Slowing Down

Due to my personal experience and the lack of presence of significant others, I could not get all the proper help and support, so art became my source to explore and express myself. I enjoyed craftwork, drawing, and even singing.

I am a child abuse and neglect survivor, I spent some years in the Russian Boarding School. It all gave me some troubles throughout my life with my emotions and life choices.
From my teenage, I started to be interested in photography. I felt behind my camera powerful and confident, while I could express my inner vision of the world.

At a certain point in my life, when I had to go through big changes and work on my childhood memories, I started to photoshoot young children, including my own three little boys. The photos were good and strong, but it was a big emotional challenge for me. That gave me a big push to rediscover my personal art vision and path in photography and to embrace it fully.
Sexuality was the object I felt keen on as I was finding it attractive and confusing at the same time. I saw it as a Big Power, that can be also fragile and destructive.

Sometimes I find my own photos “disturbing”, but they never leave me numb. I believe that I’m not just a photographer, I’m an artist. I now know what I’m doing, I know what I’m shooting, I’m enjoying it and saying to the world that THIS IS ME.

I’ve always seen sexuality as a BIG power. Power that can destroy and power that can give us new a chance for a new life. It can be abusive. It can be loving. We live in an era when everyone can express himself as he wants, but at the same time, we all go through judgments. Sometimes we hide. While others can use US and OUR sexuality against us. And again, at the same time, we are who we are. We all like different things and see the world from different perspectives. And we all have sexuality. We live with this. We should learn how to live with this. With my photos, I would like to say to the world, no. Actually not to say, I want the world to stop and to think, maybe ask some questions and answer them in silence “What do you see here? What do you feel here? What are your thoughts? Are you judgmental?

Slurp

Cher Pruys was born in Regina. Over the years, she lived in many places, including Saskatoon, Calgary, Edmonton, Ottawa, Fort Frances, settling into her present home in Devlin, on the banks of the Rainy River with her husband Mark and pets.

By age three, Cher was seldom found without a drawing tool in hand. She worked in pencil, charcoal, and ink over the years, picking up a paintbrush at the age of 35. Beginning with oil paints, she found her chosen mediums in acrylic, watercolor, and gouache, and her passion for hyperrealism.

Although self-taught, her dedication and talent have seen her work juried into 968 International exhibits. She has won 1477 awards for her work in the International Juried Exhibits.

Her work has graced the covers of 3 books, 45 magazines, including The Best Of Acrylic Fall 2021, cover of the May 2022 Arabella Magazine, #20 Hyperrealism Magazine with “Girls Girls Girls”, & #21 with “The Young Cowboy”, Artists & Illustrators March 2024 Artistonish 2024 July edition, Observica Elite 2024, Art Closeup Magazine#26 Jan. 2025, The back cover of Novum Artis #007, 2025, Hyperrealism Special Edition “The Amazing World of Cher Pruys” & The Cover of Sfumato 2026 Fall Reawakening Group Show Magazine. She has been featured in over 1000 International publications. Cher’s works have found a permanent home in private and public collections worldwide.

“To take my inner visions with my hands and create a work of art for you, the viewer …. That is the ultimate in self-expression.”

Every day moments really capture my attention. Ones that trigger memories or evoke a strong emotional reaction on my part quickly become my next obsession. By observing these often-fleeting moments, I notice that my views on life, especially in terms of time and how little of it we as individuals each have, and how one’s own perspective overall can be narrow, thus I use them to spur growth in myself with a desire to enhance the human experience.

I truly feel that my artworks are the most rewarding and fulfilling way for me to communicate my inner thoughts and feelings with those around me.

Smile

Kylo-Patrick Hart is an award-winning photographer and chair of the Department of Film, Television, and Digital Media at Texas Christian University (Fort Worth, Texas, USA). He received his formal training in digital media arts while a student at the University of Michigan and Wayne State University, with additional instruction provided by offerings of the Maine Media Workshops and Santa Fe Workshops. His photographs have been exhibited in numerous cities throughout the United States and in several countries abroad.

Photography has been my passion since early childhood. My motivation is to discover and capture the beauty, even when it is not always readily self-evident, that surrounds us continuously in all areas of our everyday lives. I believe the finest images are those that are serious yet playful, aesthetically appealing yet a bit quirky. As both an artist and an admirer, my favorite photographs tend to be ones whose contents speak loudly for themselves — even when it is not immediately clear exactly what they are saying. They seek to inspire their viewers to wrestle with their intriguing content and, as a result, ponder various aspects of our surrounding world in new and unique ways.

Snorkelling A Reef

Stanislav “Standa” Riha
Visual artist, photographer, and writer
Member of CARFAC

Born in 1952 in Prague, former Czechoslovakia. He grew up in Lesser Town (Malá Strana), surrounded by great medieval and modern art and artists that caused his desire to create. From early childhood, he enjoyed drawing and later painting; as a young man, he focused mainly on surrealism. His artistic attitude was shaped by many art courses in childhood, followed by art training by MgA Milos Saska and work in the set production of the Realistic Theatre.

In 1980, he lived for a year in Grinzing, Vienna, Austria, and then moved to Vancouver, BC, Canada. Enchanted with the natural beauty of British Columbia, he dedicated the first few years to realistic nature themes and then switched to Surreal and later Surreal-abstract creative work.

In the last three decades, I have been creating wall-mounted, cast resin, and aluminum sculptures combined with canvas and gold leaf, and exploring the computer as an art tool for creating digital artwork.

All my life, I have loved to create art full of emotions and feelings, “soul,” with the satisfaction of fun. I am interested in the balance and composition of colors and objects rather than the reality of the items.

The direction of the last two decades has been aimed at understanding and, through artwork, expressing the human struggle of emotions and adaptations. For the past ten years, I have been polishing my creative work in the Surreal-abstract style.

The main motto of my artwork is: Just as in a good story, the readers have space to create their image; in a good picture, the viewers can form their own account.

Snorkelling A Reef

Stanislav “Standa” Riha
Visual artist, photographer, and writer
Member of CARFAC

The main motto of my artwork is: Just as in a good story, the readers have space to create their image; in a good picture, the viewers can form their own account.

Snow Angles

I attained an associate’s degree in culinary arts in the pursuit of a better understanding of the different facets of art expression, in which I discovered how tightly woven the synergy among art disciplines truly is, which led me to the artist Robert Moore. I pursued an apprenticeship with Robert Moore for nine years where I learned an extended knowledge of all the appearances and actions of being a full-time artist.

I am deeply inspired by the immediacy of old Russian oil paintings which I try to continually communicate in my paintings as well; I am inspired by the idea that “less is more”. Always pushing and striving for a deeper understanding, my direction and vision for my paintings is to be more refined in conveying the love and passion of the artistic sensory experience by celebrating intensity, color harmony, clear value separation, and thick textured paint.

Snow Dancin

Tapping color into water is truly its own kind of magic; simply called watercolor

Belinda Balaski, a native of Southern California, creates colorful watercolor and pastel paintings of people, landscapes, seascapes, flowers, and animals. She is especially fond of painting horses, influenced by her childhood on the racetrack with her father, the well-known jockey, Lester Balaski. Her work focuses on capturing the spirit and unique beauty of living creatures and the natural world. She is motivated by the desire to share a spiritual sense of serenity and peace.

Belinda’s creativity expressed itself at a young age in acting, photography, and art. When not performing in theatre, she was shooting pictures and drawing incessantly. At fourteen she won a four-year scholarship to the Minnesota Corresponding Art School, where she nurtured her affinity for representational art and learned many techniques that served her well.

Belinda’s gift for acting took her on a different path. She won many awards and excelled in a 50-year career in Hollywood. She created BB’s Kids Acting School, where she taught, filmed, and nurtured thousands of children, all the while writing and producing original plays. These experiences developed her artistic eye for framing, beauty, and editing a myriad of choices.

Recently she retired from the film industry and closed her school, to return to her original pursuit of visual art. She enrolled in courses at Emeritus College, discovering a passion for watercolor and pastels. Drawing from a well of diverse talents and life experiences, Belinda uses her gift of capturing a feeling with an instinctual ease of composition.

Belinda lives and works in Southern California but spends several months a year on Kauai, her spiritual home, where many of her inspirational paintings are born.

I am an LA/Kauai-based artist who specializes in watercolor and pastels. I am forever seeking peace and spiritual tranquility in my work, drawn from a myriad of life experiences that have etched; people, landscapes, seascapes, animals, faces, children, and a zillion more images inspired from these cellular memories, into my very soul.

Working in water is like magic ~ when you finally tap a color into the invisible watermarks you lay, the magic begins as you tap darks for shadows, lights for highlights ~ trying to keep your values, just like in life.

You can wet the whole paper, saturate it in water, and sweep colors across to let them blend and mix at will. Let the water lead you, the colors, the mixes, the forms. You can try to control them, but wet on wet has its own life.

Of course, you can then let that dry and slice a hard line on top sending your blends into the background, defining your edges, and sharpening one’s focus into your subject.

There is so much diversity in watercolors, that one can only be limited by one’s own imagination. But if you are open to listening to the muse, tuning into the moment, the flow of the water can lead you where your imagination is endlessly open, allowing the kind of awesome creativity that real “Art” is truly made of. The kind of Art that takes you out of yourself and frees you of all limitations. This is my goal. To allow your eyes to rest on an image that will open and inspire your imagination beyond your physical world, allowing you to relate and yet freely fly…

Snow Poem

An emerging photographer with a background in translation and music, Robert Claus has been exploring drawing, composition, and theater since an early age. Born in Germany, he relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area after graduating from the University of London.

Attending a major retrospective of David Hockney in 2014 inspired him to return to his childhood love of photography. A self-taught artist, he has since studied under Gina Militia and took workshops and classes from Ed Kashi, Neal Menschel (both at Stanford), and Joel Grimes (remote).

He tends to draw on still life for his subjects but has also ventured into portraiture and landscapes. Now looking to gain wider exposure, he has produced several book-length curated projects that range from theater work to abstract still-life compositions.

This color photograph is a macro study of well-used baking sheets and forms part of a larger collection. It reveals patterns and textures that suggest artistic intent in their creation, but that actually resulted from years of use in the kitchen. Artistic agency here comes entirely from selecting certain “scenes,” and framing them in the viewfinder to create engaging compositions.

The macro lens gives us a glimpse into hidden realms that are as unlimited as the viewers’ imagination; to some, these non-figural marks might suggest a snowstorm; to others, jumbled-up glyphs, perhaps the marks of a palette knife on canvas. Although not representational or figurative in the least, these images bring the thing itself to life through the act of reinterpreting its surface artistically.

To me, this form of still-life photography is incredibly exciting because it opens up completely new and unexpected worlds with no more than a few common household items, a camera, and a Speedlight. This very simple and accessible technique allows me to present certain attributes of everyday objects from an unfamiliar perspective, and thus to make new sense of them. By sharing these images with a wider audience, I invite them to consider their own everyday objects as gateways to a beauty invisible to the naked eye.

So Blue Without You

Sylvia Bandyke, Royal Oak, MI, USA, is largely a self-taught photographer, having taken studio and art history classes in college. She began her art career by displaying photo collages in ArtPrize, an independent international art competition in Grand Rapids, MI, from 2014 to 2018. Subsequently, she has been juried into more than 100 group exhibitions in 24 states and accepted into numerous online international exhibitions. An awarded artist, she keeps an eye open for interesting views of a subject while looking for hidden beauty every day. Most recently, she was a caregiver to her elderly mother and was able to create some memorable, unique art as a result of this experience.

I prefer using the collage format to integrate associated images into a cohesive unit that is even more compelling because of the embedded story. Having been a playwright and technical writer, I am accustomed to delivering content with a message. So now, as a visual communicator, I continue to provide meaning via the structure of the collage format, wherein the four photos confirm, augment, or even contradict each other if warranted. I enjoy offering the richness that the multiplicity of images provides, along with the impact gained through the thoughtful positioning of them. Ultimately, I intend to have my work act as a doorway to the viewer’s own mental and emotional framework regarding the collection of images, perhaps finding their own very personal meaning in them.