Agustin Surai – Inventories

If you’re a designer like me (which I’m assuming most of you are), then you are well versed in all things Adobe Illustrator, and if you use AI like I do, then after a vigorous designing session your artboard surrounded your creation tends to look like a whirlwind of colorful ephemera and bits and pieces of discarded materials. That’s exactly what I though of when I first saw Agustin Surai’s Inventories series of illustrations. These pieces are like snapshots of a debris field in a hurricane – tree limbs, animals, electronics, clothing…all flying around independent of each other. Other pieces in the series seem to tell a story or collect a narrative of sorts using only the handful of objects on the canvas.

See more artwork by Agustin Surai here.

Philip Govedare – Excavation paintings

Landscapes, along with portraits and still lifes are the holy grail of traditional painting. So to see a classic format using the same tools but so obviously created in a more modern fashion seems like a revelation. Mapping man’s persuasion on his terrain, Philip Govedare‘s series entitled Excavation, takes a macro approach to it’s landscapes – giant, sweeping washes of color that appear almost like abstract color studies at first, are in fact attempts to showcase the enormity of our destruction and ability to reform our world to our whims. What I found most impressive is the perspective, as if you are peering down from an airliner in mid-flight, thousands and thousands of feet above the ground, a view earlier landscape artists never had the pleasure of knowing.

See more of Philip Govedare’s artwork here.

Carly Waito

I love these works by Carly Waito for several reasons. I love her ability to capture the luminous qualities in the rocks and gems. I love that the works are small (some around 5 or 6 inches tall). And most of all, I especially love that these are paintings. I tried to keep that part a surprise as long as I could. In seriousness though, Carly’s paintings are beautiful, and I love the little peeks into her process, like here on her blog. Smudges and dots of paint form together to create fantastic photorealistic geological wonders. Makes me wish I hadn’t slept through all my geology classes in college!

Visit Carly Waito’s portfolio here.

Allison Schulnik

It’s hard to pinpoint the precise influential artists that the paintings of Allison Schulnik possibly reference and were inspired by, but her often macabre and sometimes terrifying works clearly continue themes of life and death and the spiritual realm between them that have existed for centuries in art history. Some of her pieces remind me of Grecian friezes, with their pale hues and dimensional piles of paint and material, while others seem to embody the same dour portraiture and grotesque fantasies of Flemish painters like Bosch and Van Scorel. Others still, appear to be influenced by primitive African drawings, or neanderthal figures.

None of this is meant to imply that Allison’s oeuvre isn’t cohesive, it’s just wonderfully varied, with the binding elements being more in tone and less in actual aesthetic. There are common threads of dread, anguish, fear and torment throughout all of the pieces, and viewing them is succession almost creates a scary but fascinating narrative in itself.

See Allison Schulnik’s artwork here.

Aaron Smith – “Coterie of the Wooly-Woofter”

I love the new series of paintings from west coast-based painter, Aaron Smith, entitled Coterie of the Wooly-Woofter. Portraits of bearded and moustachioed characters that resemble authors, generals and great gentlemen of yore. I especially find the layered, seemingly haphazard brush marks and strokes and the wild use of colors absolutely mesmerizing. Of course each of these paintings are anything but erratic, perfectly forming imaginative and highly kaleidoscopic visions. Vivid and energetic.

Visit Aaron Smith’s portfolio here.