Andrea Carl­son is an artist whose work explores objects, and what they mean to a cul­ture. Of course, dif­fer­ent parts of a cul­ture revere objects dif­fer­ently, and Andrea uses this as a way to explain it’s how we imag­ine our soci­ety to be and its values. Upon read­ing Andrea’s artist state­ment and view­ing her work, ...

Har­riet Seed is an emerg­ing illus­tra­tor out of the UK. Her web­site shows a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent tech­niques and poten­tial direc­tions she can go with her work. While I enjoy Harriet’s work as a whole, I really love her images of museum vis­i­tors. I feel like she hits the right notes there; the draw­ing is loose ...

Thanks to Dee of The Paper Crane, I’ve been intro­duced to Clare Rojas. Clare’s draw­ings both aes­thet­i­cally please me and inter­est me in their sub­ject mat­ter and commentary. I find Clare’s paint­ings exquis­ite — they have a won­der­ful ref­er­ence to Amer­i­can folk art, and style reminds me of Mar­garet Kil­gallen. Her work is often pre­sented ...

Car­rie Mar­ill is a painter whose series Visual Aides has recently caught my attention. Visual Aides has an inter­est­ing con­cept: Dur­ing a trip to France, Car­rie came upon didac­tic draw­ings from the 1950’s describ­ing dif­fer­ent aspects of the world. She col­lected these, scanned them, and repro­duced the images, updat­ing them for the cur­rent day. Car­rie ...

Max Loren Holyoke is no stranger the world of illus­tra­tion. With clients like the New York Times, The New Yorker, and GQ, he’s really hit the big times. There’s a good rea­son why Max’s work is sought after — it’s so engag­ing and has a won­der­ful dual­ity to his images. His work is flat, yet has ...

I really like sto­ries and poetry. It’s what helps drive my love for illus­tra­tion — the fur­ther inter­pre­ta­tion of lan­guage and the writ­ten word. Jim Houser is an artist/illustrator using poetry to drive him images, cre­at­ing an almost quilt of typog­ra­phy, sym­bols, and design. I move through Jim’s work almost like a maze, with poetry ...

Still a stu­dent liv­ing in the United King­dom, Sam Cald­well has really got him­self off to a great start. Cur­rently, his port­fo­lio is com­prised pri­mar­ily of por­trai­ture in the forms of draw­ings and paintings. Sam has given the sub­jects of his por­traits a some­what grotesque look to them, play­ing with the pro­por­tions of of fea­tures ...

Pia Bram­ley is a drawer/painter whose depic­tion of fig­ures and use of ink give her a strong image despite the poten­tial soft­ness of the medium. Ink washes can be sub­tle, and ink can have a hard edge to it as well. Pia manip­u­lates it in both direc­tions, giv­ing her work range. I really enjoy when ...

Artist Sophie Alda uses gouache like a pro. She really plays up the opaque qual­ity of the medium, using it to cre­ate inter­est­ing shapes that really define her style. The char­ac­ters in Sophie’s paint­ings are rotund and a bit out of the ordi­nary. While they might appear to be human, some­times they aren’t really human at ...

When Chicago-based artist Dee Clements sent me some of her work, I was imme­di­ately drawn to the details of her col­or­ful abstrac­tions. Her work is really some­thing that should be viewed inti­mately, as the small details are what I really like about her work. Dee’s gives some expla­na­tion on her work: I never really know what I ...