Rebirth
Natasha Anisi creates medium-sized paintings on canvas and three-dimensional substrates, exploring the intricate relationship between sunlight, nature, and emotions.
Growing up in the often-cloudy Siberia, she developed a deep fascination with the interplay of light and the natural world, which she captures using various media and techniques. Her work delves into perceptual, emotional, and spiritual dimensions, crafting a personal Sanctum Santorum.
Anisi earned her M.F.A. in painting from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2024. In 2009, she pursued continuing education in painting at the Maryland College of Art and Design in Baltimore, MD. The artist resides and works with her family in Central Florida, United States.
Sunlight. I couldn’t get enough of it growing up in beautiful but cloudy Siberia. Long and cold months of a dormant world elongated my perception of time, and it felt like I was hibernating within it. When summer finally arrived, with abundant sunlight, the beauty of Siberian nature awakened into a magical place as if making up for the sun-starved days of winter. I loved observing how the light passed through the chlorophyll, transforming nature into a colorful tapestry of illuminated cathedrals. During those moments, it felt like I found the perfect nexus of time, space, and connection to something vast and beautiful.
This emotional response to the light is essential in my paintings. I depict it by weaving sunlight’s sensation into the magnified scopes of the natural world. This zoom-in perspective signifies a deeper, more intimate connection with nature.
My choice of transparent pigments is intentional. Their chemical properties allow the light to pass through the veils of color, hitting the white gesso and returning with its vibrancy and luminosity. This process not only resembles my narrative but also echoes what is going on in nature. The scarcity of light led me to understand the necessity of the dark. This contrast, the tension between the opposites, is one of the main formal aspects of my mixed-media work. This interplay takes many forms: light vs. dark tones, glazing vs. impasto applications, and vibrant translucent hues vs. opaque neutral tones. This exploration of contrasts adds depth and complexity to my work, reflecting a beautiful balance and harmony in nature. The light serves as an ethereal medium with which I seek to create a contemplative space, a sanctuary that nurtures a deeper spiritual connection with the divine.
Reckless
J. Vadala is an abstract artist working in acrylic and mixed media. Her practice centers on constructing tactical, layered surfaces where density, interruption, and contrast create a strong physical presence. Through dynamic mark-making and deliberate interventions, she exposes vulnerability, builds compositions that emphasize structural tension, dimensional depth, and material integrity.
Primarily self-directed, Vadala developed her visual language through sustained studio discipline and experimentation. Her approach reflects a commitment to compositional clarity and material investigation, balancing instinct with restraint. Gestures remain visible; revisions are not concealed. Each surface holds evidence of decision, resistance, and refinement.
A pivotal life event in 2017 marked a profound turning point in her journey toward survival and self-reclamation. Her work is shaped by lived experience, states of pressure, endurance, and recalibration. Rather than illustrating these conditions directly, her paintings embody abstraction grounded in psychological depth, without reliance on representation.
Music is inseparable from her process, shaping rhythm, density, and emotional atmosphere. Variations in temp influence movement, guiding her gestures between chaos and calm, instinct and reflection.
Based in Pennsylvania, Vadala remains active in her studio, continuing to evolve both artistically and personally. She has developed a passion for exploring what may never be fully understood – translating the unknown into a story through music, canvas, and paint.
She has also begun expanding efforts to support others in their growth. Through J. Vadala Unrefined, she shares works from her collection and occasionally offers limited reproductions, making her art accessible to a broader audience. Her work has been featured in juried exhibitions and recognized across multiple venues. Notable achievements include ‘Growing Birch’, selected for the Botanicals Exhibit at Light Space and Time; ‘Wonderland’, awarded Second Place in Abstract 2026 by the Art Alliance of Central Pennsylvania; and ‘Adapt’, selected for the juried exhibition Melancholy 2026, by Gallerium’s Art Exhibition.
Though self-taught, Vadala’s work reflects a journey forged through adversity. Her paintings consistently embody a reclaimed approach to life – unfiltered, unbound, and free.
My work is rooted in disruption – moments that fracture perception and redefine identity. In 2017, a single moment altered the course of my life, challenging my sense of ability, independence, and self. That moment became both my deepest fear and the course of my creative force.
My work emerges directly from lived experiences – from the moments that test capacity and demand transformation. Painting is not an escape; it is confrontation. It is a language for what cannot easily be understood: tension, uncertainty, endurance, and resolve. Through abstraction, I translate internal states into texture and spatial movement. Emotion becomes material.
I explore the space where vulnerability and strength coexist – where breaking and becoming unfold simultaneously. Resilience is not linear or refined; it is uneven, layered, and charged with contradiction. Disorder presses against structure, and the resulting tension is not resolved, but sustained.
Instinct governs my process. I resist formulas and allow each work to evolve through response rather than control. Interruptions across the surface function as evidence of experience rather than embellishment. What feels fractured remains visible. What feels unstable carries weight. Layering and surface disruption become metaphors for integration – not erasing damage but absorbing it into form.
Music plays a critical role in shaping the emotional atmosphere of my studio. Sound establishes rhythm and intensity before the first mark is made. It heightens sensation and allows feelings to lead. Shifts in temp and tone influence movement and pacing across the canvas.
For me, influence is not aesthetic lineage but accumulation, the imprint of lived moments that reshape perspective. The canvas becomes a site of reclamation. Emotion – embedded, not softened. Disruption – illuminated, not concealed. Each composition carries endurance and the structure of survival.
My work mirrors life’s complexity and invites viewers to encounter their own thresholds within it. Creation transforms internal rupture into material force. What once threatened to break me now defines me. Unfiltered, unbound, free – this is me.
Recursion In Purple
Gerrit van Ommering is a fine art photographer based in Gold River, California. Originally from the Netherlands, he relocated to the United States at the age of 19 to pursue a dynamic career in the aerospace industry, specializing in the invention, design, development, and deployment of space systems. Following retirement, he transitioned to photography – channeling his technical expertise and creative drive into a new artistic medium. His photography work, much of which is creative and abstract, explores the tension between realism and imagination.
Gerrit is actively involved in Northern California’s photography and arts communities. He is active in the Viewpoint Photographic Art Center and Gallery, the Sierra Camera Club, Sacramento Fine Arts, Rancho Cordova Arts, and many others. His work has been featured in numerous exhibitions and competitions, earning regional awards and entering several private collections.
In July 2024, he co-presented the successful duo exhibition “REALISMFantasy” with his wife Lucille at the Mills Station Arts & Culture Center, where he contributed the 31-print “Fantasy” segment. He had a very successful 24-print solo exhibition, “Embellished Emblems”, at Gallery 1075 in West Sacramento during June 2025. In 2025 and so far in 2026, he has had 202 images accepted in 37 physical and 73 online/magazine exhibits.
I have always been drawn to images that surprise – ones that feel a little offbeat, mysterious, or just plain strange. While I do plenty of straight or lightly enhanced photography, what I really enjoy is taking an image and pushing it into new territory: twisting, layering, and abstracting until it feels like something unexpected has emerged.
My eye tends to land on unusual shapes, odd juxtapositions, or scenes that others might overlook. I collect these visual ingredients and let instinct take over in the editing process. Sometimes I know where I’m going; often I don’t. I just keep experimenting until something clicks – when the image feels done.
In our smartphone era, billions of photos are taken each year. To even barely stand out, I feel the need to create something different, often strange, abstract, or slightly weird. If my work can get someone to stop for even a few seconds and think, “What am I looking at?” or “How did he do that?” then I have succeeded.
Recursive Revisited
I am a mixed media and installation artist who works primarily with handmade paper and organic materials found in nature. My work depicts the complexities of the human condition and the fragile, stark beauty of our ever-changing natural world.
I am a former faculty member at the Minneapolis College of Art & Design and I hold Master’s degrees in both Visual Studies and in Mathematics.
In “Recursive Revisited”, a self-portrait that I made 30 years ago was torn into pieces, reproduced, and then layered with blind contour self-portraits of my current self. The pieces of my younger self-portrait were sewn together with birchbark (representing the passage of time) and translucent handmade paper (representing emotional evolution). Tree branches, representing nature and the cycle of life, surround this collage which documents 30 years of physical change and identity transformation.
“Recursive Revisited” was created using elements from nature that changed and weathered over the seasons, just as my face, personality, and emotions have changed and weathered over the past 30 years.
Red Birds
Lana Matskiv (née Svetlana Galkina) was born in Ukraine and underwent rigorous training in structural drawing and the constructivist style of rendering under the instruction of Oleh Nedoshytko, Odesa, Ukraine. After the completion of the Fine Art Foundations program at George Brown College, Lana continues to hone the mastery of her craft through the French Atelier method at the Toronto Academy of Realist Art.
Lana is a member of the Ukrainian Association of Visual Artists of Canada and the Women’s Art Association of Canada. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Ukrainian Canadian Art Foundation and on display at the Ukrainian Consulate in Toronto, as well as in private and corporate collections in Canada, the USA, and Ukraine. In 2022, Lana’s work received an honorable mention and was chosen as a selected exhibitor at The Art Preservation Institute. As a Ukrainian-Canadian artist, she auctioned her works at Waddington’s Auctions and donated money to support Ukraine. A figurative symbolist painter, Lana depicts moments of transition in people’s lives, as she believes that these are moments when people defy the gravity of their comfort zone, rebel against conformity, and choose a path that requires courage, integrity, and a sense of adventure.
As a Ukrainian Canadian artist, I work on pieces that honour the fundamental traditions of realism with its ability to add emotional depth to my paintings, but also incorporate the aesthetics of folk art known as “Ukrainian Baroque”, with its maximalist use of visual space and rich decorative details. Whether my subjects are caught in motion or captured at a moment of quiet contemplation and profound stillness, they invite the viewer to slow down and immerse in the timeless beauty of vivid complementary colours, meticulously crafted backgrounds, and opulent costumes – all that to create an enchanting visual space and to tell their stories. Aiming to fill the canvas with their intense presence, I weave a narrative connecting the viewer with their inner lives at moments when they are closest to nature. A tangible fairy tale vibe comes from building on the historical tradition of portrait painting by old masters, and my overarching fascination with the past and local lore.
Red Boat
Dorothea Ney’s abstract paintings present themselves as a playful symphony of colors. Thanks to her travels and different living conditions, she has learned to blend the different experiences into her own abstract expressionist style. Light flows and moves through shifting pastel color fields over the canvas, and boundaries of form are dissolved. Dorothea Ney’s imaginary places enwrap the viewer in a harmonious impression of peace and beauty.
BA Academy of Fine Arts, Bremen, DE
Several works in private and corporate collections in Germany, Austria, Estonia, the US
Lived and worked as a visual artist in Berlin, DE – Installation-Performance-Sculpture –
Grant of Stiftung Kulturfonds, Berlin, DE
Grant of the Cultural Senate of Berlin, DE
Artist in residence Castle of Wiepersdorf, Brandenburg, DE
Moved to NM in 2000/ garden business until 2021
Works as an expressionist painter in NM
As an expressionist painter, I work with acrylics, oil colors, cold wax, and crayons on canvas or wood panels, and I like to explore one theme in groups of paintings. My current paintings weave together the softer colors and light from my home in Germany with the wilder, bolder colors and the intense light in NM, where I live now. Both opposites feed into my works, creating imaginary landscapes of my soul. I translate the beauty and energetics of the natural world into an abstract composition of color and movement. In my paintings, I translate the beauty and the energetics of the natural world into an abstract expression of light, color, and movement.
Red Boulder
A native of North Carolina, Mr. Mills received his Bachelor of Architecture from North Carolina State University and his Master’s Degree from Harvard University. Mr. Mills has taught architecture at Columbia, Yale, the Rhode Island School of Design, Syracuse University, and the University of Pennsylvania.
His drawings have been exhibited in galleries and museums such as Denmark’s Louisiana Museum, the Museum of Finnish Architecture, the Architectural Association in London, Columbia University, Cooper Union, New York University, and the Fashion Institute of Technology, among others.
Ed’s proudest accomplishment is his lifetime commitment to painting, which he continues to work on and study at several art schools, such as The National Academy, The New York Academy of Art, and The Pennsylvania Academy. He has studied with painters such as Nelson Shanks, Vincent Desiderio, Bo Bartlett, Steven Assael, Stuart Shils, Alyssa Monks, Robert Armetta, John Wellington, Christopher Pugliese, and Dan Thompson.
His Painting have been exhibited in galleries and museums in group shows at The Trenton Art Museum (HM Painting in Show), Mattatuck Museum, New Britian Museum of American Art, Monmouth Art Museum, Barrett Art Center, Site Gallery, the 211 Gallery, the Shirt Factory Gallery, Limner Gallery, Old Town Arts Guild, Valley Arts in Orange NJ, WAAMuseum, Paul Nigra Center for Creative Arts (Best Painting in Show), Mills Pond Gallery, Atlantic Gallery and
Aspects of My ART that I can describe are as follows:
Most of my work is about dynamic forms and lines colliding with each other in a color force field. Geometric forms and lines overlap, intersect, and fade into themselves, creating an aggressive interaction with the viewer. These geometric abstractions are aggressive and strident with dissonant colors and packed. The message of my paintings is the concept or idea for each work.
The instinctive qualities of balance, rhythm, and harmony achieve the “unity of effect” in each painting. The materials can be illuminated to show degrees of smoothness, coarseness, grain, consistency, and weave or elasticity. The relationship between light, surface, and texture can be implied, simulated, or hidden.
My tools in painting are line, shape, value, color, edges, and texture. These elements can reveal and provide form as well as act as a signifier, create atmosphere, control image, and provide expression.
The quality of light (implied or explicit) in my work can change the character of mass and the atmosphere of space. All art is entirely reliant on the presence and quality of light. This reflection of light is another way of revealing form and space. I use light and color to control excitement, emotion, surprise, and create theatre and illusion. These geometric abstractions are the basis of all my 10 series of work to date:
1- The Clock Series
2- The Artificial Still Life Series
3-The Game Series
4-The Abstract Buildings Series
5-The Dangle in Space Series
6-Exploding Forms in Space Series
7-Forms in a Color Field Series
8-Flying Objects Series
9-Read by All Series
10-Many Times Over Series
Red Cana Lillies
Jared Seff is an artist and instructor working out of Savannah, GA. Jared graduated from The Savannah College of Art and Design with a bachelor’s degree in 2013 in painting and drawing. After developing a prestigious art curriculum for the Habersham School, where he taught for nearly a decade, he went back to receive his Master’s degree in Illustration in 2020. His artwork has earned him many significant awards and achievements including: a portrait of former President Bill Clinton which hangs at the Presidential Library in Little Rock, Arkansas; a portrait of SCAD President Paula Wallace which resides in the Lacoste Permanent Collection; a portrait of Brigadier General Wilma Vaught that hangs in the Women’s Auxiliary at Arlington National Cemetery; a sketchbook that travels permanently with the Sketchbook Project of the Brooklyn Art Library; and a portrait of Sir Paul McCartney. In 2020, Jared partnered with Red Fern Fine Art Studio as lead figurative painter and project manager. There he painted a series of twelve stained glass windows for St. Peter’s Catholic Church in Beaufort, South Carolina, in addition to working on a number of other large-scale projects.. As a lifelong learner, Jared continues to perfect his craft as an artist, educator, designer, and illustrator. He currently teaches in the School of Foundation Studies at the Savannah College of Art and Design.
The works I create explore the moments in life that captivate us—those that spark curiosity, evoke emotion, and demand our attention. Throughout history, artists have sought to capture fleeting yet profound experiences, from the tension of human connection to the drama of movement and form. These moments transcend time and culture, revealing beauty in both the ordinary and the extraordinary.
As a naturalist artist, I am drawn to the way form expresses both strength and vulnerability, how light and shadow shape a narrative, and how a single moment can suggest a larger story. The interplay between grace and intensity fascinates me, and I strive to translate these contrasts through the poetry of brush and paint.
Many of my works emerge from personal observations—studies of movement, gesture, and emotion that linger in memory. By preserving and elevating them on canvas, I explore their tension and nuance, inviting viewers to discover their own sense of curiosity within them.
Red Cloud
Being an artist for most of my lifetime, I have enjoyed the journey to find my style and mediums of choice. Dabbling in the fine arts from painting, sculpture, and collage, I found myself working with recycled materials. I had worked with cardboard and increasingly fell in love with how versatile it was. I am fascinated by texture, and incorporating colored cardboard into various pieces. I took tedious steps to ensure that my pieces were accurate in size and appearance. During the process, I found the areas in which I took artistic license to be the most satisfying. My hope is that my pieces bring joy to anyone who sees them and hopefully a double take when they realize it is made of cardboard. I have a few signature techniques including never painting the cardboard. Some pieces are monochromatic, staying true to traditional cardboard, and others incorporate vibrant colors from carefully hand-picked colored cardboard. Another process I use is to incorporate one element in each piece that is not cardboard. Sometimes it is more hidden and other times it is a necessary element for support. Lastly, my choice of cardboard for sculpture is two-fold. I enjoy reusing something and making it new again, creating something people would never think possible out of cardboard. I also love the challenge of finding cardboard that will be sustainable and work with it in unusual ways. To date, I have turned two very full truckloads of cardboard into art. I continue to find my path and it is lined with cardboard.
My journey of creativity started young as my parents were both artists of one sort or another. My mother worked in watercolor and sculpture mostly depicting folk scenes while my father was a contractor who specialized in historic construction and preservation. At college age, I went to Beaver College and aspired to be a children’s book and scientific illustrator, and found barriers and rejection at many points. Frustrated, I moved into graphic and web design which paid the bills for a long time but I truly love the act of making something tangible with my own hands. So between the artistic flair I had gained and my knowledge of building, my love of sculpture began. My real breakthrough came after meeting my husband, who owns a shop in a busy town, and I started doing his window displays while getting many comments and followers along the way. I had used cardboard as a supporting element in so many of the windows and decided to make the cardboard motorcycle for his window. Once the bike was completed, I was asked to enter shows and it has now traveled all over this past year to juried shows and museums. It has won awards and created some wonderful experiences. Each piece is truly a labor of love, with tons of patience and takes approximately six months to complete.