Castle

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.

Catcher In The Rye

Leombruni is a Connecticut-based painter whose work explores the emotional and psychological dimensions of human experience through a lens of expressive realism. Janet Leombruni is President Emeritus of CT Women Artists. She is an Elected Member of the CT Academy of Fine Art, New Haven Paint &Clay, West Hartford Art League, and her work is part of multiple collections in the US and Europe.

Solo shows: Celeste LeWitt Gallery at UCONN Health Center, Arts of Tolland CT, the Monastery Gallery in West Hartford, Atrium Gallery at Raymond Library EH CT, FIAT LUXE at the Art League of New Britain, Workspace Manchester, CT. Leombruni has held artist talks at Kehler-Liddell Gallery in New Haven and the Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury, and was a featured artist for the CWA Art Chat Series. Her work is currently in the Hillstead Museum, Farmington, CT.
Group Shows: Jorgensen Gallery, UCONN, Mattatuck Museum Waterbury, Monastery Gallery, West Hartford, Slater Memorial Museum, CT, Barnes-Franklin Gallery Tunxis, CT, Flinn Gallery with the Greenwich Art Society, Theaterworks, Hartford, CT, CAFA at Lyme Academy of the Arts and Sill Gallery, Old Lyme, the New Britain Museum of American Art, New Haven Paint and Clay, SOHO20 Chelsea, NYC, KBM Gallery Riverside, CA, Rhode Island Watercolor Society, San Fernando, CA, dodomu Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, and San Rafael, CA.

Leombruni received a BA from Hartford Art School, an MA in Education from UCONN, and a Master Plus 30 in Painting and Art Education from CCSU.

In my work, I tell the stories of my experiences in the classroom. I also explore relationships, sometimes utilizing tropes or idioms in the form of children’s literature, myths, films, or portray stories as told to me by my students. I like to examine themes of hope, impulsivity, family, fantasy, innocence, and coming of age. My colors are powerful. Figures often occupy charged, ambiguous spaces, where gesture, symbolism, and narrative intersect to reveal underlying tensions between individuals and their environments. I seek to draw the viewer in, to elicit an emotional response. I like to ask the viewer to determine: What is really going on here?

Catching Snowflakes

Cher Pruys, ASAA SCA, IGOR, AAPL, CSAA, AMS, LMS, OSA, MAA, CFA, NOAPS, PSOA, AWA., AAOA.
“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.”

Cher Pruys was born in Regina. Over the years she lived in many places including Saskatoon, Calgary, Edmonton, Ottawa, and Fort Frances, settling into her present home in Devlin, on the banks of the Rainy River with her husband Mark, 4 dogs, and 2 cats.

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

Although self-taught, her dedication and talent have seen her work juried into 463 International exhibits, as well as exhibits in numerous non-juried shows. She has won 718 awards for her work in the International Juried Exhibits.

Her work has graced the covers of 3 books, and 36 magazines, including The Best Of Acrylic Fall 2021, the cover of the May 2022 Arabella Magazine, #20 Hyperrealism Magazine with “Girls Girls Girls”, & #21 with “The Young Cowboy”, & the latest, Artists & Illustrators March 2024. She has been featured in over 350 International publications. Cher’s works have found a permanent home in private and public collections worldwide.

I am a self-taught artist working in water-based mediums, mainly acrylic, but also at times gouache and watercolor. I am a hyperrealism painter fascinated by the world around me. I am very drawn to shiny surfaces as well as transparent objects, especially when the lighting brings them to life. I look for beauty in everyday objects that most people take for granted or just don’t truly see as they are. The seemingly boring and mundane subjects can truly be like magnets if portrayed in the right light. The shiny metal is one of those materials that can host endless visions….the light hits it and the reflections are captured on the smooth, sleek surface…people and animals especially the eyes…an artist’s dream! My future art plans are to paint the countless subjects I have chosen to become paintings and to share my art with as many people as I can.

“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.”

Cathedral Portal On Machu Picchu

Karen Safer is an international, award-winning photographic artist and poet with a musical bent. A Los Angeles native, born to creative, scholarly-minded parents who encouraged her world travel (230+ countries/territories visited).

Early on, she was greatly influenced by movies, music, books, and plays, and as a student of art and history, inspired by ancients to moderns – Assyria to Cindy Sherman. She has a bachelor’s/master’s degree in Art from UCLA and California State University. She is a member of the Los Angeles Art Association, IAA-USA, Women United, Praxis Gallery, LACMA, MOCA, IAA-USA, in Who’s Who of Professional Women, ArtTour Magazine (NY), AATOLAU interview, Artist Talk Magazine (UK), Lens Magazine, etc. She was given a camera and crayons at 3 and exposed to/inspired by California motifs: light, trees, the ocean, music, and vernacular architecture that defined/influenced her left-handed aesthetic. She began taking pictures of family and friends, progressing from painting to developing black-and-white photos in college. She was fortunate to begin a life of travel as a teen that shaped her love of the exotic paired with an eye for the formal, accidental, and unusual while subliminally seeking the “beautiful” that jiggles the lens/frame of my eye.

She is featured in magazines, catalogs, and books and exhibited internationally in over 80+ galleries/museums with over 370+ exhibitions from London, Rome, Berlin, Glasgow, Budapest, Athens, Prague, Paris, Barcelona, Florence, Venice, Sao Paulo, from California to New York, winning 360+ First and other awards – most recently: Black & White SPIDER Awards nominee, 21st Julia Margaret Cameron Awards in Abstract and in Architecture categories, Botticelli International Prize in Florence, LA Art Show 2024, 17th Annual Color Awards and soon in Tokyo Metropolitan Museum, Art Expos in Basel and Armenian Modern Art Museum in Yerevan.

“A photographer has the whole world big or small to capture.” – kjs

Influences: I am a student of art, architecture, history, literature, film, and music. I have been heavily influenced by so many sources but here I’ve chosen to highlight art and photography influences from Hopper to Cartier-Bresson and from Atget to Cindy Sherman. So many influences on life from cities to nature to music and art. I love color and all its vibrance while I venerate black and white. I embrace all the many influences that have touched my art and my life deeply.

Cats Wedding

Yue Zeng is a Chinese-American self-taught artist, mother, and wife, who has been living in the United States since 2008 and currently resides in Woodbury, Minnesota. Zeng’s artistic practice focuses on oil painting, with her subjects mainly being mythical creatures and imaginary landscapes. With a style between impressionism and fantasy, she explores the vividness of their spirit in saturated colors and organic forms. Zeng’s interest in the arts started in elementary school, sparking her desire to create later in life. In her twenties, she obtained her Master in Science from SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, New York. In 2017 due to physical complications, Zeng had to leave the chemistry industry. Transformed by the experience, she decided to revisit her art practice and make it her career regardless of the obstacles she would face. Since then, Zeng has flourished in her artistic expression, finding her true passion in oil painting. Although Zeng explores other painting mediums such as gouache, pastel, and digital, oil and canvas feel the most natural. This medium allows her to relax and be free with the changeability of the material and exploration of color within the subjects she paints.

My paintings are an outlet to express the imagination I have inside my head that I can not put into words. After trying many mediums, I always find myself coming back to paint and brushes. In my current artistic practice, I use oil paint and mainly create portraits of mythical creatures and animals transfixed in the shifting colors of seascapes and landscapes. There is a natural spirit and magic to these creatures and their energy draws me in. Choosing to paint these creatures as real living wildlife rather than abstractions, I use bold and vivid colors to express the imagination intertwined with reality, finding magic between the seams. Using a saturated color palette, I create bold and striking imagery, contrast between foreground and background, subject and landscape, and light and darkness. Weaving their bodies and the surface of the landscape into each other through organic forms and flowing brush strokes, I find beauty, strength, and innocence in these creatures that reflect my inner world.

Celestial Web

For 3 decades, Peter Hriso has worked as an artist and animator in various positions. He is a Professor of Digital Animation and coordinates the MA in Art and Design program at Kennesaw State University. He imparts his knowledge and expertise to students by teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in animation and motion design.

Peter Hriso has been a dedicated artist and animator for more than three decades, holding various positions in the field. He currently serves as a Professor of Digital Animation at Kennesaw State University, where he also coordinates the MA in Art and Design program. Through his teaching of animation and motion design courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, Peter shares his wealth of knowledge and expertise with his students.

My work investigates repetition, modularity, and rhythm within digital space, exploring how simple geometric forms can accumulate into complex architectural landscapes. Using 3D animation software, I construct layered systems of blocks and tiles that balance order with subtle irregularities. The interplay of opaque, translucent, and textured surfaces creates shifting patterns of light and depth, transforming static structures into dynamic visual experiences.

These compositions—ranging from stacked translucent panels to painted cubes and soft, fabric-like blocks—highlight the tension between rigidity and softness, as well as uniformity and variation. Each piece becomes a meditation on structure and fragility, evoking both digital precision and tactile materiality. By abstracting architectural and industrial references into playful, modular forms, I invite viewers to reflect on how repetition and variation shape the environments we inhabit, both in reality and in imagination.

Chalk It Up

“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.”

Challenges

Irina Howard is a New York-based artist whose work explores the complexity of human life experiences. She is internationally recognized for rigorously composed and sublimely musing paintings and sculptures. Her innovative style is inspired by organic forms and textures bridging reality and imagination, giving a physical form to a conceptual idea, and revealing the visible within the invisible.

Howard was born and grew up in Ukraine. As a child, she encountered traumatic events that influenced her to interact with the world through her drawings. Her youth Howard spent in the elite cultural group committed to arts and literature, where she established her lifelong passion for the arts. By lifting the burden off her shoulders, she emerged with the personal belief that the artist has no right to contribute any more pain to a world full of struggle and despair, which kept her in artistic silence for several years. Moving to the United States, exploring different careers, and then heading into a midlife crisis significantly changed her perspectives and led to a creative awakening. Her real-life experiences of grief and hope found reflection in her current series of works. Howard studied fine arts and graduated with honors from the City University of New York and Yale Gordon College of Arts and Sciences.

Irina Howard is a recipient of several awards. Her recent recognitions: “Oscar of Visual Arts” as Top 60 Masters of Contemporary Art in 2022 by Art Tour International Magazine. Her work has been widely published in magazines like Aesthetica, the Art & Culture Magazine, Art Ideal Contemporary Aesthetics Magazine, and art books worldwide, including Important World Artists by Worldwide Artbooks. Her most recent exhibitions are at Art San Diego in California, and Hamptons Fine Art Fair in New York, USA. Her work highlights multiple private collections internationally.

“Patterns of Life” is a black-and-white collection of paintings and sculptures communicating life experiences and human values. The choices we make in life shape our identity and motivate our future behavior. By illustrating both positive and negative outcomes, I encourage the viewer to believe in themselves, be their best, and look for a positive change.

I draw inspiration from organic texture and compose my themes by giving physical form to a conceptual idea, bridging reality and imagination in the form of artistic beauty and revitalizing energy. My fascination with forms and textures takes me on a journey to reveal and interpret their meaning, unique purpose, and beauty in connection to human experiences. The creative use of symbols illustrates visual metaphors and offers insight into an idea or a concept from a different perspective.

My processes combine research, thoughtful, conscious decisions, and spontaneous, intuitive solutions while creating compositions. I realized that abstract style is my best form of artistic expression. It opens doors for curiosity, imagination, interpretation, and the flow of inner emotions. The development stage is very exciting. Lines – help me to create feelings; shapes and forms – to reflect emotions, thoughts, and perception; texture – to reveal experiences; color tones – to add contrast and reinforce the message through design and composition.

My favorite elements are circles and curved lines. I found them simple but, at the same time, very compelling. The circle is a line that never stops, represents “completeness,” and gives a sense of protection, friendship, femineity, community, and perfection. It naturally communicates positive emotions and builds a strong visual identity. In my work, circles often symbolize hope.

My body of work expresses personal experiences, thoughts, spirituality, feelings, and philosophy in life. I always strive to inspire hope and encourage positivity.

Change The World

Adriana Azevedo was born in 1970 in Natal, Brazil. During the Covid pandemic lockdown, she’s unleashed her artistic passion and embraced it. As an immigrant artist based in Florida, her unique Brazilian perspective and cultural background inspire her creative expression.

She worked as an architect in Brazil for 2 decades before moving to the United States. She is proud and honored to contribute to the vibrant and diverse artistic community in the Orlando area.

I find my deepest inspiration in the fascinating worlds of Cubism and Surrealism. These influential movements have ignited my creative spirit, guiding me to explore the intricate interplay between reality and imagination on canvas.

My work is a reflection of the multifaceted nature of existence. Through the lens of Cubism, I deconstruct the ordinary, breaking down conventional forms into a tapestry of geometric shapes and angles. This allows me to unveil new dimensions within the familiar, encouraging viewers to contemplate the essence of what they see.