Soaring
Brigitte currently lives in Switzerland. She is a self-taught photographer inspired by her grandfather as a child; thus, she chose to bear his name as an artist to honour him. Travelling the globe with an analog camera in her twenties, she gained experience in landscape, travel, and street life photography. Nowadays, she is also experimenting with other approaches, like abstract, and is shooting digitally. Her work has been published in international art magazines and books. Two of which are special editions about her artwork at Docu Magazine. Her photography was exhibited physically and virtually at galleries and fairs in the UK, the USA, the EU, Switzerland, Canada, the West Indies, Asia, and more. One of her main exhibitions was at Artexpo New York in April 2025, at ArtBasel in June, and at SpectrumMiami 2025.
Her photography has been distinguished with honourable mentions, merit awards, a bronze award at Pispa, a first prize from HMVC Gallery NY, a nomination at the 1839 Awards in the urban category, and a gold winner at the London Photography Awards.
Currently, she is working on three long-term projects; the aim is to have them published.
My favourite photographic approaches are landscape, street life, and abstract photography. Landscape and Abstract as moments of peace of mind, my eyes are amazed by the beauty of nature. Soothing my soul. Street life was moments of exhilaration, being ready at any minute to shoot a scene that caught my eye. A scene of life, of youth, of the ordinary, of joy,(of despair sometimes). A scene I am drawn to by my emotions, thus mostly candid. My photographs tell a story; the point is to share it with the viewer. May the viewer see my story or see a story linked to their life. If we were to meet, we could communicate and share our stories and create a new one. To me, communication is essential in our daily lives.
Abstracted or lost in thoughts.Abstract or freedom. The techniques I use in photography to express this freedom are ICM (intentional camera movement), long exposures, or double exposures.
I started experimenting with this approach when I just needed to move, move my hands, my arms, my body. My camera became a brush, and I felt like painting. The sense of boundaries was gone, and I felt free to express my emotions and my thoughts at will. What a joy.
Soaring
Donna Northington holds a BFA degree in painting from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Born in Queens, New York, she began her career exhibiting in street fairs in NYC and Long Island. Post-graduation, she worked at the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, D.C. She contributed to major public arts murals in Springfield, MA, and the historic Centennial Vision mural at Tuskegee University, with her mentor and husband, painter Nelson Stevens. Returning to NYC, she earned her master’s degree at Columbia University.
Northington went on to build a successful career in television, working for brands like CNN, HBO, and Warner Bros., while continuing her artistic practice. She has served on the boards of the Museum of Contemporary Art Georgia, the National Black Arts Festival, and the Paul R. Jones Collection of American Art at the University of Alabama and the University of Delaware. Her work is held in numerous private collections, including the University of Alabama and Usher Raymond.
Northington currently works from her art studio at the Goat Farm Arts Center in Atlanta.
My work expresses duality: first as a human being on earth connected to others and the greater universe through a collective consciousness and, second, as a multicultural woman living in America and navigating between the natural and built worlds. Mixed media elements representing the earth, sky, atmosphere, cosmos, plants, and architectural elements combine to depict this reality.
My Heartmospheric Series– Original created digital images using universally recognized symbols from the earth, sky, and cosmos, connecting our souls to a greater universal consciousness.
Social
In 2020 at 65, it had been decades since I made a body of art. Since then, I’ve been honored with 4 first-place awards in photography. The University of Delaware gave me a one-woman show. My work has been seen from coast to coast including several times through the HMVC Gallery in NY and Las LaGuna Gallery in CA. Pictorem based out of Montreal, Canada, has me as a featured artist. Two books had a write-up about me with a few of my photographs; Pen Women’s, Nobis II, and Emerald Coast Review.
The photographs I create are abstractions in fluidity, rich in joy, color, pattern, curiosity, and concern. My archival photographs are usually printed on aluminum.
I grew up in the Mid-Atlantic region and later spent much of my young adult life in New England. For the past 28 years, the Deep South has been home. I have a Master’s in Social Work and worked as a clinical social worker and a realtor. In the South, I married and raised a daughter. I also helped plant the seed that grew into the Mississippi Children’s Museum and worked at 2 art museums as a docent for 17 years.
I create photos as peaceful, playful, healing stimuli by drawing upon different objects and melding them into a unified whole. Part of my process is setting up compositions and visually weaving together beautiful glass, flowing fabric, and sometimes surprise elements with vibrant colors and patterns into integrated fluid formations seeking to reshape light, pattern, and color into a visual oasis. I then tightly crop and photograph. My intent is to transcend and transform objects into images that visually excite while calming the soul.
A lifelong passion for art and artists influenced my work. I nod to Miriam Schapiro, a leader in the Pattern and Decoration Movement. Having lived much of my life by the shore, I have always loved the play of light in watery reflections. I am drawn to artists who capture light, Stephen Rolfe Powell’s glass delights me. Mark Rothko, believed in the visceral effect of color, He wanted people to have an experience with his pictures. I seek to have my work viscerally affect the viewer.
Soft Petals Of Love Embrace Of Spring
Nicole Martinelli is an international award-winning artist and photographer who has been featured in prominent galleries and exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe. The vibrant colors she incorporates in both her paintings and photographs are inspired by the intense and captivating emotions she experiences upon first encountering the subject matter and surroundings that inspire her artworks.
Over the past few years, Nicole Martinelli has expanded her artistic portfolio and explored new mediums into previous unchartered creative territories including the creation of hand-painted E-paintings using a stylus. The Artist’s photographs and organically crafted hand-painted E-paintings have been showcased in various prestigious group exhibitions at renowned fine art galleries across the United States, including The Marblehead Arts Association Gallery in Marble Head, Massachusetts, the Kavanaugh Gallery, Illinois MVA Gallery Bethlehem PA, BWAC Gallery Brooklyn New York, CORE Art Space in Denver Colorado and The Mosaic Arts Gallery, Mosaic Arts District Fairfax, Virginia amongst others.
The Artist, Photographer Nicole Martinelli’s photography and hand-painted E paintings have earned the Artist international recognition winning numerous awards including a third-place international award in July 2023, in an International juried exhibition based in Geneva Switzerland.
There is always an ocean or stream to catch your tears and a sunset to brighten your life. If I can inspire, awaken, make the viewer feel, think, and bring solace, happiness, and peace to others as I have found myself while creating then I have achieved my artistic goal.
– Artist, Nicole Martinelli
Solitaire Play Again
Tara Peckham is a multidisciplinary visual artist currently based in New York City, primarily working in painting, drawing, and photography. In blending reality and fluidity, structure and play, sensory memories and dreams, all of Tara’s work portrays moments of a visceral presence of self. Growing up in Bali, Indonesia, with an American father and Indian mother, their life has been full of inspiring artistic and physical landscapes. This background has cultivated a fluidity in the artist’s relationship with home, gender, love, the self, and the other. All of Tara’s work explores this ambiguous space of in-between-ness, a space (or lack thereof) the artist has found themself wading in throughout their lifetime. Looking for and discovering junctures where contradictions exist in unison, she depicts the moments where he does not exist in opposition to anything.
In juxtaposing nudes with material objects and natural imagery, Tara Peckham’s work holds a fantastical essence that flirts with the erotic. The nudes found in most of Tara’s paintings, often objectified through their facelessness, maintain a commanding presence. Playing with the tension between subject and object; animate and inanimate; background and foreground, Tara’s work challenges the rigidity of these binaries. This painting highlights the aspects of life which exist in a sticky and intertwining state of multiplicity. Although their work carries allusive imagery, Tara’s practice is not rooted in premeditated symbolism. Instead, their practice is much more resemblant of match-making. When determining a piece’s content and composition, the artist focuses on fostering tender relationships between figures and lines, often placing colors side by side, eagerly awaiting to see if they will kiss.
Solstice
I was born in Habana, Cuba and at the age of 8, my parents sent me to the US alone to avoid indoctrination in Russia to communism. I was part of 14,000 children who arrived in Miami and were sent to orphanages or foster care. It was in the orphanage that I developed my love for art. I would draw pictures to send to my parents to let them know that I was okay. I learned that through my art I was able to bring peace and joy to my parents. My mom still has some of these pictures. I was reunited with my parents about a year later. After high school, I wanted to go to art school but I wanted to help my parents so I went to secretarial school and went into the business world where I climbed the corporate ladder and became very successful. My love for art was always there. I am a self-taught artist who has worked in many mediums. In the last 10 years, I have been creating and perfecting the pouring process with Pebeo paints. I have exhibited in Spectrum and Red Dot in Miami, the New York Expo, SOFA in Chicago, San Diego, Dallas, and the Hamptons. I have been published in several art magazines and represented by several galleries.
My primary influences have been nature, music, and the movement I perceive in them. I am able through my art to transport my viewers to see and feel wonder and awe in my art.
Being born on a Caribbean Island, I am drawn to the beautiful sunsets/sunrises along with the crystal clear colors of turquoise, emerald, and blues reflected in the water. I love how the water caresses the sand as it reaches the shore. You will see in many of my pieces the contrast of these colors. There is so much beauty that surrounds us that needs to be captured. My pouring process has evolved through the years where I can create layers that give my pieces a 3D effect. My colors are blended to provide depth to the pieces. It is fascinating to see the movement created in my pieces. This is what I love about my work and the emotions people feel when they see my art. The best compliment I have received from my collectors is that they see and feel exactly what I am trying to convey through my art.
Someplace Somewhere
My childhood refuge was to immerse myself in the natural world around me — experiencing the beauty of nature, the vibrancy of color, and the variety of architecture. This eventually led to a 1982 Bachelor of Fine Arts with a minor in Art History from the University of Southern Mississippi, and to a 1984 Summer Course in Illustration at Parsons School of Design in New York, NY. Not finding a job in the arts field, I joined the federal government in the mid-80s, and eventually retired in Washington, DC as a paralegal.
After moving to the Gulf Coast of Alabama, I converted my new garage into an artist’s studio and revived my talents in acrylics and watercolors and my interest in abstract forms. I participated in art markets, artists’ co-ops, galleries, and art shows, even winning awards and mounting a 6-month one-man show. All these venues were in multiple cities in Alabama and western Florida.
To satisfy my cravings for new avenues of creativity, I began experimenting with digital photos of nature, architecture, and my own artwork, altering colors and combining images in multiple overlays. By the time I moved to St Petersburg, Florida in 2016, I was wholly committed to the digital photography art world.
Now my tools for expressing myself as an artist have changed: I work with clean hands — no brushes, no pencils, no splattered acrylics, watercolors, or oils — and I can take new photographs and work digitally from any location.
My photography captures the beauty and spirit of nature and the real world. I meld these into digital artworks using multiple exposures, layers, color transformations, and advanced art filters – images that may live through many iterations.
Each digital image is my personal expression of inspiration from the real world, explored and revealed through my own artistic imagination.
ENERGY | FREQUENCY | VIBRANCY 2022
“An ongoing exploration of universal components in the origin of cosmic life and its evolution. Each artwork is a unique window into that continuum, anywhere from the first spark of life energy to the sophisticated harmony and complexity of the human mind.”
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My creative perspective and process are unique in the world of digital design. I see universal energies in the world around me — the life forces of nature, the vibrancy of color, and the vitality and strength of architecture.
My purpose is to interpret and reveal those energies to all who view my art — to awaken curiosity and prompt introspection, to feed their inner being, and to have my designs resonate with them.
All of my designs begin with original photography that captures the beauty and spirit of nature and the real world. I meld these photos into digital artworks using multiple exposures, layers, color transformations, and art filters.
Nature and architecture are the foundation for many of my abstract designs: spirals from the Dali Museum DNA staircase merge with the domed ceiling from a Budapest spa and tropical flora to evoke the infinity of the cosmos or restructure into a futuristic energy escape.
Organic elements can lead to amazing constructs: overlays of magnolia blossoms reveal a feminine torso or explode into a fantastical flower; stems from a bunch of grapes morph into a multi-patterned North Star ascending to the heavens; a pond of waterlilies at a neglected mansion melds with marshland scenes to become a colorful vignette of tranquility and contemplation.
Other people may not see the world as I do, but my wish is to stimulate their own imaginations, to have them look within and create their own interpretations of my designs.
Somewhere In The Night – Andromeda
John Calabrese received his BA in Art from Catholic University, Washington, D. C., MFA in Painting and Drawing from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, and his Ph. D. in Comparative Arts from Ohio University, Athens.
He is Professor Emeritus of Art at Texas Woman’s University, Denton, where he taught art history, aesthetics, history of film noir, the films of Alfred Hitchcock, and was in charge of the Studies Abroad Art History Program, which he initiated in 1994.
He has published articles on Paul Klee, J. R. R. Tolkien’s “”The Lord of the Rings,”” and Alfred Hitchcock’s “”Vertigo”” and “”The Trouble with Harry.””
Delicate nuances of value and texture become tools in conveying powerful dramatic statements about earthly beings who are not afraid to wonder, think, dream, and take that one step beyond.
The inhabitants of the cosmic atmosphere appear at odds with their surroundings (many of which are actual, specifically named astronomical objects). This is the result when the merely earthly confronts its unavoidable connection to the awe, mystery, and majesty of the heavens.
However, when fragile earthly beauty confronts sublime heavenly beauty, the earthly is reverently and silently humbled.
Somewhere Inbetween
As a recent MA Fine Art graduate, after 25 years working as an architect, Shelley’s works are expected to be spatial. With a personal interest in one’s identity, portraiture, and the impact of grief, her research and art making have developed into the sphere of liminality, rites of passage, and otherworldly spaces. Exploring themes of the experience of the liminality, navigation through it, from entering, being within, and the journey itself. Contemplating moments of the unknown within the sensation of an other-worldly space.
Working digitally and with mixed media, between maquettes, photography, collage, and hand drawing, works do not conclude, allowing them to transform and evolve, sometimes melding multiple works. The gift of time to reappraise and reconsider, as a manifesto, allows growth and reflection on continued life experiences.
The sociology of spaces, human interactions, reactions to, and experiences of spaces is key to Shelley’s making and line of enquiry in her works. The in-between moments are a mystery to be encountered. More recently, Shelley’s works are installations with audience decision-making generating works as an output of the experience of being within a space. Creating a ‘token’ of experience as she draws the audience into a space where the boundaries between the real and the virtual can blur.
My works explore themes of the experience of liminality, navigation through it, from entering, being within, and the journey itself. Contemplating moments of the unknown within the sensation of an other-worldly space.
Working digitally and with mixed media, between maquettes, photography, collage, and hand drawing, works do not conclude; I allow them to develop and transform, sometimes melding multiple works. The gift of time to reappraise and re-consider, as a manifesto, which allows works to grow with and reflect life experiences.
Interests also lie in the sociology of spaces, including human interactions, reactions to, and experiences of. The in-between moments and how interactions of audience decisions can create self-generating avenues of investigation. Audience participation and the output or ‘tokens’ of experiences are an integral part of my research and my works evolving as I draw the audience into a space where the boundaries between the real and the virtual can blur.