Author: Arden McKenna

Montreal-based artist Adamo Macri has developed a multidisciplinary practice that moves between sculpture, photography, painting, video, and drawing. Across these different mediums, his work investigates questions of identity, transformation, contamination, and the delicate relationship between human existence and the natural world. Rather than treating an artwork as a fixed visual statement, Macri approaches each creation as an evolving occurrence, one that carries its own narrative and invites viewers to reconsider the boundaries between the artist, the artwork, and the surrounding world. A defining characteristic of his practice is the use of his own physical presence as an artistic material. His…

In a small corner of Southern Illinois, far from the world’s major art capitals, an artist has been quietly carving a message that speaks to people everywhere. Michael Aldag’s linoleum relief print Shine like Stars (2008) imagines a world where people of different faiths live side by side in peace. Few themes matter more today. A Midwestern Voice with a Prophetic Ear Aldag was born and raised in Southern Illinois, and the Midwest runs through his work. The landscapes he depicts are the ones he grew up in, seen through his own eyes. He is also drawn to something less…

In an art studio surrounded by towering canvases, heavily textured surfaces, and layered paint, Stephen Williams explores dimensions of male identity that are rarely discussed openly. Working as a heterosexual Black male artist, Williams approaches contemporary abstract painting with a deeply personal perspective. His practice examines vulnerability, emotional restraint, self-worth, personal boundaries, and the ongoing process of healing. Rather than relying on recognizable portraiture or linear narratives, Williams uses abstraction to document internal experiences. His paintings function as visual journal entries that capture complex psychological states and feelings often too nuanced for words alone. For Williams, painting is more than…

Here’s a career path no art school would recommend: have four kids, work a range of jobs, retire, then start painting. Lisa Tahar, born in Leipzig in 1963 and still living there, did exactly that. In 2018 she began painting landscapes in oil on canvas. Less than a decade later, she has shown work in Venice, Rome, Milan, Florence, Prague, Paris, and beyond. If you’ve ever told yourself it’s too late to start something, keep reading. The Bob Ross Effect Her spark came from Bob Ross, the American painter who taught people that landscapes are doable. Tahar took that idea…

James Day works across more disciplines than most artists attempt in a lifetime, and the interest of his practice lies less in any single medium than in how they speak to each other. Painting, photography, sculpture and diorama making have all passed through his hands over twenty-five years, and each has left its mark on the others. A Practice Without Fixed Borders What distinguishes Day’s work is not a signature style so much as a signature sensibility, one that treats the flat canvas and the built scene as two ends of the same project. His early paintings, made in bright,…

Oenone Hammersley is an internationally recognized mixed-media artist whose vibrant paintings explore the beauty, complexity, and fragility of the natural world. Through bold colour, expressive texture, luminous surfaces, and abstract forms, she creates artworks that invite viewers to look more closely at the world around them. Her nature-inspired paintings, particularly her depictions of water and tropical landscapes, combine visual energy with a deeper awareness of the environmental challenges facing the planet. Born in England in 1957 and now based in Florida, USA, Hammersley has developed an artistic language shaped by both her creative background and her extensive travels. Her experiences…

If you’ve never heard the terms “grisaille” or “glazing” before, don’t worry; you don’t need an art history degree to appreciate what contemporary painter Lib Mason is doing. You just need a willingness to look a little longer than usual, because her paintings are built to reward exactly that. From Magazine Pages to Museum-Style Technique Mason didn’t start out painting the way she does now. She studied editorial illustration at the Rhode Island School of Design and spent years as a working commercial illustrator, creating images for major publications like Rolling Stone and Time Life Warner. Later, her career expanded…

Before it becomes anything else before composition, before technique, before a finished print photography, for Antonio Rana, begins as an act of looking. Long before he owned the vocabulary of the medium, he was already doing the thing photographers do: pausing at a threshold, tracking a shadow across a wall, waiting for a passerby to complete a scene that was otherwise empty. That instinct for observation, more than any formal training, is the foundation his practice was built on, and it remains the clearest throughline in his work today. Choosing the Discipline of Black and White Rana’s photographs are almost…

Michael Kaphengst was born in 1969 in Norden, a small town on Germany’s flat northern coast, where the horizon stretches wide and the North Sea sets the rhythm of daily life. He was the youngest of three children, with two older sisters a decade ahead of him. His father was never part of the picture, and his mother, overwhelmed by the demands of raising three children alone, placed him in a children’s home while he was still an infant. Those early years remain hazy in his memory. He returned home around the age of nine or ten, but his mother’s…

A painting career built on travel does not usually begin with a suitcase; it begins with attention. For Sylvianne Blum Cassereau, the two have become inseparable. Movement across countries and cultures does not simply supply backdrops for her work; it supplies the work itself, in the form of faces encountered, photographed, and eventually carried home to become pastel portraits in her Mexico City studio. The Wandering Eye Travel plays an essential role in Blum Cassereau’s creative process, and not in the incidental way it might for artists who simply happen to enjoy visiting new places. For her, movement is method.…