses and cranes as living entities endowed with mind and emotion. This perception arises from an inner, multidimensional worldview that is liberated from physical and temporal constraints, within which such beings reveal themselves in this form. What appears there is not the object itself, but the manifestation of mind and emotion; at times, the universal ideals of truth, goodness, and beauty—which each being may inherently possess—are reflected with clarity and dignity within the rose.
I am interested in the tension between escapism and the weight of the real because I don’t think we ever fully move from one to the other. Screens offer us moments of escape, projection, and imagination, but they are also where anxiety, comparison, loneliness, and desire accumulate. What looks like lightness or play often carries a quiet heaviness underneath. In that sense, fantasy and the ordinary are not opposites in my work—they coexist and constantly bleed into each other.
I am guided almost entirely by intuition, an inner voice that speaks through the process. When something is missing, the painting carries a sense of visual emptiness; it has not yet found its soul. The moment of equilibrium arrives when that inner voice becomes clear. A sense of fullness rather than excess. That is when I know the painting has reached its emotional balance, and that nothing more needs to be added or taken away.
Michel Testard is a contemporary painter whose work is shaped by long-term travel and lived experience across Asia, India, Europe and the polar regions. Born in Japan and raised between continents, he has developed a practice rooted in travel, cultural immersion and sustained encounters with distant places. His paintings explore landscapes, interiors and human figures as emotional spaces rather than documentary subjects, blending observation, memory and imagination.
I don’t see anything particularly abstract in my work. I see a mode of expression through colors, texture, and theme. I see a transmission of emotion much more than abstraction.
For me, it’s visual, it’s emotional, but not abstract.
When I choose something that evokes liquid, metallic, or cosmic surfaces, it’s a choice. When I choose a reserved woman or a child with a bear, it’s a choice, but it’s not abstraction.
I want the audience to feel an intense sensation, an intense emotion, something that touches them. It’s not an endpoint; it’s the beginning. It’s a choice to choose colors, forms.
I want both recognizable iconography and visual density.
Aesthetic perception has a great deal to do with ray and mathematics. And then there is untamed human nature, in its search for expansiveness and freedom of spirit. This tendency towards sequences has stayed with me to this day.
The painting itself is a portal to the realm of beyond. It encourages a different way of perception. Someone has to be a little distracted, a little scared, and confused to start seeing things differently or as they are. First must be reluctance, then awareness of worth looking further, and the perception of vision afterward. The mind should get preparation in order to be focused differently. We live in a world where focus is fixed, as life is. To a much greater extent, this is established by the system and could be shifted. I encourage the spectator to learn to look without prejudice. This is my goal.
My creative process is absolutely an excavation of my internal landscape on all layers, mental, emotional, physical and spiritual in that given moment and to use the archaeology reference, some things are easier to excavate than others depending on how many layers it is buried beneath. This is reflected in my work, the deeper the emotion, the memory or experience, the more layers of paint, the more activity and energy is required to achieve the release.
Iyad Almosawi is a versatile and talented artist with award-winning works across various genres. He masterfully blends technique and vision in his paintings, sculptures, murals and installations, exploring inner energies and emotions. His murals, which bring color and life to public spaces reflect his love for nature. Through his art, he transforms spaces, making them accessible and inviting for people to admire and engage with.
Most of my chosen canvases and surfaces are conscious decisions. It begins with the size of the canvas and then the structure. This decision is very important. The painting process is a constant making of choices which influence, enormously, the result. Sometimes I struggle with the surface and ask it what it wants. To work against the surface is contradictory. For example, I chose a very plain canvas surface for the painting -love- , as I wanted the black color to drop down on it, to express the fluid existence of love. According to the philosopher Heraclitus, “Everything flows…”
Rose Masterpol is an artist of considerable importance. Her paintings do not imitate the world. They reorganize it. They reveal the underlying patterns that shape experience. They invite the viewer to slow down, to recalibrate attention, and to discover the richness that exists beneath the surface of perception. Her three decades of creative exploration have culminated in a body of work that speaks with remarkable authority and poetic intelligence.
Aleksandra Ciążyńska’s paintings, then, are not simply artworks. They are instruments of perception, catalysts for attentiveness, and invitations to dwell more meaningfully in the world. Her talent lies in the rare ability to make viewers feel that the world is worthy of wonder and that they themselves are capable of perceiving that wonder. Her contribution to contemporary art is already significant, and her trajectory promises even greater impact. She is an artist who restores faith in the power of painting and demonstrates, with impressive clarity, that art remains one of society’s most profound tools for illumination and renewal.
Gustavs Filipsons stands as one of the most compelling abstract artists of his generation: a visionary whose works vibrate with psychological force, whose textures carry the weight of spiritual inquiry, and whose commitment to originality has forged a language entirely of his own. His paintings, layered, dynamic, eruptive, meditative, form an atlas of interiority, a testament to the enduring power of abstraction to reveal what the rational mind cannot grasp.
Born in 1957 in Antwerp, Belgium, Karel Vereycken graduated from the Institut Saint-Luc in Brussels and trained in engraving at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts, where he obtained a certificate of passage « with distinction. ». Today, in France, he concentrates on writing about art history, producing audio guides and of course watercolors and engravings. In France, as a member of the Fédération nationale de l’estampe, he confirmed his technical mastery at Atelier63 and continued to perfect his skills in the Montreuil workshop of Danish engraver Bo Halbirk.
Painting to me has been a spiritual journey for over 50 years. I have to my credit more than 300 paintings of oils on canvas. My genre of art is photo-realism, expressionism and hyper-realism. I am particularly passionate about preserving Nature and my intention and purpose is to bring awareness to the beauty of the environment we live in so that we as human beings take action to preserve and appreciate all aspects of it: Through portraits of people, birds and animals - I bring out the true essence of their personalities and immortalize their moments.
My work pokes at that uneasy space between structure and entropy — what I like to call “controlled chaos,” because frankly, that’s what life looks like when you take the training wheels off. Every piece is its own little ecosystem, humming along with its own rules, moods, and mischief. I’m fascinated by how order crawls out of disorder, how meaning sneaks in through the cracks when forms, colors, and movements collide like they’ve had too much coffee.
The figures allude to the practice of spirituality, to love of nature and humanity. Dialogue with God expands thought and the senses. The strands of light in my paintings symbolize forces, for example, the sun with its warmth and growth power, and the moon with its effect on water, especially on the sea with its ebb and flow, and on births, since humans are largely composed of water.
In her painterly practice, Naomi Okubo develops beautiful and seductive images that mask darker themes relating to her adolescence and that are connected to greater problems and inconsistencies in society.
