Chromatic Mayhem
Gerrit “Gert” van Ommering is a photographer based in Gold River, California. He moved from the Netherlands to the USA at age 19 to pursue what became a busy career in inventing, designing, developing, and deploying space systems and managing space programs. After retiring, he moved to photography to provide an outlet for the creative and technical juices that had fueled his career. He is involved with Viewpoint Photographic Art Center and Gallery and the Sierra Camera Club, where he directs the print programs. He is a member of various broader arts organizations in Sacramento, Yolo County, Rancho Cordova, Lodi, and Placerville, entering many competitions and exhibits, receiving a nice range of local awards, and selling quite a few prints into private collections.
He recently put on a large, successful duo photography show, “REALISMFantasy” with his wife Lucille at Rancho Cordova’s Mills Station Arts & Culture Center, where he was doing the creative Fantasy part. His solo show “Embellished Emblems” at Gallery 1075 in West Sacramento in June 2025 was very well-received, displaying 24 photos of creatively edited and radically modified classic and vintage car emblems, logos, and badges with stunning textures and colors. So far in 2025, he has had 84 photographs accepted into 17 physical and 21 online gallery exhibitions.
My photography preference is to make seriously manipulated, constructed, strange, and abstract images of just about anything, but I also do a lot of straight or lightly enhanced work. I look for interesting shapes, patterns, juxtapositions, scenes, and arrangements of objects that other photographers may pass by. I’m always looking for something different, weird, and unique. I especially enjoy looking for objects, shapes, and patterns that lend themselves to manipulation into radically modified images, often reaching into the abstract. I typically let my instincts and subconscious take over and play and experiment until something tells me that I’m done.
With a camera in everyone’s pocket in our smartphone era, many billions of photographs are taken each year. The challenge is to be different and unique, and yes, sometimes a little weird, so that we can catch the attention of a viewer for just a few extra seconds. I hope my recent images selected for “2025” are different enough to have somebody pause briefly and say, “Wow!”
Circle Of Life
Hwei-Li Tsao is a San Francisco-based artist. She has exhibited at the de Young Museum, Triton Museum, Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, Marin MOCA, Gallery 621, The Mine Gallery in Fairfax, Sebastopol Center for the Arts, Marin Falkirk Cultural Center, Marin Society of Artists, College of Marin, 142 Throckmorton Gallery, Las Vegas (NM) Art Council, and around the Bay Area.
She completed an MFA in Painting at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2011. In addition to being a studio artist, she has taught painting at the College of Marin, and at the Adult Continuing Education at San Francisco Art Institute.
I paint in praise of women who inspire me with resilience and dignity. They paved a path for offspring to flourish. In a withered sunflower, I see the beauty and strength of women who have passed.
Circle Of Life
Subodh Maheshwari was born in Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh, North India where she learned folk art and classical music. She passionately believes: “In the threshold of my life, my present is the window to the past and a key to the future”. She acquired her degrees and studied art at Agra University, California State University of Fullerton, and the University of California Irvine. Subodh has won numerous awards, including the regional Fellowship Award at UCI in 1986, the Bharat Gaurav Award in India in 2015, and the 60 Masters Award in 2017, 2018, and 2019. She is also registered in Marquis’s “Who’s Who in America,” the standard in biographical information. Her paintings have also won awards in a variety of categories including landscape, open, all women, nature, elements, seasons, and abstract.
Subodh is a diversified artist who enjoys telling stories through her artwork, whether it is through landscape, flowers, or abstract art. Her art is a fusion of Eastern symbolism and Western composition, influenced by 16th and 17th-century Rajasthani and Mogul art, and accented by poetry, passages, and phrases in Hindi, Sanskrit, and English. She admires Georgia O’Keeffe for her floral influence and Frida Kahlo for her courage. Whether it is the serene beauty of nature, her spirituality, or the current political climate, she finds inspiration. Having a life shared between India and America, she sees the beautiful similarities, like love that transcends all borders. Highly individual in her style, her works are described as emotional, mysterious, personal, spiritual, and humorous.
Circuit Breaker (Algorithm Sage)
I hold a BA in art from the University of Arkansas, with additional studies at Oklahoma State Technical University.
A professional graphic artist with 39 years of experience, I have been a Senior Art Director for a major US corporation, and owned my own art design business since 1997, working with companies across the United States and the world.
After focusing on graphic art for most of my professional career, I have begun to explore my fine art side, trying new mediums to see where they will take me. It has been a joyous new chapter in my life, as I have found there are always new things to learn and experience.
The target of focus for humanity in 2025 was, in large part, a discussion about artificial intelligence and the ramifications on society. This work is a dystopian reflection on the cacophony of distraction presented by a deluge of targeted algorithmic information and the resultant human echo chambers.
A double-edged sword, this new technology offers endless new horizons for humankind, but also the potential for the loss of self. This piece offers a cautionary tale against becoming a servile mouthpiece, regurgitating thoughts constructed without human empathy and consideration.
Circus
Juliette Manolié is a self-taught visual artist with advanced degrees in Art History and French Literature. After a long career in teaching, she became a full-time artist in 2019. Her work has been exhibited in Maryland (Pyramid Atlantic, Jo Fleming Gallery, Maryland Federation of Art, Annapolis MD), Massachusetts (Cultural Center of Cape Cod), Virginia (The Art League), Pennsylvania (Vestige Concept Gallery, Pittsburgh), California (Las Laguna Gallery), and in France (Galerie de l’Hotel de Ville, Larmor Plage). Her work has also appeared on multiple online art exhibition platforms.
I enter my workspace ready to do battle. The initial approach is decidedly physical: it involves gouging and scratching, then using waterproof India ink to imprint, infuse, and splatter the surface. The visual result is chaotic. While I yearn for balance and clarity, I am resisting any intellectual noise that might interrupt the work. There is always a struggle.
The push and pull of the process reflect the ambiguities and contradictions stemming from my feminist, bi-cultural experience. The paintings evoke feelings of longing, belonging, and alienation inspired by surrounding stimuli, readings, dreams, and childhood memories.
In my work, elements of the female figure are partial, contorted, or otherwise misrepresented and take on a bolder symbolic value: women bow or rise to the invisible pull of expectations, and in the process, we often lose ourselves, disassemble, or dissociate.
Choosing a title is essential. It provides viewers with a lexicon to enter the work.
City 2
Digital photography – associative sceneries / Photo art on topics that touch and inspire…
Rosemarie Berger worked as a designer in the media sector and, among other things, managed the entire photo planning of an extensive work area in the mail order business for many years, certainly one of the foundations of her further development. She started working as a photo artist in 2008 and has since shown her pictures successfully at national and international exhibitions, e.g. at Art Karlsruhe, Art Strasbourg, Art Innsbruck, and others.
Thoughts and emotions become visible in my pictures, and the theme of “being and passing away” is often the underlying theme of the works. What is also important to me is the special detail, the details removed from the whole. I do the artistic processing of the pictures on the computer, which can be understood as if a painter were applying several layers of paint with a brush and then partially removing them again, perhaps comparable to a (digital) collage.
City At Night
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 several countries abroad.
Photography has been my passion since early childhood. My motivation is to discover and capture the beauty that surrounds us continuously in all areas of our everyday lives, even when it is not always readily self-evident. The finest images 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.
City Lights
Babler’s work has been juried into: Anderson 2025-26 Winter Exhibition; 38th September Competition – Juried Exhibits Alexandria Museum of Art; “After Dark 2025”, “Fall Juried Exhibit 2025”, and “Reflecting 2025”– Maryland Federation of Art; 38th Annual McNeese National Works on Paper Exhibition; “In the City” exhibit juror Christina Gomez (Art Institute Chicago); North American Print Biennial juror Elizabeth M. Rudy (Associate Curator of Prints Harvard Art Museums, Boston); Dubuque Museum of Art Biennial juror Pamela Hugdahl (Executive Director, Rochester Art Center); Rockford Art Museum Biennial Juried Exhibit of Contemporary Artists; Andrew James Wulf, Ph.D. (Director – Albany Museum of Art); Gary Freeburg (Professor/Director of Duke Hall Gallery of Fine Art at James Madison University); Amanda C. Burdan (Associate Curator – Brandywine River Museum of Art); Christiane Paul (Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art); Felice Frankel (Science photographer/research scientist); Malcolm Daniel (Curator of Photographs – Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC); Kenneth Baker (Art Critic, San Francisco Chronicle); William Lieberman, Director of Zolla/Lieberman Gallery – Chicago; Annette Carlozzi (Sr. Curator at Blanton Museum of Art); Dr. Jefferson Harrison (Chief Curator Chrysler Museum of Art); Charlotta Kotik (Curator of Contemporary Art Brooklyn Museum of Art); David Houston (Chief Curator –Ogden Museum of Southern Art); Dr. Russell Panczenko (Director – Museum of Art, Madison Wisconsin); Siri Engberg (Walker Art Center); Stephen Phillips (Phillips Collection – Washington DC); Sam Gilliam (international artist); and Ed Paschke (international artist).
She is a Ragdale Residency Fellow, a juried member of the Illinois Arts Council’s Arts-In-Education Roster, and exhibited at Northwestern University, Concordia University, Rockford Art Museum, and the Alexandria Museum of Art. She was a fine art consultant and advisor for Grumbacher/Prismacolor, along with developing a program for Blick Art. Her artwork is in corporate, university, and private art collections.
Color is a language of its own. It expresses a range of emotions while setting a mood. Understanding the relationship of colors has been experimented with by artists from Delacroix to Hofmann. Visual artists have realized that the use of one color next to another color can result in responses across the emotional spectrum – from excitement to calm. This color interplay influences the viewer. In my submission, I have used vibrant colors carefully placed next to one another to create spirited energy. The work encourages the viewer to examine further, uncovering a message using vibrant colors and composition. A curator has described my artwork as “smart and thoughtful and dense with information; gorgeous with color”. Color is my visual voice!
City Of Dreams
Poornima Dayal has been painting since 1984.
She began expressing her love for the art through oils on canvas, as she found the medium very fluid and easy to work with.
Born in New Delhi, she is based in Mumbai now for over a decade. Since 2019, her ‘passionate affair with the brush’ as she lovingly terms it transformed from using oils to Acrylics on canvas.
She has had the fortune of being written about in The Vogue, India magazine as well as many leading Indian Newspapers, including The Hindu, The Bombay Times, The Indian Express, The Hindustan Times, Midday, and many more.
She has been the recipient of A Talent Prize Award and A special Honor award for her art by The prestigious Art Show International Gallery, L.A.
She has also received a special Honor award from Fusion Art Gallery, U.S.A.
Her works have also been selected by The Bombay Art Society, Mumbai for an online display at their selected Independence Day collection in 2021.
Amongst several Art exhibitions around the globe, her artworks have also draped the walls at The Melamegi Art Festival in Vienna.
An online exhibition of Cityscapes adorns the walls of Art Show International Gallery, L.A. as a solo artist since 2020.
Her artworks have also been on exhibition and sale at artsy.net and ArtNet, leading global online Art sites.
I live in Mumbai, India, and have been painting for over 3 decades.
I dabble with colors and textures to bring out feelings and perhaps, tales somewhere held within. Painting lends an excellent medium for me to express myself and has been rejuvenating. Acrylic and mixed media are very luminous and versatile mediums that I use to display my artworks on Canvas or Art Paper.
The artwork presented here contains elements of self-discovery and wonder that I was fortunate to experience in 2022. In extreme Gratitude for this thematic submission.