Shroom Of Ages
Jared Konopitski is an artist living and working in Sacramento, California. Jared works in many mediums; however, he primarily works with acrylic paintings. Jared has worked with many clients such as Art O Mat, Turning Art, Wide Open Walls, and more. In addition, Jared has curated numerous gallery shows and corporate art seminars. In his spare time, he enjoys facilitating art workshops with a focus on early art education. His work has been exhibited at galleries, festivals, and museums across the US and internationally, including:
The Smithsonian, Washington, D.C.
The Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA
The Mutter Museum, Philadelphia, PA.
Stranger Factory, Algodones, New Mexico
Giant Robot, Los Angeles, CA
Baton Rouge Gallery, Surreal Salon, Louisiana
Jared has had his work seen in:
Adbusters Magazine(2023)
Juxtapoz.com (2018)
PBS Art Showcase television show (2015 – 2017)
The New Yorker (2014)
Color Ink Book (2013)
Papercut Magazine (2013)
Arcana’s Steampunk Originals (2013)
Heavy Metal Magazine (2012)
Catapult Magazine (2012), DisColouring Book (2012)
Penumbra eZine (2012)
And Wow! Cool! Psycho Nurse Calendar (2011)
Awards:
KVIE Art Auction Curator Award – 2019
I am inspired by all things beautifully weird, such as monsters, the bugs living under the rocks, creatures in jars, ghosts, all the nooks and crannies of nature. But I am also inspired by comics, cartoons, noise music and neon anything. So I try to paint the way these things make me feel. Sometimes it comes out fun, sometimes scary, sometimes cute, and sometimes ugly. But I love it all. I prefer painting with acrylics on wood. And after the acrylics are laid down, I love to go over everything with black Ink. The black ink brings out the detail and gives the whole painting a better sense of flow.
Shuddhi Mandala – Purity
I’m a paper artist deeply inspired by nature, culture, and personal connections. Using the ancient art form of quilling, I transform strips of paper into intricate, vibrant compositions that tell meaningful stories. Originally from India and now based in the U.S., I blend traditional techniques with modern aesthetics, often collaborating with illustrators to add depth and emotion to my work. Each piece is a reflection of my journey—rich in color, texture, and intention. From wall art to fine jewelry, I create with the hope that every design evokes joy, curiosity, and a sense of wonder. My work has been part of gallery exhibits, art shows, and cherished as personalized gifts that celebrate love and identity. Whether it’s a Tree of Life, a mandala, or a custom initial, my art is a quiet offering of beauty in a fast-paced world. I believe in the power of handmade and in making art that connects people deeply.
In a world teeming with patterns, where chaos and structure intermingle, my dual passion as an engineer and artist is ignited. Fascinated by the harmony that emerges from shapes and colors, I found my medium of expression in the ancient art of quilling. Through Paper Sweetly, born in 2016, I embarked on a creative journey that began with paper jewelry and expanded to encompass a diverse range of art forms, from earrings and necklaces to wall art and sculptures.
Within the confines of my San Jose home studio, I immerse myself in the process of translating my perceptions, moods, and glimpses of inspiration into tangible creations. With each sketch, color selection, and delicate curling of paper, I witness the transformation of intangible ideas into exquisite reality. The entire journey, from inception to completion, fills me with an overwhelming sense of joy and relief from stress.
Side By Side
I find deep joy in creating art with my hands, using creativity as a way to connect cultures and share stories beyond language.
While studying Chinese in China, I discovered the art of sand painting, a moment that became a turning point in my artistic journey. In 2019, I was honored to receive a Top 10 Award at the Silk Road International Sand Painting Competition. This recognition opened opportunities for me to present my work at cultural events, including the Thai Festival at the Royal Thai Embassy in Beijing and the International Student Festival at my university. Through sand painting, I was able to share Thai culture while embracing cross-cultural exchange, an experience that was later featured by Chinese media.
More recently, a Chinese article documented my artistic journey and described my role as a bridge connecting Eastern and Western cultures. I was deeply grateful and proud to be seen in this way, as I believe everyone can serve as a cultural ambassador for their country.
I also believe that each person can help protect the environment through meaningful actions. This belief inspired me to transform discarded cans into artworks, turning what is considered useless into something meaningful.
For me, recycling is not only an act of love for the Earth, but also a powerful form of artistic expression.
My husband, a lover of energy drinks, often left empty cans behind. Instead of discarding them, I searched for a way to give these overlooked objects new life, which led to the creation of what I call “can decoration art.”
The process is challenging. Each can must be carefully cut into small pieces and assembled one by one. Even more demanding is imagining and designing each section so that every detail has its own unique character while still maintaining harmony in color, despite the limited patterns and shades available on the cans.
I am grateful to have exhibited my work at several art events, including the Art Exhibition in Pasadena (February 2025), the 58th Annual Newport Beach Art Exhibition (June 2025), and the 1st Thai Community of Fine Art Exhibition in Thai Town, Los Angeles (August 2025).
One of my artworks was selected to be featured in the Canadian art magazine Artistonish (October 2025), and another artwork was showcased in the Canadian online exhibition Unity 2025, organized by Gallerium.art (November 2025). I am also honored to have been selected as one of the artists for the Biafarin Awards 2025, held in December 2025.
The greatest joy comes from designing intricate details and hearing viewers say they never imagined cans could become such unique artworks. It fills me with great pride and happiness.
Side By Side
Jody Nelson is a Palm Desert, California-based mixed media artist whose layered, luminous paintings have been featured in juried exhibitions and both group and solo shows, with original work available through Saatchi Art and held in private collections across the United States and Canada. Drawn to expressive color, richly built-up surfaces, and the emotional resonance of still moments, her paintings transform the quiet textures of everyday life into bold, joyful works. Working in acrylic, pastel, and collage, Nelson builds each painting through layers of torn paper and mark-making, creating surfaces that carry their own history before the figure arrives. Each piece balances energy with calm — an ongoing invitation to pause, to notice, and to find beauty in the ordinary.
I paint women in the quiet moments — not the moments the world sees, but the ones that happen in between. The exhale after the effort. The stillness that arrives when we finally stop moving long enough to feel something.
My work is built in layers — torn paper, acrylic, pastel, and mark-making — each surface carrying its own history before the figure arrives. The women I paint are never performing. They are resting, remembering, belonging to themselves and to each other. Emotion, for me, lives in the body before it reaches the face. In shoulders that relax. In feet sinking into warm sand. In a chin lifted toward the sun.
Silence
Born in Copenhagen on November 5, 1973, Jasper is an artist who trained herself from the ground up. As a child, Jasper felt the liberation and delight of creating art. He had experience as both a carpenter and a construction architect. He had returned to painting as an expressive, enjoyable, and freeing activity. He became more well-known for his work in 2018 after joining an art club. Major art galleries all around the world have hosted his exhibitions, such as Zenith Art & Fashion, Miami, USA, VAN GOGH Art Gallery, Madrid, Spain, Capital Culture House, Madrid, Spain. He has been featured at the M.A.D.S Art Gallery, Milan, Italy, Artifact, NY, USA, Artio Gallery, NY, USA, HMVC Gallery New York, NY, USA, World of Crete, Greece, The Holy Art Gallery, London, UK, and ArtSpace Innovations, London, UK. He is featured online on PLOGIX Art Gallery, London, UK, TRiCERA Art Gallery, Tokyo, Japan, Artavita, Santa Barbara, CA, USA, Artifact, NY, USA, HMVC Gallery New York, NY, USA, Singulart, Paris, FR, and Circle Foundation For The Arts, Lyon, FR. He won the coveted International Prize Donatello, Florence, Italy, Top Artists The Protagonists of Contemporary Art, Venice, Italy, Creative Excellence Award 2023, Artistic Excellence Award 2023, Masterful Mind Award 2024, and Honorable Mention Award 2024, Circle Foundation For The Arts, Lyon, FR. A participant in The European Art Guide 21/22, Bellamonti Art, Helsingborg, Sweden, Art Anthology III 2021, Art Anthology VII 2024, Guto Ajayu Culture, Madrid, Spain, Art in America Annual Guide 2023 and 2024, Artifact, NY, USA, Masterful Minds Digital Magazine Vol. 1 and 2, 2024, Circle Foundation For The Arts, Lyon, FR, The Holy Art Gallery Magazine 2024, London, UK. Interviewed in 2024 by Aatonau, Osaka, Japan, and in 2020 by The Magazine of Contemporary Art, The MoCA, LA, USA. He took over the 2020 @10011mag Instagram account for 24 hours, where he shared his personal artworks, experiences, and studio via live stories and posts in NY, USA.
Shapes and colors represent my aspirations, fears, and inner monologues. Instead of praising achievements, I highlight qualities like sweetness, honesty, empathy, and love. My life story is incomplete without love. I came from a world where men are wicked, egotistical, stupid, harsh, and dishonest. Because of them, I transitioned from being a happy, loving person to developing a mental disorder and experiencing feelings of social anxiety and frustration. From a young age forward, this occurrence made me afraid of women. For males, having sex with women is the ultimate fulfillment of their dreams. When love is absent, jealousy and malicious intentions flourish.
I hope that individuals might become more honest, authentic, accepting, loving, and courageous by seeing the parallels between fake looks, living masks, being oneself, and cool performances. The tribal way of life is quite like the loving way of life, yet love promotes harmony, peace, and happiness, and my goal is to bring these things together somehow. I promote liberation, simplicity, tolerance, calm, self-expression, and a love revolution through the iconography of Indigenous people and my sweet, loving artwork. I banish evil and fear, paving the way for love, harmony, and peace so that people are happy and fulfilled in every aspect of their lives.
Silent Cheer
Anna Mathai is a multidisciplinary artist based in San Francisco with a practice spanning from mixed media and painting to sculpture, decorative residential wall installations, and writing. She creates sculptural and textured works that use color, light, texture, and shadow to tell her story, and frequently works with plaster, textile, and metal. Her goal is to create things that hold some strange magic. It’s why she likes to experiment with and create new methods (like her “canvas kintsugi” and hardened silk origami). She makes works that interact with their viewers and the light around them, reflecting, shifting colors, and jumping off of the wall to mingle art and enjoyment, to transcend viewing into experiencing. She feels that the aesthetics (and a touch of whimsy) are paramount. However, on the “series level,” her work often references deeper themes from her life, such as rebellion, feminism, “otherness”, and the immigrant experience. Her work, however, is not overtly political. In her mind, her art generally reflects on boundaries, both real and imagined and blurs them.
Mathai was born in the UK to Indian parents but spent most of her childhood in the rural Deep South. She obtained a Bachelor of Arts from Rice University after graduating from the Louisiana School for Math, Science, and Arts, then went to medical school, and eventually law school, later practicing as an entertainment lawyer. Since pursuing her art professionally, her work has been featured in international art magazines and exhibited nationwide. In her other time, she writes lyrics and screenplays, enjoys nature with her Australian Shepherd, and Cowboy, and tests jokes on friends and family.
I create sculptural and textured works that use color, light, texture, and shadow to tell my story, and frequently work with plaster, textile, and metal. I want to create things that hold some sort of strange magic. It’s why I like to experiment with new methods and create works that interact with their viewers and the light around them, jumping out of the canvas to mingle art and enjoyment, to transcend viewing into experiencing. I feel that the aesthetic (and a touch of whimsy) is paramount, though on the “series level,” my works sometimes reference deeper themes from my life, including those of rebellion, feminism, and the immigrant experience. My work is not overtly political, and it would be unlike me to have one meaning for any single work—in fact, the exploration of dualities and the blurring of them is conceptually central to most of my art. Even in my poetic writing, I find beauty in the multiplicity and ambiguity of meaning. So, I prefer to avoid prescribing meaning to each work and let the viewer interact with it themselves, adding to the art with their own interpretation. It’s a sort of acceptance of all meanings: each one is true as it applies to you—I call it my “quantum art” philosophy. All that being said, in my mind, my work generally reflects on boundaries, both real and imagined, and blurs them.
Singapore Line & Shape
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.
Sirens
Paul Pinzarrone studied classical piano, biology, and chemistry. He explored playing the keyboard in various rock & roll bands, playing piano for musicals, singers, and dancers, and also worked as an orderly in a trauma center emergency room and surgery. He studied art history and painting at the University of Illinois, earning a BFA in Painting with Highest Honors. Graduate work was done in painting and drawing at Northern Illinois University and the University of Wisconsin.
Paul taught drawing and design at Rockford and Rock Valley Colleges and exhibited at juried contests and galleries in Chicago, Miami, Louisville, Muskegon MI, Ohio, and New Orleans. Exhibitions include the Art Institute Biennial, Butler Institute of American Art, Gilman Gallery, Horwich Gallery, Union League Juried, and Zhou B Art Center [Chicago].
Earlier work included photography, acrylic, and airbrushed lacquer constructions on Plexiglas. Matching the process to the imagery, Pinzarrone pushed the science-fiction look of spraying bronzing powders with acrylic lacquers for an inaccessible, reflective presentation. Film photography transitioned to digital and airbrush turned into an electronic version with Photoshop and other painting methods. To be “art”, Pinzarrone contends that it must be a new…. new version of a Vermeer or Michelangelo or Titian using digital photos, photoshop, and fractal software, printed on Plexiglas or aluminum. It must have a new look, using new materials, presenting a new approach to how great masters saw life.
Current work includes numerous texture-free digital layers, photographic manipulation, and a high gloss machined-looking flat piece. The viewer tries to solve puzzles of why the figures are emotionless and passive, all expressions have been wiped away with most wrinkles and blemishes. The figure’s skin is Pinzarrone’s canvas now, drawing from Titian and other master themes and poses. Tensions are explored to pull the viewer to wonder if it is a photograph or a fabricated reality. Craftsmanship counts.
This work is a study of how nature and power rhyme. It is a study of candy-colored puzzles displayed on high gloss aluminum or plexiglass and metallic paper. The viewer is drawn in to feel comforted yet disturbed, pulled towards the work but paused at the detachment. All are invited in to play and explore…. and wonder if these are mirrors, this science fiction, some other-worldly situation, or nightly dreams.
Process Remark:
This work is digital…. I use Flame and Amber software, fractal software for patterns, painting software for digital airbrush & air erasure, and digital photography to show you my world. Images are built up using transparent layers. After they are compressed, I wrap them around figures and build up additional transparent layers. The figure skin is my canvas presented as though photographs of tattoos, painted figures, or something else. Darker pieces are printed on high gloss aluminum while higher color work is printed on metallic film and bonded to the reverse side of clear plexiglass.
Sita Ram Wedding
Nupur Nishith is a USA-based, award-winning artist inspired by Mithila or Madhubani paintings. Roots in Darbhanga-Madhubani, like any Maithil girl, Nupur inherited Mithila Art from her Mother, Dr Mridula Prakash, the first PhD in History of Mithila Painting. She did an MBA and pursued a career in Marketing and Banking with Bank of Baroda. Relocated to the US when her husband was transferred to the New York office in 2011. She rediscovered her art and developed her unique and distinct style in the contemporary art world with a traditional art form, using varied themes and tools. Works on various surfaces ranging from Paper, Canvas, Glass, Clay, Ceramic, Wood, Aluminum, Murals on walls, ceilings, and floors, and installations to Digital tools and software. Her painting Dheeya was awarded by a jury from the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), NY. Her art has featured in United Nations, Consulate General Of India, NY, Disney family house, Dr Harvey Manes, Nassau County Museum of Art, NY, Asian Art Museum, SFO, CA, Gracie Mansion, New York Mayor Residence, CBS Sunday Morning News, ABC7 News, News12 NY, Huffington Post, Daily California, Indian National Award winning movie Mithila Makhaan among others. With more than 60 exhibitions in the US, she has 8 Solo exhibitions and around 6 Curatorial ventures. Art Ambassador to share dias as a Speaker for Art and Culture of Bihar with Hon. Consulate General of India, NY, and Emmy Nominated Host to some of the internationally acclaimed people, International Mithila Mahila Summit, Nupur is a great advocate of Mithila Art and Culture globally. Nupur actively supports other Artists as one of the leaders in various art organizations, including former Vice President, Pro Arts, the leading art group in New Jersey. She is the founder of Creative Mithila, which intends to promote Mithila Art globally.
I practice art inspired by Mithila or Madhubani folk art from India. I paint on canvas, paper, cloth, wood, ceramic, terracotta, glass, aluminum, along with murals on walls, ceilings, floors, and 3D installations. Even digital paintings for an even wider reach. I have evolved a unique style of art with an amalgamation of traditional motifs of ancient folk art with modern contemporary themes and tools with global appeal.
Mithila Artform is famous for the details in the paintings in a flat two-dimensional perspective with no shading or overlapping. Taking it to the next level, I draw inspiration for my art from my experience and surroundings. I visualize objects and situations in perspective to create the symbolic motifs and designs that make my art unique and distinct. Mithila paintings use natural and bright colors with symbolic distinct features, which I never hesitate to experiment with while conserving the essence of the art form. While a set of my paintings is inspired by the colors in the artform, mostly primary colors, the other set is mostly black and white or subtle use of a few colors in line work, also inspired by the artform. Paints range from various contemporary commercial paints to natural vegetable paints used with brush or dip nibs. I like to work mostly freehand without using any stencils or pattern tools on my projects.
I have learned through observation and everyday experiments. During research and production, new areas of interest arise and lead to the next body of work. So, every piece that I create has a story to tell based on the research and its process of development