It’s not just about winning; plenty of Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize finalists have also enjoyed a boost to their careers!

Each year, the Editor-in-Chief of Beautiful Bizarre Magazine and the team review all entries submitted to the Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize. From here, 140 entries are short-listed as Finalists [25 per Award category: Digital Art, Photography, Sculpture; 50 from the Traditional Art Award category; and 15 from the Emerging Art Award category]. The esteemed Jury Panel, which changes each year, then reviews each Finalist’s work and practice, and casts their vote. From these votes the Winners in each Award category and the overall Grand Prize Winner are selected.

As well as being celebrated on our social media and website, the Finalists are also automatically entered to win the People’s Choice Award. This is the chance for you, our amazing community, to have YOUR say, and vote for the work that you feel deserves to win this prestigious Award.

Many entries and of course the Finalists’ works are shared on the Beautiful Bizarre Magazine socials and website over the year – so don’t miss your opportunity to get your work in front of our Editor-in-Chief and see it shared with our 1 million + social media community – enter today!

$50,000 USD in Cash & Prizes to be won in the 2023 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize + plus receive global exposure for your practice!

Previous Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize Finalists have shared their progress stories with us, and we want to celebrate these achievements. So why not take a few minutes out to discover what some of the 2022 Finalists have been up to since last year’s event.

Psyche Ophiuchus

“The visibility of my work has increased significantly and my art prints have been very well received. I won first prize in the Julia Margaret Cameron Alternative Process Competition and my work has been exhibited in Barcelona, Spain.

Finally, I had the great honor of being published by Taschen in their book: “Witchcraft. The Library of Esoterica”. So, I thank you warmly!”

Ksenia Buridanova

“Since becoming a finalist, my life has undergone a wonderful transformation! Projections of my paintings have been displayed in London and Belgium, and I have had the opportunity to collaborate with many talented artists, including Val Kilmer, Laurence Fuller, Jeremy Lipking, Henrik Uldalen, and Tania Rivilis. Additionally, most of my physical paintings have been sold. I am currently preparing for a solo exhibition, which is very exciting.”

David Seeley

“Having had two pieces selected as finalists definitely lit a personal and professional fire under my transition from commercial art to making paintings. “Ronin” was a Digital Art category finalist. It was for a game studio and was featured in Spectrum Fantastic Art, and is more in-line with where my career has been in prior decades. “Ronin” has brought me several new illustration clients. 

“Transcendent Chris” was a finalist in the Traditional Art category, and is a great example of where my art spirit is focused in recent years with gallery figure works. Both successes with the Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize created great social media buzz and a ripple effect of exposure.

I know that this contributed to the success of my solo show at Abend Gallery, and I also exhibited at the annual IX Arts show in Reading, PA, where Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize finalist congratulations were non-stop.

“Transcendent Chris” created a great response within the LGBTQ community and was exhibited at the Bowersock Gallery’s Modern Male Show, and then at the Boston International Fine Arts Show, along with several others from me. I exhibited several more paintings from my “Transcendent” series at the Boskone Art Show last month, where I won the Best of Show. I already have many new pieces I’ll enter in this year’s competition, but there are several more I hope to finish in time to include. Thanks a ton for your commitment to art and artists!“

Virginie Gribouilli

“Since my sculpture, “Neehiba”, was selected as a finalist for the Yasha Young Projects Sculpture Award 2022, I have gained a lot of visibility on social media. I have more than doubled my number of followers on Instagram, and I have had a huge wave of support from people who were already following me and who have been supporting me throughout this year. This has allowed me to reach an audience from all over the world, and additionally, to sell works abroad.

I have also had another sculpture selected to be published in the 40th issue of the Beautiful Bizarre magazine. This is a great honor for me as someone who is just starting my artistic career!”

Dani Summ Art

“Since being a finalist last year, I have been contacted by companies like Collectionzz and Bottleneck Gallery, both out of New York. Through them, I was honored enough to create a venue poster for the Smashing Pumpkins 2022 tour, and to create a Lord of the Rings art print. I’ve enjoyed both immensely, and hope that this opens more doors for further freelance work. My piece being featured by Beautiful Bizarre has been invaluable, so thank you so much!!”

Olivia Jane

“Of course there was the initial shock of the news; I was so close to not submitting my work last year, but decided to in the last minutes before midnight. I cried a lot, happy tears of course, it’s very validating to be recognized by such an international publication as Beautiful Bizarre, and no doubt a long time dream of mine. The artist journey is a hard one, so these moments of recognition do make the tough times feel worthwhile.

Life since becoming a Beautiful Bizarre finalist has been full and deep.

I was also pleased that it was my painting of Alok Vaid Menon that was chosen. This painting took me 15 months to complete, and it’s important for trans and non-binary people to have representation and visibility, especially today when so many anti trans bills are being proposed. Since the art prize, I have had a couple of shows. The first in the Santa Fe Plaza with FaraHNheight Fine Art and then at the Surreal Salon in Baton Rouge.

I’m most excited however that the custom frame built for “Saint Alok” is finally finished. This piece is now complete and available to travel on. It’s my dream for this painting to end up in a collection where it can be seen by many trans and non-binary people, a reminder that each one of us is divine.”

Patrick Bergsma

“Last year I had the honour of being chosen as one of the finalists of the Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize 2022. Since then, the exposure on social media has led to a significant increase of followers on my Instagram account and overall, this year has been very good and busy for me, and I am very grateful to Beautiful Bizarre for this! My growth includes an increasing amount of sales coming from international collectors who bought directly from me. Additionally, I exhibited in the show “Content/Craftsmanship” in January with Duane Reed Gallery in St. Louis, and “This is the age of Destruction” with Franzis Engels Gallery in Amsterdam in February 2023. 

At the moment, I am doing the finishing touches on my work for the upcoming show “Bold II” at MUGA Museum in Heerenveen, Holland. In March, my Gallery Duane Reed will show my work at the Palm Beach Modern and Contemporary and in April at the Art Market San Francisco. Again, thank you Beautiful Bizarre!”

2023 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize

Sinisha Kashawelski

“The time after becoming one of the Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize finalists brought some subtle changes in the understanding of my inner world. This subsequently influenced my new phase that I was preparing to flow into for a longer period of time. It was a switch that created a few pieces that resonated well with the audience around the world, bringing invitations to participate in exhibitions in Paris, Jakarta, Barcelona… Salute, Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.”

Leigh Schneider

Since being a finalist in the Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize 2022, I’ve participated in multiple exhibitions – of which one was my debut solo show. I’ve sold my art, and had press, publications and speaking engagements. Overall, I was able to build a solid foundation as an emerging artist. Thanks so much!

Roxy Peroxyde

“Since I made it into the Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize as a finalist, I exhibited at the Scope art show in Miami Beach, in Louisiana for several group shows, and in Toronto for Art Toronto art fair. Additionally, I am currently working on a solo exhibition (August) with Station 16 gallery in Montreal where I’m currently based. 

I have several group shows lined up for 2023 and I’m looking forward to seeing what 2023 will bring to the table. Beautiful Bizarre Magazine is one of my favourite art magazines and making it into the finals was a huge stepping stone in my career. I’m extremely grateful for the support and visibility it has brought me. I also have an editorial coming in the 10th Anniversary, June 2023 issue of Beautiful Bizarre Magazine!”

Julia Agnes

This past year has been a productive one! I’ve been able to scale back on freelance work and dive further into my art practice in a more full time capacity.

My work was selected for two group exhibitions in Munich, at the Støerpunkt Gallery. I’m also continuing to be represented by the Arta Gallery in Toronto Canada.

I had the wonderful surprise to find out that my work was reviewed internationally in an article for Info Mag, and urban subculture magazine, and did an interview with Monolith Volume magazine. I was also blown away to be invited to do a podcast interview with Polymer Week which came out a few days ago, and to do a live Q&A with them, just this February, which was a fantastic and humbling experience.

My work will be published in The Story of Fashion a magazine that showcases Canadian artists, designers, and creators this summer/fall. It’s all been very exciting and surprising to see how much my grannies have been moving and shaking. I’m also very excited to show some new pieces in the coming months!

Alex Peter Idoko (Winner of the People’s Choice Award, as voted for by the public out of all of the 2022 Finalists)

“The Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize has been a major stepping stone in the advancement of my career. I’ve had a major of my pieces go viral on Instagram, Facebook like ISOKEN, getting up to 12 million views. I earned an ambassadorial deal with Severt-Ab, a Swedish company that manufactures burners for my work. Entering the Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize earned me more visibility in the public. That has brought more collectors and aided me in the propagation and communication of my art and its technique.”

Interested in joining the Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize Hall of Fame?

US$50,000 in cash and prizes to be won

2023 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize

The post 2022 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize Finalists share their success stories appeared first on Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.

In these troubled times of pandemic, wars, climate change-induced disasters and runaway inflation, we all need something to lift our spirits and lighten our hearts. Let me introduce you then, to the perfect panacea for what is occurring in the world today, the uplifting and joyful works of the Grand Prize winner of the 2022 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize, painter Kristin Kwan of Lincoln, Nebraska, USA.

Although suffering her own personal travails – in addition to the seemingly endless dumpster fire we are served up in the nightly news bulletins – Kristin has managed to bring us all to a happier place. A place where we can just be in the moment, appreciating the beauty of her quirky oil on panel artworks, reading our own story into the surrealism and symbolism therein, and emerge feeling that although the darkness can sometimes feel overwhelming, there is still light, beauty, and delight to be found. Reducing the tempest that surrounds us, if even just for a while, into a storm in a teacup – or a bathtub!

Although only exhibiting since 2019 (can we even count the ‘lost years’ of 2020-21?) Kristin has rapidly gained a devoted following online, participated in many group shows, and held her first solo shows – with many more to come. Although her skill and technique with oils is clearly evident, it is the themes of her work, an elegant mix of fable, fairy tale, and the beauty of nature – with a healthy dash of Lewis Carroll added for good measure – that makes her work irresistible to the viewer. Kristin’s art takes us away from where we are to a place where we would far rather be.

Yes, art can be powerful, can make arresting and important statements on the world as it is and how we must struggle to make it as it should be. But, equally, art can bring us respite, allow us to breathe and experience that sometimes most elusive of emotions – joy.

My goal is to keep moving towards fearlessness.

Exclusive Interview with Kristin Kwan

Congratulations on being selected as the Grand Prize Winner of the 2022 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize Kristin! There is no doubt that 2022 has seen the strongest field ever in our art prize, with more amazing entries than ever before from emerging, mid-career, and internationally renowned artists. How did you feel when you learned that you had won, and what do you hope that your win means for your practice?

Thank you so much! I have to say when I found out I had won I was just floored, absolutely speechless. I may have had a little cry. Starting out as an artist can be a real financial puzzle. It’s next to impossible to have the time and resources without some kind of outside help, and this coming now means yes, keep going, I can keep building my career as I’d hoped and dreamed.

Please tell us about the work you submitted to the art prize, “The Golden Afternoon”. What were your thoughts and inspiration while creating this painting, and why you selected this work in particular for your entry?

I liked the idea of this ludicrously large sun behind someone, a bit flat like a Byzantine icon, but painted somewhat realistically. As with most of the things I make, the initial image doesn’t have any kind of “narrative” meaning to begin with. I think I really liked the idea of painting a giant sun more than anything! But as I paint, I live alongside the painting for months, sometimes years, and a meaning always seems to grow, I think normally a private web of meanings more than a story, per se.

This painting, and the other paintings, I was making at the time were fed with the pain and anxiety of my personal life crumbling, my marriage ending and everything that felt solid and dependable felt like it had vanished, I felt very at sea. And yet through this kind of haze of pain there is still this hum of joy in the world, harder to access sometimes, but there nonetheless just throbbing away underneath it all, inextinguishable.

It’s easy to get stuck in your head with all the fears of failure and vulnerability that come with creating art.

And the process for creating the golden afternoon, from conception to finished work?

I’d made a thumbnail sketch a year or so ago with the idea of painting a figure beneath a giant sun. I’d originally had the figure laying down, but I had another thumbnail of a girl eating a honeycomb with bees flying around her which I wanted to paint, and they seemed to work well as a single piece, so I combined them. I fiddled around with a couple of thumbnail sketches until I got one that felt right, usually something seems to just settle into place and you think, “Hmm, that feels good.”

Then I made a more finished sketch to work out the details. I like working this way, because I feel like when I paint I’m already having to make so many on the fly decisions about colour and paint consistency, technical stuff. I don’t feel like thinking about the image itself, so I plan that beforehand. Then I blow up my finished sketch to the size of my panel, print it out, and transfer it with graphite paper.

I listened to and watched quite a few things while painting this piece, since it ate up a chunk of time being so large. It’s funny, the things I watch while painting get tangled into the picture for me, so that every time I look at the finished painting after, the other thing will come into my mind unbidden. This piece makes me hear the Succession theme, Age of Adz in the weeds, Terence McKenna’s voice in the honeycomb, and a few other odds and ends that I realise only have meaning for me, but are brought back with strange clarity when I look at it.

Could you tell us more about your background as an artist, how your upbringing and family influenced you?

I grew up drawing from the time I was a toddler. My parents were always incredibly encouraging of my dream to become a professional artist. My family moved around a lot, I was home-schooled and allowed to work very independently, so I’d say I had a fairly unconventional upbringing. I spent many days finishing school early, then taking off to wander in the woods or the desert or a field behind our house.

It was wonderful but I also think it may have ruined me for a normal career. I am pitiful with schedules. We also went to the library a lot. It was always one of the first things we had to do when we moved to a new town, get our library cards, that’s how you know you’re home. I’d always check out whatever art books they had. There was a library that had a collection of books of the work of Robert Bateman, a Canadian wildlife artist. I remember reading how he loved the work of Andrew Wyeth, that underneath the subject matter of the painting the abstract bones of it would exist first, and have to be something beautiful independently. I thought it was interesting, how his subject matter was almost like a secondary medium to the paint itself, something to use as well. Instead of just painting a bird, he was making a piece of art, using the bird as a shape, a colour, a line. It stuck with me.

Did you have any formal education in the arts? If so, how do you think that helped you become the artist you are today, and how have you continued to develop your skills and techniques since?

I went to Union College in Nebraska and got a bachelor’s degree in studio art. It’s a liberal arts college, not an art school, so I had the good fortune to be required to take a wide variety of classes. I also had the luck to have a student job that required very little other than sitting at a desk and once in a while answering a phone.

I read a lot of books during that time, I always had a stack from the library, anything that caught my eye, often popular science books about physics or biology or math even. I think the best thing an artist can do is have a voracious and omnivorous mind, and feed it constantly.

When you graduate with a degree in studio art your career path can be a little murky, and it took many years to find my way to what I am currently doing. Over the last few years I’ve been trying to develop my work habit skills, and I think if you’re going to make an investment of mental energy that’s the place to do it. The one thing that has made the biggest difference for me to develop artistically is just to make more work, but I was really struggling to get more than a few paintings completed a year.

When I switched my goal from getting work done on a painting, to just starting to work with no outcome in mind, that’s when things seemed to shift for me. I’m a big believer in quantity over quality. If you want to develop a style or technique, just do it a LOT. And that’s really hard with art because it’s easy to get stuck in your head with all the fears of failure and vulnerability that come with creating art. So now my goal is, start, no need to do anything but start, but you have to start 10 times every day. Then you get really good at starting, which is by far the hardest part.

Was there a particular point in your life that you realised that a career as an artist was your dream, and that you could actually make that dream come true?

It was a dream from adolescence on, with varying degrees of optimism that it could work. I remember when I was starting college and everyone asking what I was going to be studying. I replied “art”. There were a lot of skeptical looks, but my parents never doubted it was something I could do so I felt (maybe a little blindly) confident.

But after college there were a lot of times I doubted my path even though it was the only thing I could really ever see doing. Sometime around 2007 or 2008, I’d gotten a hold of a couple issues of Juxtapoz, and began using the internet as well, so I started seeing this kind of art that made me feel really excited.

I’d started painting more for myself (I’d been doing illustration work) and it was around 2011 when I began to feel like this was something I had the ideas and drive to do full time. I had my daughter shortly after and art became a bit of a hobby for awhile, but I came back to it more intensively once she started kindergarten in 2016.

While your works have stylistically classical influences, you also personalise them by applying surrealistic themes and extensive use of symbolism. What do you hope to convey with the symbolism present in your works?

The symbolism I use tends to be very personal and open ended. I shy away from using my paintings as direct narratives or vehicles for a message. They are more like collections of personal feelings presented visually. I find it extremely satisfying when people are able to overlay their own stories and meanings on a piece. Even for me, the image usually starts out almost devoid of “meaning” other than the shapes and colours themselves. As I work on it meanings start to grow in my mind, but they come after the image is set.

I like to think of a painting as some kind of communal scaffold or trellis that meaning can grow on, my own alongside viewers, and hopefully the image is enticing enough to pull a viewer in and coax them to feel their own meaning into and out of the image. That’s part of why I really love traditional western painting subjects, often from myths.

I think the fact they’ve been used over and over by so many different artists gives them a lot of layered references that are able to be pulled on if you know the story and the work. Or they can just be a visually interesting starting point for a piece, devoid of any backstory.

You are relatively early in your career as an artist, only showing since 2019. How has your art evolved in that time, and how do you see it continuing to evolve?

That’s right, I participated in Suggestivism at Nucleus Portland, curated by Nathan Spoor,
in 2019, my first group show. With painting more and more over the last few years, I feel like my technical ability slowly continues to develop so that I’m better able to make what
I have in mind going into a new piece. There’s often something that I will feel intimidated to paint, knowing I don’t quite have the skill to pull it off how I’d like to. There is always a bit of a dance between making something you know you can, and pushing beyond your skill level and failing and possibly scrapping a piece.

It feels a bit like with each new painting I learn a new little trick to keep up my sleeve. I’d like to be able to work faster because I have so many ideas for paintings, and I don’t know how I’m going to ever get them all painted – ha! My goal is to keep moving towards fearlessness in what I make, that I’m not ever censoring myself, or making something to show off or pander. I think good art comes from following your gut, even if it feels a bit over the top, or corny, or odd.

And to the future! Do you have any longer term artistic dreams that you wish to pursue?

My plan all along has been to paint some thing that makes me feel really excited to be painting it. That’s my long term for now, haha. I’m always convinced that the next painting will be the best one, and I suppose that positive delusion keeps things joyful.

Kristin Kwan Social Media Accounts

Website | Facebook | Instagram

The post Kristin Kwan: An Ode to Joy appeared first on Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.

The overlap of blackness, art and nature is one that is explored in Juliet Nneka’s world. The artist uses digital mediums to create highly dramatic portraits of women who look like her, set in places that only seem to exist in another world. The Netherlands-based artist of Nigerian descent offers a refreshing approach to portraiture where women seem to be one with the fictional world they inhabit.

Portraiture or self-portraiture are one of the oldest forms of art expression. It stems from a desire for humans to see themselves or others in more detailed or particular ways. Whether it is through the depth of a gaze, the curve of a nose or the fullness of a lip. Indeed, humans seek to render physical characteristics through materials in an attempt to transcend flesh and blood.

Indeed, Juliet Nneka brings a certain refinement to digital art. A sort of unique tapestry of colors and movement that sublimes realism by making it into something more profound. There is depth in the gaze of the women she creates. There is harmony between flora and femmes, stuck in a perpetual dance. An aesthetic feast, a ritual of some sort. Whether Juliet Nneka, chooses to be literal or phantasmagorical, there is still an undeniable charm about the way she chooses to depict the world.

Thanks to the artist, black femmes can be seen and perceived as dramatic heroines which existence can be romanticized and their beauty, revered. A necessary homage to women that navigate a world that isn’t always welcoming of them and whose beauty goes still largely unnoticed.

The artist was featured in Beautiful Bizarre Magazine’s 14th curated exhibition, Halcyon Days, last November. And she gracefully accepted to answer our questions.

We can create our own unique visual language by observing reality!

When did Juliet Nneka’s love for sketching first emerge? Is it a lifelong passion or something you found out about yourself later in life?

As a child, I spent evenings in my parents’ gardens, shifting through leaves and taking the flowers apart. Hibiscus pistils and stamens had a cryptic, alien disposition when observed together up close. Orchid petals postured like faces. All I did was try to understand the beauty I found in the gardens – to capture them on paper so that I could live in those moments forever. Sketching was a love of mine that blossomed quite naturally from childhood.

How important is realism to Juliet Nneka as an artist?

Very. Realism is the resting place where we find a bearing to grab onto; we warp, shape, and deconstruct our inputs, creating our own narratives through a personalized visual language. Nothing in art is without meaning, and meaning is based on personal semantics. The orchids I replicated with graphite as a child find their way into my work today, but through a love of organic floral surrealisms: free flowing, twisted stems. Pinks and purples and iridescent greens. We can create our own unique visual language by observing reality!

Your artworks two years ago had a slightly different color palette than your most recent works (warmer tones, a strong presence of green with blue undertones in 2020 versus tamer tones and pink-ish nuances in 2022). What inspires you to experiment this way?

On pink, I really think I was just afraid of being too feminine. I stopped caring somewhere down the line, and it became one of my favourite colours to use in paintings – just after green. I think my colour palette mellowed out because I realised what colours I really enjoyed, and it all just became a little more curated. My style just matured, and will continue to evolve as my psychology changes over the years.

I learned about Hollywood and eurocentric beauty standards at some point – even tried to portray them. But they felt less like home, so I just made blackness my own staple.

The women you, Juliet Nneka, draw have eyes that look almost unreal, like small colorful whirlwinds that hold special powers… Is it intentional?

Not really, but mystique is a trait I quite enjoy. I love to transport people to a different time and place. I love things – and people – that seem alien and cryptic. It’s not intentional that you end up picking that up through the gaze, but the idea of the exploration of a surreal presence is something that I have always been taken with.

You seem to make it a point to draw black woman in dreamlike setting… does it stem from a desire for you to generate representation for black beauty in art?

I grew up in Lagos, Nigeria. Everyone around me was black. Like with realism, this is the reference point that shaped my own narrative. Of course, I learned about Hollywood and eurocentric beauty standards at some point – even tried to portray them. But they felt less like home, so I just made blackness my own staple. Because of the history of the west, there’s this subconscious misconception that it is an act of protest to just exist as a black woman. I fight for my people in other ways, but in my art I’m just being who I am. I am happy that it inspires others.

Digital art can be a misunderstood art form at times, have you ever encountered people who didn’t take your art seriously?

I was trained on traditional mediums through high school, and I do have a great deal of admiration for the traditional arts. But I think that the one gripe people have with digital art today is that it is inherently less ‘human’, because we create and interact with it primarily through the existence of a technosphere.

I do get the occasional comment about how my work is easier because it’s made on a screen, but they generally don’t bother me, and I don’t think that is true. Because although an infallible technique can be fascinating, it’s no longer about the ‘ease’ of creating art. It’s more about the question that many people are afraid to ask: who are you as an artist, and where are you going?

Through my mind’s eye, there exists a character that is a constantly wavering, dichotomous force. Always inquiring, and conjured up out of greens and purples.

Do you think digital art is on its way to becoming an elevated art form in the art world?

Yes. We are finding ways to create new, immersive experiences, different from the traditional space where a 2D piece is mounted on a wall. On a global scale, we already consume artwork through the digital domain all the time, and it is one of the most flexible mediums for storytelling.

There are people underground creating incredible work, and spaces for new media are emerging every year. It isn’t enough to say that cryptographic artifacts are becoming indistinguishable from their traditional counterparts in the contemporary art space. They will become the contemporary art space. Every traditional work has a digital counterpart in some form… of course, unless the point of the work is to be digitally untraceable. That would be interesting to think about, wouldn’t it?

Does your work as a model influence your art? Would you ever consider mixing the two for a specific project? Or even working with fashion collaborators on a design project?

Through my mind’s eye, there exists a character that is a constantly wavering, dichotomous force. Always inquiring, and conjured up out of greens and purples. But they are not quite me. Or perhaps they would be, if I were not stuck within the matrix of today’s time and place. When I pose for my own painting, this alter-ego is who I try to connect with.

In a way, you could indeed say that a lot of my practice is a collaboration between artist and muse, where they are the same person. As Juliet Nneka the model, it’s hard sometimes to connect to someone else’s world when I’m really still exploring mine. But I think that if I’m able to build the right bridge with the right person, I could rightfully live in the world of another designer.

Can you walk us through your artistic process for a typical piece?

I first gather my references if I need them: personal photographs, dendritic images and sculptural derivatives. Paintings and works by current inspirations, such as James Jean and Iris Van Herpen. A new addition I have been exploring is the use of DALL-E to create botanical abstractions to add to my mood boards, but not necessarily to directly reference.

For the central figures, I pose if necessary. Then I build a composition, which actually involves a lot of initial collaging and a grayscale underpainting if the piece I’m envisioning is complex. But once the sketch is complete, I don’t usually make a lot of changes from then. I just paint, and play with textures, light, and my favourite colours.

Would you ever consider working in animation?

I’ve recently become intrigued with this idea that I can bring a painting to life by making it move through via AI animation – that is one thing that I certainly see myself exploring, especially as more AI tools become available.

Why did you enter the Beautiful Bizarre Magazine Art Prize?

I saw that artists I admired had also been involved with the Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize, at some point, either as finalists, honorable mentions or winners. I also have been following the magazine for some time. My style sort of aligns with the themes, so I decided it couldn’t hurt to apply – I just wanted to get my work in front of new eyes.

What do you feel you have gained from this experience?

I am more confident in the digital medium! And I am grateful for new connections and the opportunity to participate in the gallery exhibition among so many brilliant contemporary artists.

Would you recommend it and encourage others to enter? If so, why?

Yes! Especially digital artists. I was able to discover so many amazing artists through the prize, and it also helps to get people to see your work. The connection created between yourself as an artist and the magazine is valuable.

Juliet Nneka Social Media Accounts

Website | Instagram | Twitter | Foundation

The post Juliet Nneka and Her Black Nymphs: A 10-Question Interview appeared first on Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.

Jet black hair cascades like a waterfall down the women’s shoulders. Strands of her long locks trickle down twirling into delicate curls to meet the folds of her creamy white dress. Lustrous pearls decorate her shoulders framing her slender figure. There is an air of mystery about her as her soft eyes meet the gaze of a small fantastical creature wrapped around her wrist. The creature looks back at her with curiosity, its two winged friends framing her other arm with gleeful and equally curious expressions. Their bodies intertwine as the creatures find peace and comfort within the delicate caress of this ethereal beauty. Envelop yourself in the mysterious yet tranquil atmosphere of Kremena Chipilova’s “Her Shadows Caress Me”.

To me this painting is about the emotions and feelings it can invoke, in addition to “just” aesthetic value. It is about memory, acceptance and serenity.

Kremena Chipilova has mastered the art of fantasy and magical realism within her oil paintings. Each piece of work she creates possesses a soft, feminine sweetness that is complimented with a darker, more haunting magical quality. Her paintings are heavily influenced by her love of nature, fairy tales and her own personal life experiences which when combined together showcase the magical realm she has built for herself as an artist.

The Bulgarian artist has had her fair share of experience in the creative field over the years and has dipped her toes into a number of artistic endeavors. Such endeavors include working as a caricaturist, designing book covers for self-published authors as well as working in the gaming and publishing industry with companies such as Kobold Press, Dragon Phoenix Games and Paizo Inc.

However, while Kremena has explored many different avenues, her most current venture, a journey which she began in 2020, is that of the fine artist. Two years later, in 2022, Kremena found herself submitting one of her paintings titled “Her Shadows Caress Me” to the annual Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize where she would go on to become the second prize winner for the RAYMAR Traditional Art Award.

Exclusive Interview With Kremena Chipilova

A huge congratulations to you in your success in the Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize! To start this interview off, I’d love to hear more about “Her Shadows Caress Me”.  What was the initial inspiration for this piece?

Thank you! As with most of my paintings, the initial inspiration came while I was sketching little thumbnails in a sketchbook. I think it started off as a random idea – it was not inspired by a specific event or concept, but symbols, meanings and little stories about it started piling in while I was working on it. When I had something that I liked enough, I continued to develop it further to an actual painting.

How did you decide that this was the piece you wanted to submit for the Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize?

It was the painting of mine that I liked best at the time, from the last body of work I had made. So, I hoped it would have the best chance of getting ahead.

What was the process for creating “Her Shadows Caress Me” like? Did you find yourself facing any challenges when working on this piece?

Strangely, this was probably one of the easiest pieces I made that year. It flowed through different stages very easily. I first made a thumbnail with the basic elements like the pose that I wanted, how I wanted the hair to fall and I knew it would be a relatively simple composition with a figure in front of simple background.

I had made this photo of a gloomy field at dusk and the colour and mood it had just fit perfectly with what I wanted in the painting, so the background was surprisingly easy that way. Then I took photos of myself trying to capture the body language and expression from the thumbnail as closely as I could. And then I made the final sketch in which I explored the details like creatures and dress design, and interpreted the photos and thumbnail to the finish I wanted.

As I said earlier, the colours for the background came from the photo, and from the beginning, I knew that her hair would be black, and her dress white. That is also why I chose the muted colour scheme for the creatures instead of something bright and vibrant.

Hair is definitely something I enjoy painting very much, but it could also be symbolic in the sense that I interpret such long hair as a trait that makes the character and the painting overall more romantic.

I know your work is heavily inspired by fairy tales, myths and legends, which stories do you particularly enjoy and take inspiration from?

I think, from the beginning, it was mainly fairy tales and legends, even when I was younger, and nowadays I still tend to read a lot of fiction works – fantasy, sci-fi, classics and mystery novels, and poems, and a little horror. While I paint, I tend to listen to crime/mystery/thriller/detective books, which often have a similar feel in many ways.

On the topic of inspiration, who are some of the artists who have inspired you and your work?

It is difficult to narrow down to just a few, but maybe some of those I follow on Instagram. Maybe (in no particular order, and definitely not an exhaustive list) Van Gogh, Kay Nielsen, Harry Clarke, Edmund Dulac, Angela Barrett, Ivan Bilibin, Virginia Frances Sterrett, Olga and Andrei Dugin, Kinuko Y. Craft, Michael Parks, Marc Burckhardt, Aron Wiesenfeld. I love the Golden Age of Illustration, the Symbolism art movement, the Pre-Raphaelite, Botticelli and the entire Renaissance; there are so many and they change over time, and they are so different from each other, that usually I don’t know who inspired or inspires me the most.

I love the small creatures featured in “Her Shadows Caress Me”. They are so sweet and have such character to them. Upon closer inspection, they appear to be a hybrid of birds, dragons and serpents. How would you describe these adorable little creatures? Do they have names?

While I was planning the painting, I knew that the female figure would be some kind of otherworldly being and I decided to emphasize that by having the creatures around her be otherworldly too. So, I had to think of them as fantastical creatures, but I did not want them to be well-known ones like, say, dragons. So, I mixed several things that combined well in my mind. I wanted them to be a little different from each other so they have different heads, but I also wanted the interaction between them to be natural and intimate, so they could not be too dissimilar.

Overall, the moment that I wanted to capture is one of peace and serenity, of a gentle reunion with a tinge of nostalgia, a little bit of sadness, a little bit of mystery. While painting, the relationships between them changed a few times and in the end, especially when the painting’s name came into my mind, I decided that they would be the “shadows” (while “her” in the title is left open). So, that is one way of interpreting them and the title.

Long, flowing, wavy locks are a signature theme in your artwork, is hair a symbolic theme in your paintings or is it simply something you enjoy painting?

Hair is definitely something I enjoy painting very much, but it could also be symbolic in the sense that I interpret such long hair as a trait that makes the character and the painting overall more romantic. I think it makes it look more like it happened “once upon a time” and adds an air of mystery to the painting.

I read that you like for people to be able to see and interpret your work however they like. However, if possible I’d love to know what “Her Shadows Caress Me” means to you as an individual?

To me this painting is about the emotions and feelings it can invoke, in addition to “just” aesthetic value. It is about memory, acceptance and serenity.

I read on your website that you enjoy reading books in your free time, what have you been reading lately? Any good books you can recommend?

I’m usually reading a few books at the same time. Just recently I discovered Karl Edward Wagner, and I am reading a compilation of short horror stories of his “Why Not You And I?”. Some of the stories in it are about the fears writers face, and so they can feel very relevant to other artists and creators too, I think. I find them very enjoyable and thought provoking. Before that, I read the first book of “The Fionavar Tapestry” trilogy by Guy Gavriel Kay and can’t wait to read the next two. These are the two authors I have discovered recently and whose writing I loved, and I want to read more of.

Overall, the moment that I wanted to capture is one of peace and serenity, of a gentle reunion with a tinge of nostalgia, a little bit of sadness, a little bit of mystery.

Alongside reading, you also love spending time in nature. Do you have a favourite place to visit and/or a favourite type of scenery you like to surround yourself with? E.g. forests, the mountains, the ocean, etc.

I would say forests and fields resonate most with me. I like the quiet such places can have. I find being in nature soothing and calming, and it can make me forget about the busy everyday life. For an introverted artist, this can be a very needed respite from civilization and people, a chance to slow down and recharge your brain. I like going for long hikes, which is also a great physical activity.

Finally, do you have any exciting projects or plans for 2023 that you can share with our readers?

I have a few group shows coming up this year in wonderful galleries that will feature lineups of amazing artists. You can check them out on my website where I list all my future and past exhibitions. At the moment, the list is:

• “Secret Longings“, group exhibition curated by Beautiful Bizarre magazine, at Corey Helford Gallery, Los Angeles, USA, March 2023
• “House of Many Tales”, group exhibition at WOW x WOW Gallery (online), April 2023
• “Memory Hive”, group exhibition at WOW x WOW Gallery (online), June 2023
• “Small Works 2023“, group exhibition at Beinart Gallery, Melbourne, Australia, September 2023
• “Serendipity“, group exhibition curated by Beautiful Bizarre magazine, at Haven Gallery, New York, USA, November 2023

Kremena Chipilova Social Media Accounts

Website | Instagram | Facebook

The post Shadows & Magic: An Interview With Kremena Chipilova appeared first on Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.

I was always an admirer of Hannah Flower’s creations on canvas, wood, and skin, moved by her delicacy, textures, and depth, my eyes eagerly following each curvature and contour in the cabinet of curiosities she summons. Talking to Hannah allowed me to taste all the ingredients of the visual delicacies she offers to us.

And truly, I can feel Hannah’s paintings under my skin, in my guts, and on my tongue.

Helena Aryal

The love for her work reaches much deeper than the first subcutaneous layer of my body: Hannah Flowers triggers all the viewers’ senses and travels from our brains to our hearts, causing a bizarre sensation in our guts with every brushstroke. Undoubtedly, Hannah’s challenging questions raised about what our society calls beauty and what is acceptable in the arts and for an artist to create, evoke feelings of enchantment, shock, appreciation and sometimes disgust – a rather exciting mixture one should experience looking at a piece of art at least once in their lifetime.

By turning one’s insides out, Hannah does not intend to shock for shock’s sake, it is much more her interest to explore the “well-known facet of the human psyche that negative experiences are remembered more vividly than pleasant ones. It seems to be a viable self-defense mechanism, the brain’s way of avoiding potentially threatening circumstances in the future”. Challenging the viewers and visually piercing the boundaries of their comfort zones results in criticism. But Hannah found her way to deal with this negativity: “In general, I react to berating humans in much the same way I react to barking dogs: Wait for my bones to stop shivering, then get on with the task at hand”.

As we stumble over more and more reasons to be enchanted, we discover an incredible depth and context to her creative practice. After realising the hard way that art degrees in Australia no longer taught any technical skills, she decided to pursue a different path to fulfil her desire to hone a real craft and use her hands to make beautiful things. Tattooing was Hannah’s first step to embracing a practice and exploring the possibilities of a medium. Naturally, Hannah reconnected to painting when she wanted to break the boundaries of skin and the requirements of working with clients and the human body, longing for a medium that allowed the artist to “play and experiment a lot more”.

Asking the artist about what inspires her to create such whimsical portraits and compositions, she explains that it is a personal relation to femininity, nature, and inanimate objects that intersect in her work. It is the feeling of connection that draws Hannah Flowers to her subjects: The identification with female characters, the passion “for buried treasures” and their different materialities next to each other in a meticulously constructed still life and the “beautiful woodland” that surrounds her become one reality in her rich compositions, full of intriguing textures and fine details.

No matter if your heart beats for portraiture, if delicate objects and symbolic still life arrangements tickle your pickle, or if you want to escape reality by entering pompous interiors and lush natural environments, Hannah Flowers has some magic to offer to everyone. But naturally, the artist looks at her work with a more critical eye.

Occasionally, I feel irritated with myself for drawing the same type of girl over and over, like a one-trick pony. But I love her too much to leave her behind. I think it’s one reason I’ve been dissecting them in recent work. Cutting them open and riffling through the innards to see if there’s anything deeper.

It is precisely this twist of challenging the well-known obvious and disrupting the candid surface that makes Hannah’s creations a beautiful, bizarre sensation of gore meets beauty. A blissful experience of the paradox – here we are, joyfully diving into the depths of these innards, exploring your “glistening, wet ambiguous shapes”, appreciating the beauty of the tragic, vulgar, and voluptuous.

Exclusive Interview with Hannah Flowers

Could you outline a small chronology of your career mentioning moments, people and spaces that inspired you to follow a creative practice?

Well, as a young and naive person wishing to pursue painting, I foolishly enrolled in a painting course at a university, thinking I might learn how to paint, haha. Of course, most people now know what an absurd notion that was. Uni felt like a lot of very confused people stumbling around in the dark spouting big words to validate poorly made pictures. Apparently the policy there was that learning any skills whatsoever could damage your ‘oh so delicate’ creativity – preposterous! And it was regularly repeated by students and teachers alike ‘it’s not what you know but who you know’- contemptible! I found the experience vaguely repulsive.

At that time I had no idea of the existence of ateliers or that there might still be people alive on earth that were interested in the type of art I wanted to make. I wanted to hone a craft. I wanted the visual arts to be just ‘visual.’ Not all these pompous blustering meaningless words. 

I dropped out of the course and turned my sights to tattooing. In this field, it’s only about what you know. The majority of people getting a tattoo, care about how well it’s going to be done rather than how big your name is. It was refreshing. Of course, it was a trying and difficult road to learn to tattoo, but I never had any doubts about it as I had had about the ‘art scene.’ It felt more gritty and pure. You get paid for the work done, not for your name. For 10 years, I put my head down and worked as hard as I could to become a better tattooed, and everything else fell by the wayside. 

Only in recent years, as I developed my tattoo designs further, have I found myself thinking ‘if only’ as I draw. If only I had longer to do this if only I had a flat still surface to work on if only finer details would hold in the skin. I realised I really needed to paint as well to be able to fulfil the ideas I’m having.  

So warily, yet hopefully, I’m dipping my toes back in the waters of fine art and finding small pockets of good people who seem interested in what I’m doing.

How does the medium dictate the content? There seem to be similarities between your tattoos and paintings, but there are also clear differences – how would you explain this?

The main things that dictate the content are time restraints, the shape of the canvas or body part, and what is going to hold in the skin. With tattoos, it’s very important to make what you do very legible so that it has room to spread and blur slightly over the years. That’s why my tattoos have more defined edges, and more contrast and are often simpler bolder designs than my paintings. One must also take into consideration that a good tattoo composition would flow nicely with the client’s musculature, which can be quite different from the flat rectangular compositions for painting. 

Painting is a far more malleable medium. You can fiddle around with it, paint over or change things where necessary, so I find myself playing and experimenting a lot more. But I do try to bring what I’ve learned from each medium to the other where possible. 

For example, I’ve tattooed for so long that my mind kind of works in tattoo ink colours. I often mix the colours I use in my tattoos on my paint pallet using 3 or 4 paint colours to achieve the same shades as the ink colours to which I’m accustomed. Conversely, painting has made it easier to envision things more sculpturally which has helped me make more effective tattoo designs. 

What do you love about each medium, also in comparison to each other?

Painting suits my natural inclinations. To spend long slow days alone, sipping coffee, contemplating and taking my time over each decision. To put whatever takes my fancy on the canvas without worrying if anyone else likes it. 

Tattooing is much faster-paced and much less comfortable (for everyone involved). But it’s very important to me. Tattooing has made me dredge the very bottoms of the barrel and pull out things that would probably have lain dormant forever. It’s often a requirement of the job to push myself far beyond what’s comfortable. When you have a client sitting in the chair, you don’t have the option to walk away if things aren’t going to plan.

You must solve the problem straight away at the moment, no matter how long you’ve been working or how exhausted you feel. It’s both more immediate with less time to think and more permanent and important than painting is.  You don’t have the option to put it away in a drawer and come back to the problem after you’ve slept on it like you can with painting. 

To push myself like this, to keep on concentrating beyond my natural limits has made me realise what I’m capable of when the need arises. 

I have some truly wonderful clients who I have great affection for and have learnt a lot from. I’ve been invited to meet and work with masters in the field from all over the world. I know I would never have met so many new and interesting people had I been left to my own introverted devices. It’s been a richly interesting, surprising and challenging ride. Luckily for me, I wasn’t able to make a living as a painter from the start.

What fascinates you about gore and “darker” subjects?

It is a well-known facet of the human psyche that negative experiences are remembered more vividly than pleasant ones. It seems to be a self-defense mechanism, the brain’s way of avoiding potentially threatening circumstances in the future. 

I suspect that could be why I find darker subjects more interesting and memorable. But really appreciation of beauty is my foremost reason to paint. 

I think of it like the layers of a cake; the icing might be the best part, but it would be sickly and unappealing by itself. To me, beauty is a bit like that, entrancing and divine, but almost too saccharine without a little viciousness or amusement to offset it and allow it to flourish.

There’s always a push and pull between opposing forces in painting. I’ve not found the perfect balance yet, but I find it to be an exciting idea to work towards. 

I also just love painting glistening, wet ambiguous shapes – so blood and guts are a great joy for me to paint. After I’ve sculpted the lusciously rounded innards, I lavish them with various glazes of yellowish bile and darkly cloying blood-like colours. When the paint is still wet and glistening with oil it really takes on the lineament of bodily fluids. It’s a lovely experience. 

I see mostly female subjects in your paintings, is there a specific reason for this?

I think it began with wanting to feel connected to the work. I know what it is to be female so it feels more natural and personal. Putting something of myself into the stories, I was weaving. That, and no doubt being influenced by a lot of my favourite historical painters who painted women. That’s how it started. That was a long time ago. Then through my tattoo work, it’s what I became known for.

So I’ve been drawing girl faces all day every day for years for work. Now it’s become an unbreakable habit. Mostly I’m quite content and enjoy this habit. I still feel a connection to the faces. Though I would like to paint more men and have been doing so a bit in my personal work. 

On occasion, I feel irritated with myself for drawing the same type of girl over and over, like a one-trick pony. But at the same time, I love her too much to leave her behind. I think it’s one of the reasons why I’ve been dissecting them in recent work. Cutting them open and riffling through the innards to see if there’s anything deeper to them. But really I think they’re just ingrained in my brain through some kind of muscle memory. Like a musician’s fingers playing an old tune without conscious thought. 

I sometimes wonder if my art may have been different had I not been paid to draw lady faces over and over day in and day out for so many years. Probably not much.

How do you counter people and their negativity? How do you react to people who criticise your work?

Negativity about my paintings doesn’t tend to bother me too much, of course, it’s unpleasant, but I can shrug it off fairly quickly. Whereas cruel comments on social media about tattoos I’ve done send me into a panic! I worry my client might have seen the comment before I could delete it and feel bad about something permanently on their bodies. 

But in general, I react to berating humans in much the same way I react to barking dogs: wait for my bones to stop shivering then get on with the task at hand.

It’s quite obvious you love to create portraits: How do you select subjects, and how do you compose the pieces and elements you add?

I enjoy going off on tangents too much to be very good at portraits of specific people. 

I fall too much in love with the slightly wrong features I’ve made on the page that I’m loath to erase them to make them look more like the person I’m meant to be drawing.  So most of my characters are made up. I’ll often use old photographs, myself or friends as starting points for the pose, but the end product is barely recognisable. 

I’m searching more for a mood or character than a specific person’s features. 

I live by beautiful woodland, so I’m able to step outside and sketch and photograph trees, plants and animals to use as inspiration for the surrounding elements and backgrounds. I also have some great books of natural history illustrations I sometimes use as inspiration for more exotic flora and fauna.

Of course, I can see that you are inspired by certain styles from the past: Could you elaborate a bit on how each movement inspires you? And what exactly about each style?

I love the vulgar voluptuous fleshiness of Rubens and the baroque period, the overwrought intricacies, hidden creatures and rotting elements of 17th Century Dutch flower painting, and the tragic romanticism and storytelling of the pre Raphaelites. I love the ornate beauty in the rococo movement. I’m inspired by the interesting lines, shapes and bold colours of a lot of golden age illustrators like Norman Lindsey, Maxfield Parish and Arthur Rackham. 

Essentially if it’s frowned upon as pretty and vapid or only catering to the male gaze – chances are it’s my cup of tea.

I love the still-life elements of your work! Could you explain a bit about why you give so much space to objects? How do you connect these elements with your subjects?

I’ve always loved beautiful objects! I may have a bit of a hoarding problem… but it’s not really a problem if I’m using them for art… right?!

Maybe I’m only a painter as an excuse to collect things. There’s not much I love more than finding a little-known second-hand store or junkyard and greedily riffling for buried treasures. I have a cupboard filled with vases, snuff bottles, swords, cameos, moth-eaten costumes and various items of tableware.

I love different textures next to each other, and I’m always looking for excuses to add pops of colour. Certain colour combinations have me drooling like Homer over doughnuts. I’m always looking for places to sneak them in. Fruit and flowers are great for this too.

How would you like people to look at your work? Do you intend to make people think about certain topics and contexts?

No. I don’t like anyone feeling pressured to pretend to see something that they don’t because so and so said so. There’s too much of that in the art world.

If anything, I’d prefer a more physical response. When I look at a piece of art, I can tell I really love it when my eyes widen, and my heart races a bit. To dissect potential meanings ruins the experience for me.

Back to the cake analogy – if I were eyeing off a delectable slice of chocolate cake, I wouldn’t be pondering the chef’s inner machinations, dwelling on the finer points of cocoa-bean harvesting or engaging in an intellectual exploration of the possible philosophical implications of the decadence of dessert trends. Nay, I would simply salivate and think of nothing further than how delightful it may taste. As grandiose a goal as it may seem to be, I believe that the ultimate responsibility for one of my paintings to elicit in a viewer would be something along those lines. Visceral, not cognitive.

Hannah Flowers Social Media Accounts

Instagram

The post Hannah Flowers: Tragic, Vulgar, and Voluptuous appeared first on Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.

Sculpture is more than a physical element–it’s a physical representation of an unseen world that can be brought to life through human hands. Jorge Vascano shares his insight into the world of sculpture and takes us on textural journeys through this medium.

From porous wood and stark metals to smooth marble, Jorge Vascano narrates stories that are introspective, timeless, and emotive. With his hands and inquisitive mind, he creates sculptures that are filled with enchanting details that strike deep emotions within every observer.

What strikes inspiration for you? When do you know it is the right time to sculpt?

I find many things inspiring to me. An expressive face, a memory, a place, an interesting form, an emotion I felt, etc. However, more often lately, it’s been when the subject of inspiration calls for introspection and invites me to look inward. I’m very interested in the internal narratives and forces that shape our human experiences. I love manipulating material in an attempt to depict how something felt like. Sort of, trying to sculpt the human being, but from within. So, any subject that evokes a strong emotion is welcome as an inspirational source.

It is the right time to sculpt, when an interesting idea that I feel, I cannot fully express two-dimensionally comes along. Also, when the subject causes a tactile urge to understand its forms.

What is your favorite material to work with? How do you relate to each material?

Marble and wood are equally my favorites. Each material has its unique properties. I relate to them according to the idea that I’m using them for. For example, in wood I like its flexibility, also, I love the color temperature it has, its natural warmth, and (to a degree) the predictable way the veins can complement the subjects’ forms.

With marble, I feel more like a painter when I am working with it. I like using marbles that are more “exotic” in colors and patterns to express sometimes more intense ideas.

Your sculpture of Frida Kahlo is astonishing. How long did it take to create?

Thank you very much! I really appreciate it. This piece was a beautiful collaboration with the North American Sculpture Center, where I was an artist in residence after graduating from the New York Academy of Art. There, I worked on doing detailed and finishing work.

The Frida Kahlo piece was sculpted in clay first by a talented sculptor friend, Heather Personett, then scanned and milled with a CNC machine. After that, I came to do all the detail carving, finishing work, and overall work on the nuances to try to give it a natural likeness. In this particular case, it took me almost 3 months to do all that work.

What is the intention of every piece of work you create?

I feel the intentions of an artist change and evolve as we mature. However, something that I noticed looking at my past works, is that certain interests always stay with you that are present in the work in one way or another. In my case, I realized that since I was little, I was always curious and wanted to understand the interworking of things and what lies under their surfaces.

I feel this interest never left me and I see it now reflected in my current work. It is not as literal anymore, but in a more introspective way, where the curiosity in portraying and expressing the internal stories within us, propels me to create each piece now.

Do you enjoy creating in silence or with music in the background?

It depends on what I am doing and the level of concentration I have at the moment. For example, if I am finishing work like sanding or monotonous repetitive tasks that don’t require much brain power, I love listening to music or some podcast to relax a little bit. However, if I am carving something where I have to be very focused, like detail-precise work such as carving the eyes, the nose, or some very crucial detail, then I prefer to be in silence and as focused as I can be.

You know, wood or stone carving can be very unforgiving and with very little margin for error. Every cut tends to be the last cut.

Why did you enter the Beautiful Bizarre Magazine Art Prize?

I entered it because I have been following the magazine for some time and I have always been impressed by the amazing artists it showcases and promotes. Besides, the consistency in work quality, the depth of themes was another appealing point.

I believe this combination gives integrity to the magazine’s mission and in turn attracts inspired artists like me to be encouraged to participate in one of the many artistic contemporary conversations.

What do you feel you have gained from this experience?

To have your work be acknowledged and also included within a group of talented artists, it’s always a nice incentive to put your work out there.

During this experience, I got an opportunity to share my story and artistic motivations with a much bigger audience and in a way to feel part of its creative community. As a result, I feel my work has gotten on the radar of more people interested in it and wanting to collaborate.

I think through the magazine’s mission to showcase and give a platform to its artists of interest, I became more aware of these opportunities to share the work I want to make.

Would you recommend it and encourage others to enter? If so, why?

Yes, I would recommend entering the competition. Regardless of whether one wins or not I think it’s a great opportunity to have your work be seen by the magazine’s welcoming audience. Also, I feel it’s a good thing to give yourself goals to motivate you to help you keep creating and moving forward. This is my second time entering and the positive response and outcome that came from the first time were what made me enter it again.

A lot of people commented, appreciated, and interacted with my work and for me being part of that artistic conversation was good enough. Not so much the thought of winning, but having my work exposed and seen was a win in itself.

Jorge Vascano Social Media Accounts

Website | Instagram

The post From Porous to Smooth, Jorge Vascano Shapes With His Hands appeared first on Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.

When it comes to sculpture, what comes to mind? Is it the sculptures of antiquity adorning marble temples with the faces of the Roman and Greek pantheon? There is a very rich history of sculpture and unlike many forms of art, holds up very well against the effects of time. There is also the terra cotta army of Qin Shi Huang, which is undoubtedly a phenomenal site to see. But maybe when one thinks of sculpture, something more modern like the work of Michelangelo or Donatello comes to mind, as each have a large number of sculptures graces religious sites across Europe. Sculpture has long been a way to physically represent an artist’s ideas in a tangible form. It is work in the third dimension that brings completely new values to appreciate. One artist that does this exceedingly well is Brian Booth Craig.

As Beautiful Bizarre’s second place prize winner of the Yasha Young Projects Sculpture Award, his art is truly something to behold. His pieces, almost exclusively in bronze, feature nude figures almost realistically detailed that stand (or sit) at a life size ratio. His sculptures play on various aspects of human-ness in a way to bring action to stillness. His figures, though frozen in time, speak of oppression, struggle, grace, and chaos. In addition to being an artist, Brian also teaches at his studio and travels the globe for workshops. Beautiful Bizarre set up an interview with the sculptor so without further ado…

I am a big believer in letting the process of moving material around as a means of finding ideas and concepts to pursue. Meaning comes through making, and my process is all about letting the inspiration come to me during that process.

What is your preferred medium to work with and why? What are some of the difficulties with working with that material?

My work is primarily sculpted in plastilina and cast in bronze. I prefer bronze because of the compositional freedom it permits due to its high tensile strength. For example, I can make a large figure supported on only one hand, or just the toes of one foot without additional support. Bronze is very difficult to master, is very time consuming and expensive, but it is extremely durable and will maintain its archival value over time.

You have been sculpting since you were very young. What interested you in sculpture specifically?

I started making art and knew I was an artist when I was just five years old. However, it wasn’t until I was an adult that I tried sculpting. I had an immediate affinity for sculpting. It felt like a very natural way to express myself. Sculpting engages and requires many skills. The complexity and challenge of sculpting appealed to me. It is wide open with material possibilities, and that expansiveness has kept me intrigued.

Tell me about your artistic process. What sort of headspace do you find is the most inspiring for you? Do you have any superstitions regarding new pieces, do you work alone or listen to specific music?

I am a big believer in letting the process of moving material around as a means of finding ideas and concepts to pursue. Meaning comes through making, and my process is all about letting the inspiration come to me during that process. I rarely conceive an idea prior to putting pencil on paper or molding clay with my hands. It is a form of work-play that I try to enter into as a way of receiving questions to be pursued or inspiration. This process opens me to asking ‘why?’ I am making something, which will inevitably lead me to the answer of ‘how?’ to make it. I don’t ask for answers, only new lines of inquiry through artmaking. I don’t have any superstitions about new pieces, but I do feel like there is something seeking a form to embody. Ideas are looking for an art form to enter into, and my job to be open to that voice, to get out of the way and let it flow.

I prefer to do creative work alone, sometimes for days or weeks without much interaction with people. Once the creative part is finished and I am in the production phase of sculpture such as molding and casting, then I like to work with others. 

Whether I listen to music or not, and what kind of music I listen to is dependent on the stage of the sculpting process. If I am in the development and creative flow stage of sculpting I prefer silence, but once I am working on bronze I like to have music on.

How long does an image usually take you to complete? How many steps are involved?

This is entirely dependent on the size and complexity of a piece. The clay sculpting can take anywhere from three hours (for a terracotta sketch) to 100 hours (for a life size figure). There are far too many steps to explain briefly here!

You appear to be very busy with multiple projects including your involvement with your studio, you had a documentary done about you recently, and you host workshops all over the world it seems. What do you do in any free time you might have?  

I have about thirty projects going right now at varying states of development and completion. In addition, I have workshops planned for Rome in May 2023, at my home studio in June/July and many other places beyond that. My busy schedule leaves me little time for much else, but I like to read in my free time. I try to read a little every day, even if it is just one poem, which is a daily habit. When I have time, I will attend openings in NYC, go to museums, and occasionally watch a film. There is little time for much else!

Out of some of those projects, and I’m sure others that I didn’t mention, what are some of your favourite things to be engaged in?

As I said above, I enjoy reading poetry. I find that it opens my mind to creative pathways and imagery when I am working in the studio. It puts me in a state of mind that is mentally flexible and non-linear. I also like going for walks in nature, especially with my dog. On the flip side, engaging with culture in cities as a flaneur or observer is also essential for me to feel rejuvenated and fed. Having a balanced connection between nature and culture helps to keep my creative momentum.

Ideas are looking for an art form to enter into, and my job to be open to that voice, to get out of the way and let it flow.

Tell me about the themes you have chosen to depict. How does your artwork represent you and your values?

Primarily, I am interested in discovering  the various ways in which the human form can communicate states of being and ask questions about the mystery of what it means to be human, if there is any meaning. My work usually employs methods of verisimilitude within ambiguous contexts precisely to jolt the viewer out of their preconceived notion of what actions can narrate what it means to be an embodied consciousness. I seek ways to conjoin the human form with ambiguity of action or gesture in such a way that it feels both recognizable and mysterious in equal measure, which is how I experience life.

Who or what has been the single most important influence for your work today? Who are some of the other artists that have influenced you?

This is a nearly impossible question to answer, not because I don’t know some of the answer, but because it would take me an entire book to properly and fairly explain who and what has influenced me, and even then that book would be incomplete. There is no single most important influence, and I intentionally keep it that way. I don’t ever want to feel like there is one salient influence on my creative process. It is constantly shifting and growing due to the constant accumulation and accretion of newly discovered thoughts, ideas, cultures, artists, experiences, people, etc. Perhaps it would be fair to say that insatiable curiosity is my biggest single influence. 

Tell me about your personal workspace. How big is it and what does it look like?

I live about 100 KM from NYC, on what used to be a small farm. There are multiple work spaces for sculpting clay, drawing, and bronze work. The bronze working spaces are in the old barn, but my primary space for sculpting and drawing is in a building specifically designed for that purpose. It is about 93 square meters with 6 meter high ceilings and a wall of north facing windows. The walls are covered with artwork, shelves for storage, bookshelves, tool cabinets and supplies. 

How has COVID-19 affected your work?

My work was beginning to change just prior to covid-19, but because of the isolation it may have accelerated that process. Covid-19 hit me hard financially, and the stress was an impetus for me to pursue the new ideas I was finding in my work. That might seem like a contradiction, but I find that major life shifts can be viewed as signs that you need to make changes, at least that is how I see those times in my life. When things look like they are falling apart, or might fall apart, I tend to throw caution to the wind a bit more and try things I have been putting off, or do something entirely new.

Tell me about “Exotherm”. What is the message behind this beautiful piece? How long did it take you to complete?

Exotherm emerged through the experience of working with a friend of mine. When I am working with female models I have one personal rule: they must exude agency and a sense of self-determination that confronts the viewer/voyeur. Margarita has a physical demeanor and presence that is commanding, so all I had to do was find a way to deploy her attributes. She and I had a lot of conversations about how to represent individual characteristics through limited means. For example, she has red hair, but I was working in a monochromatic material. Chromatic limitation forced me to seek ways to describe her attributes metaphorically, hence the idea of making her hair ‘flaming’. From there it followed that an emotional counterweight might add a layer of meaning, which is how the fire extinguisher came to mind. I have no specific message to impart, but I do intend it to communicate the feeling that she is in control, and her intensity is combustible. The extinguisher is not for herself, but for whoever or whatever might become inflamed, so that heat is under her command, not ours.

Why did you enter the Beautiful Bizarre Magazine Art Prize?

I entered because I have a few friends that have won the prize, and they encouraged me to enter because my latest work fits in well with the personality of Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.

What do you feel you have gained from this experience?

I’ve gained insight into another part of the art world ecosystem, which I am sure will influence me and my work.

Would you recommend it and encourage others to enter? If so, why?

Absolutely! It is a very effective way to see how one’s work converses with other artwork being made around the world. It is also a great way to expand one’s community and network of people working in the artworld. 

Brian Booth Craig Social Media Accounts

Website | Facebook | Instagram

The post Brian Booth Craig: The Human Shapes of Molten Liquid appeared first on Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.

Jenny Boot is a photographer who masterfully creates a somewhat surreal effect on her subjects through the use of both lighting and props. Sometimes using references from the “masters”, Jenny creates a brand new narrative and overall look, which make her pieces very much relevant to the 21st Century. I often find myself getting lost in her fine details that sometimes read more like a painting than an actual photograph. 

Come with us and learn more about Jenny Boot and her inspiring creative lens as I get up close and personal with the 1st Prize Winner of the INPRNT Photography Award in the 2022 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize!

About the Artist //

Since the beginning of her career Jenny Boot wanted to convey her feelings though art and for this reason, she started painting, but soon discovered that with photography she could control her vision even more.

Light is an important aspect of Jenny’s work. According to the artist, even though a photo, an idea, or a model can be beautiful, light is what makes or breaks a photograph. It is through the use of light that she is able to capture her models in painterly images. Jenny graduated in Fashion Photography at the Fotoacademie in Amsterdam, worked for many magazines, and has been the recipient of numerous awards and accolades, including a nomination at the Cannes Lion Awards and an Honorable Mention at the prestigious Moscow International Foto Awards.

Her artworks have been presented at the most prestigious international art fairs. They are also a part of the collection at the Palms Hotel in Las Vegas, beside artists like Damien Hirst, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, Takashi Murakami, KAWS and Dustin Yellin. One of the works, “Black Girl with Pearl” has been added to the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam collection in 2020.

Exclusive Interview with Jenny Boot

I have always been one to admire your subjects that read as royalty to me due to their stance and lighting – lighting in which I know is so important to each piece. Can you kindly explain how/where your sense of lighting the subjects – quite like Caravaggio (to me) or other Renaissance painters – came to be? If I am off in my opinion, please feel free to let our audience know your point of view.

Thank you, Nicole. Your attention to my work has also meant a lot in my career. I don’t know exactly how my kind of light came about. I was at the photo academy where I learned all the techniques and I think it was at the end of the second year that I made a self-portrait based on a work by Jan Saudek, that I discovered that the Clair–obscure work created an image that made me very happy myself became. It reminded me of the old painting of Rembrandt and indeed Caravaggio.

Although it may have been a fluke at the time, because I didn’t start making that style my own until much later when I had already left the academy. I made a lot of portraits instead of nudes and started experimenting with the Clair–obscure use of light because I took the photos in an attic room with a skylight. My dark style was born from that.

Many of your subjects are women – do you prefer photographing women and if so – why? Are there other subjects you’d like to photograph in the future? 

Yes, I get that question a lot. I like to photograph beautiful women or girls. That’s because that’s what I can best identify with. They can show what lives or has lived in me. With men it is more difficult, they are at most a subject in my photo that should add something to it. But an exception is my son. I have photographed him a lot and for the first time – there is, now, also a recognizable work by him in an exhibition of mine, coincidentally the work is called “Caravaggio”.

Is there something you can share about your work that you have not been able to tell another journalist before? 

Somehow it seems like I’ve already forgotten those two years. I was lucky enough to have a sole exhibition in a museum in Sneek in 2020. Just from that date everything could open with restrictions and when it was done everything closed again. How lucky was I?

During these past few trying years- have you found yourself most creative or longing to work? How did the pandemic affect your work? In the sense of both your subjects and/or upcoming shows?

I just kept working and first looked for other ways, such as portraits behind a window, so that I stayed outside and the model inside. But soon I had the idea that it was nonsense to work like that. With a little caution and distance, I could just make my work. By limiting freedom, and the compulsion to vaccinate, I did make my work “Get your freedom back with one more jab”. My series, “Roaring twenties” came out of the hope that we would have the same experience of regained freedom as in the 1920s.

Is there any medium, as I remember you are also a painter, that you’d like to work with but have been intimidated by? 

Yes, I did have the desire to make bronze statues or with other materials, but I can’t get any further than to make something with clay. However, lately I have been very inspired to start painting again and also to take lessons because I want to be able to do better. Wood is also something that always fascinates me, so I will also do something with it if I have the right materials. I always admire those people who do something creative with everything and tackle everything. But I think my focus on photography helped me break through there. Maybe it’s, only now, time to pick up other materials and see what I can do with them.

If you could collaborate with any artist, either alive or deceased, who would it be with and why? 

I would like to work with the beautiful designs of Iris van Herpen. But actually I am someone who prefers to do everything alone. That sometimes makes it difficult because, of course, I can’t do everything, but in shooting I do get the best result when no one else is around.

Why did you enter the Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize?

I once had an article in Beautiful Bizarre Magazine and from there I found out about the contest they held every year. I think I’ve entered for the third time now – although I never actually participated in a competition, it feels like a good place to show your work. There’s a lot of recognition for your work, especially now that I’ve won. I would definitely recommend it to others if only because you get so much publicity from it.

What do you fee you have gained from this experience?

What I have gained from it is perhaps too early to say. I am very happy with it anyway. I think it came at the right time in my personal process to win with this image.

Jenny Boot Social Media Accounts

Website | Facebook | Instagram

The post Jenny Boot: A Controlled Vision and Creative Lens appeared first on Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.

For Marcela Bolivar, art is less made than manifested. Bolivar pulls from her inmost intuitions, beginning with an idea inspired by a moment, a brief from a client, or her own dreams. Her collages are crafted using 21st century mixed media; a commingling of photographs taken by Bolivar herself and digital elements created through Photoshop. The resulting photomanipulations are as beautiful as they are complex. Her creations have a signature softness, which when combined with bold, powerful hues and unexpected subjects, produce images that are at once earthy and transcendental.

Marcela Bolivar began her journey as a digital artist in her teens when her first digital camera, a low quality piece of equipment, produced imagery she was not happy with. She took the images into Photoshop and began to manipulate the elements she disliked. Over time, her manipulation techniques grew into the multifaceted imagery she produces today. Marcela Bolivar has created pieces for industry leading clients including Penguin Random House and Adobe. Her layered, transformative visions dare the viewer to consider the spaces between reality and fiction, disguise and truth.

Can you tell us more about the process behind your winning piece, Chthonic Tide?

This piece speaks of the artist embodied by the figure of the Magician in the tarot. The Magician is the manifestation of the work on earth, in the material world. I, obviously, took some elements from the tarot, but I let the image appear before me as the plant itself that shines and transforms. After a frustrating series of sketches made to no avail, I finally let myself be freely carried away by the creative resources around me and let each of the elements come into the image without methodical thought. This brought me closer to the idea of the Magician as a conductor, a vessel of the creative force that has the power to manifest on the surface that subterranean world in which our subconscious, our purest ideas, are found.

Most of the photographs taken for this work I already had in my personal image bank but each one has a story. The subterranean part of the fantastic plant is actually a pine tree that dried up in my house and when I cleaned it, it revealed an incredibly symbolic form, its roots formed a perfect space inside, as if something should be kept there.

What inspired the piece? What do the various elements symbolize?

The inspiration came from the figure of the Magician, but definitely what pushed me was to destroy a failed sketch to create something from that ruin. The subway space that I like to evoke in many of my images is where all ideas are born, manifest or dormant. The orb carefully enveloped by the roots is the very nourishment of the plant that shines on the surface.

A consistent theme throughout your work is natural elements interacting with humans in unexpected ways — what do those elements symbolize for you?

I really enjoy representing plants in my work because for me they are inscrutable, mysterious, silent but tireless beings, the very paradigm of alien lives sharing the earth with us. Plants determine the atmosphere of every place they are in and from which they are absent. They are the natural force that insistently returns and transforms everything. In my work, plants represent the organic, the irrational, the otherworldly, and the wild. Everything that a human tries to control, both in the civilized world and in their own being.

Where do you draw inspiration for your pieces?

It depends on what I’m thinking about at a certain time, but I’m often inspired by dreams, words, music. I try to digest everything that aesthetically moves me to know myself better, to enlarge my inner world. I’m normally driven by concepts like transmutation, wilderness, artificiality, human and nature.

I try to digest everything that aesthetically moves me to know myself better, to enlarge my inner world.

You frequently work with publishing houses on book covers — what is your process for a piece that you know will have a home on bookstore shelves? How do you familiarize yourself with the story and decide what pieces of it to represent on the cover?

It’s always a very exciting process. First, I am contacted by the art director who thinks my style might fit a story. After that they provide me with the manuscript and also a brief on ideas that are important, or visual elements that should be illustrated. I do my best to read as much of the manuscript as I can to take elements that speak directly to me. Then I do 3 or 4 sketches and present them to the art director. Sometimes one of these sketches is ready to go to its final version, other times the chosen sketch needs to be modified in another direction. It’s a lot of fun to collaborate with the designers and to know how the image is transformed by the typography; I’m learning more and more to take that into account in my illustrations.

You’ve been a Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize finalist before – how did it feel to be a winner this year?

I never expected it, honestly. When I have applied to the contest I always do it to support the magazine because it is a publication that has supported me a lot to grow in social media and for that I will always be grateful. It is very flattering to be part of such an inspiring group of artists.

Your pieces are complex – a viewer could spend an hour looking at the same piece and still not see all of the hidden details. Do you enjoy layering in symbols and textures that may not appear to the viewer at first glance? Do you feel like your pieces are hiding any secrets?

Yes, I like to think so! Digital art is seen as immediate and lacking in originality or effort. But I think it’s important to show that the inner world of an artist manifests itself with more fluidity and momentum when we find the medium in which we feel comfortable. This gives me the freedom to put details and elements that often go unnoticed but that for me are everything when a work is examined. And I like that, it’s not just a visual treat or part of an infinite scroll on social networks, if you want to stay a little longer looking at an image of mine, you will be rewarded.

Can you take us through how you go about creating a new piece from start to finish?

The most important thing are the ideas. I have a serious amount of notebooks with sketches, ideas that come and go, obsessive ideas, shocking dreams, recurring dreams, all of that goes into a filter where I choose a subject either on the spur of the moment or because I honestly think it’s a great subject that motivates me. Then I make a list of the things I need to photograph to make the image and what other resources I can take from my personal archive. In photoshop, I work a lot with scanned textures from paintings I make and also textures from surfaces I take on trips or outside. I base a lot of my atmospheres on these textures and the whole image slowly emerges from them. After putting in all the elements of the composition, I use more textures and brushes in the last layers of the image and play a bit with the color palette until I am satisfied. The thrill I feel in those last steps is unmatched.

It would be interesting if everyone who is attracted to what I do could see themselves in my images, see in symbols or atmospheres something that they cannot articulate rationally.

What do you hope viewers will see when they look at your work?

I don’t really expect anything. It would be interesting if everyone who is attracted to what I do could see themselves in my images, see in symbols or atmospheres something that they cannot articulate rationally. I am very happy when someone is inspired as I am inspired by the work of others.

Is there any image in your repertoire that holds special meaning for you? What about that image do you connect with?

I really like Cold Vessel. It is based on a sketch that I had been waiting for many years and when the time came to realize it, it manifested itself very strongly. I had just arrived from Madrid where I visited a special Bosch exhibition and the impression lasted so long in me that you can see it reflected in certain details of this image. The image is a portrayal of the sublimation of the human psyche, a bodily and mental transformation, a body that is t

What equipment do you work with to craft your pieces?

I work with a Nikon750, light lamps, acrylic paint, graphite, scanner, molding supplies, Wacom Intuos and Photoshop.

Do you have anything exciting planned for the future? What can our readers look forward to seeing from you next?

Yes! I’m going to spend a good part of this year and early next year illustrating a special edition of one of my favorite books and authors. Dream job.

What advice would you give to new artists who are just beginning in your medium?

I would advise you to take your own photos, references, textures and make every single detail in the image unique. In the days of artificial intelligence and unlimited stock photography, it’s very easy for everything to end up looking very similar and no voice is your own. You need to get up from your desk, get out there and make your own resources.

It’s a way to test yourself, to lose your fear and expose yourself to the world, when you get used to that, you are more free.

Why did you enter the Beautiful Bizarre Magazine Art Prize?

Because I like to support this magazine that I appreciate and because it is not bad to know how my art is valued today. It’s exciting to see yourself side by side with inspiring artists and it forms a community linked by the desire to create.

What do you feel you have gained from this experience?

Exposure! haha, well that’s important especially if it’s your work. Plus the certainty and validation of knowing that your art is valued by people who have appreciated a lot of art in their lives or who are dedicated to this. One tends to forget what the perception of the world is when you spend months locked away creating new things.

Would you recommend it and encourage others to enter? If so, why?

Of course, it seems to me that if it’s in someone’s budget, there’s nothing to lose by entering this kind of contest. It’s a way to test yourself, to lose your fear and expose yourself to the world, when you get used to that, you are more free.

Marcela Bolivar Social Media Accounts

Website | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter

The post Manifested Spaces: The Otherworldly Imagery of Marcela Bolivar appeared first on Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.

Jennifer Bruce has turned allegorical portraiture on its head. Subverting our expectations, the subjects of her recent portraits are faceless, but no less intimate for it. Rather than distancing us from their plight, these characters are now all the more relatable – because it could be you or I trapped in the frame. We are used to seeing allegories painted in oil, and on first look you could be forgiven for believing that’s what you’re looking at. With these incredibly detailed works, Bruce has truly elevated the medium of digital art. 

After falling in love with oil painting at college, Bruce moved into the dark arts of the digital world. She studied Illustration (with a minor in Concept Art) at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit and after getting started with digital painting, she never looked back. Alongside her personal works, she has created a variety of book covers for fantasy authors – showing the versatility and imaginative power of her unique style that blends the best of both worlds. 

It’s no surprise that her striking piece ‘A Particular Blindness’ won 1st Prize in the iCanvas Digital Art Award category of the 2022 Beautiful Bizarre Art Awards. It’s a subject so many of us can relate to: a woman holds her injured heart close, not realising that by keeping it so protected she is preventing her own healing.

People are reluctant to seek therapy because of social stigmas, fear of admitting “weakness” or of stirring up emotional pain.

“A Particular Blindness” has a powerful and relatable allegorical meaning behind it. You’ve said previously that it represents “the struggle to ask for help when it feels safer to hide away.” Can you talk more about the story behind this piece and what inspired you?

I got the idea for this piece from an article about the general reluctance to seek therapy, even when obviously needed. I think humanity as a whole would be so much better off if everyone had a therapist! I think some people think you should only seek therapy if you have obvious psychosis or experience extreme trauma, when in fact therapy can be helpful for almost any situation that has a negative effect on your mental or emotional state, no matter how small or trivial-seeming. People are reluctant to seek therapy because of social stigmas, fear of admitting “weakness” or of stirring up emotional pain. Therefore, I think people try to protect themselves from these fears by hiding their emotions and avoiding therapy; which actually locks them away from real healing. 

I say all of this as someone who has been through a lot of therapy as a mostly “normal” person, and as someone whose personal faith encourages me to seek out the roots of my struggles and find healing, rather than trying to gloss over them. I don’t think it would be appropriate for me to comment on something like this without personal experience!

Why did you enter the Beautiful Bizarre Magazine Art Prize?

I entered in the hopes of gaining exposure and recognition. Freelance art is not an easy career to get off the ground, so every bit helps!

How did you get started as an illustrator, and was it something you wanted to do from a young age?

Like many artists, I was drawing from a young age – mostly black and white drawings with pencil. I was almost completely self-taught until I started looking at colleges, but I didn’t have the self-confidence to pursue art as a career at that point. Several years into my college experience, after floundering in my decision on a major, I finally took a few art classes at my community college. I tried graphic design, which ended up feeling too sterile and restricting. A fine art major seemed like a great way to become a “starving artist”, and I wanted more narrative direction in my work. I looked around at colleges and discovered the illustration degree at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, near where I live. Somehow, it had never occurred to me that this could be a job – the perfect blend of marketable skills and fine arts talents!

I finally finished a degree at CCS for both illustration and a concept art minor, and started trying to market myself to potential clients. It’s been a long road since then, and I haven’t really avoided the “starving artist” trope, but I’m so glad I took the risk.

I really strive to include lots of detail and texture in my work, and I want my illustrations to have a traditional feel to them.

You have such a unique art style with digital paintings – so detailed they look like they could have been created through traditional means. Can you talk about your creative process, and the tools you use? 

Thank you for that comment! I really strive to include lots of detail and texture in my work, and I want my illustrations to have a traditional feel to them. Although I work primarily in digital media, I do have a background from art school in traditional media. In college I fell in love with oil painting (talk about ASMR, it’s like painting with butter!), but once I really dug into digital painting (it’s a totally different feel at first), I never looked back. I’m trying to reintroduce more traditional media into my portfolio, because I still love it. I will probably always attempt to hit “Crtl+Z” to undo a pencil stroke in my physical sketchbook, and have to laugh at myself!

My process has a few layers; I usually start with a black and white or colour sketch. My idea gathering for this stage often consists of looking at other artists’ work, listening to music, and just letting my imagination wander. You’d be surprised at how many of my paintings have roots in some of my favourite pieces of music. After I’m happy with the sketch and composition, I’ll hunt down reference images online or take my own photos. I have probably hundreds of very strange looking photos on my phone of me or my friends in capes made of blankets, holding brooms, curtain rods, or candle holders as props. It’s helpful when I can find an online reference, but if I need the lighting to be a certain way I have to take the photos myself. This can be tricky, because my work is very reference-centric – being semi-realism – so I need to make sure it’s just right.

I then begin my work on the final image. I mainly use Procreate on my iPad Pro 12 with an Apple pencil, with a DokiWear CG Art Glove to reduce random mark making from skin contact on the touchscreen. I’ve used a couple of other digital painting setups, but this is my go-to – partly because I can take it anywhere (although I’m usually in my special comfy armchair!). Then I spend hours painting away, with music or Netflix on in the background. I’ve binged a lot of movies and TV-shows while painting!

I tend to use a rather painterly process, occasionally using application functions like gradients, painting guides, layer duplications, etc. I use a LOT of layers; it’s very useful to be able to move things around as needed. These functions are why I would struggle to go back to an entirely traditional process – I simply can’t put out art at the same speed. However, I do try to add other traditional media inspired elements – such as hatch lines, overlaid paper textures or patterns, and textured brushes. When I’m almost done, I’ll go back in to add some more precise details, and then transfer it to my computer for finishing touches. Since Procreate doesn’t have a lot of photography filters and such, I open the illustrations in Photoshop to correct any brightness or contrast issues. I also like to watch back the process video that Procreate automatically records – it’s so fun to watch an illustration be created from start to finish!

C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series and J.R.R. Tolkien’s work will always have an influence on my work.

In your career to date you have worked on a range of book cover projects with a particular focus on fantasy – which fantasy books or series have inspired your work over the years?  

Ooh that’s a good question. Robin McKinley’s “The Hero’s Crown” has inspired a couple of pieces, as has Donita K. Paul’s Dragonkeeper Series. Last year I discovered Ursula K. LeGuin’s writing, which I hope I’ll get to base a few personal projects on. Of course, C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series and J.R.R. Tolkien’s work will always have an influence on my work. Interestingly enough, though, I think that it’s music (and sometimes really good movies) that have most inspired my work. I have many long playlists of cinematic music, as well as pieces from other genres. The really dramatic pieces can send me deep into my imagination, and I often surface with my best ideas – the ones that I’m really emotionally invested in.

Your personal project ‘Even So’ seems to be another allegorical piece referencing the pandemic, with flowers on a face mask materialising and flying away. Has the pandemic influenced your work, or the way you work at all?

I created this one at the very beginning of the pandemic in response to a call for pandemic-related art from a group I was working with. It actually got picked up by the European branch of Politico for one of their articles. I was trying to portray the idea of hope in the face of adversity – that though we have to make changes to our lives to deal with a new reality, and though we have to face daily tragedies, there is still hope and beauty to be found in the world, and in personal faith. 

I think the pandemic mostly affected my work in logistical areas, rather than directly affecting the way that I work or the illustrations themselves. For instance, sending art postcards to the art directors at publishing houses that you wanted to work with was one of the main ways to reach out, but then all of a sudden the art directors were working from home, so emails became much more important. For a large portion of my beginning as a professional artist, I wasn’t able to go to the conventions and meetups that people often get industry contacts from. In the past year or so I’ve been able to engage more with other professionals in person, and I really value that.

What’s next for you – are you able to share details of any upcoming projects?

My next project is for the award-winning author Midori Snyder, and I’m very much looking forward to this one. I recently illustrated the new cover for her novel “Hannah’s Garden”, and she has since hired me to recreate the covers for her Oran Trilogy. I read the books in preparation, and I have been refining a couple of ideas that I am very excited about. Midori has been wonderful to work with, and I think we have similar visual tastes, so it’s going to be a very fun project. I’m also trying out some new strategies for this round of covers, which should be interesting. We’re still in the sketch phase, but I can’t wait to share the illustrations when they’re done! Check back on my social media around February or March, if you’re interested. 

What do you feel you have gained from this experience?

I’ve definitely gained from winning this competition, largely from the exposure to your social media. This has done more for my follower count than anything thus far! 

Would you recommend it and encourage others to enter? If so, why?

I would encourage others to enter for sure – your team does a great job of making the winners feel excited and celebrated, the exposure is great (in my limited experience), and you get to experience the other amazing works by incredible artists.

Jennifer Bruce Social Media Accounts

Website | Facebook | Instagram

The post Jennifer Bruce: Where Fantasy Meets Reality appeared first on Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.

Art is something anyone can appreciate, and everyone can create for themselves. Whether it is a paintbrush, a chisel, or a pencil there are a variety of tools to use. Alex Peter Idoko chooses some of the more dangerous tools of the trade. For the Nigerian artist, its razor blades and fire. To be clear, Alex does not use a hot tool to burn and score the wood, instead relying primarily on a blowtorch to scorch the wood.

The Lagos based artist takes takes a slab of wood and both burns and cuts into the sylvan surface with such a refined method as to produce the hyper-realistic images featured here. Sandpaper and charcoal help him along the way, but his tools remain very basic. He strives to capture ideas that make his audience think more than “what a lovely piece”. Alex’s art is powerful and there is clearly a message about black lives and living in Africa. His process is extensive, which seems apparent from the first image below depicting Alex at the bottom right using a razorblade on a piece that is rather large.

My [greatest] source of inspiration has been God, but also my environment and the things happening around me.

Please tell me more about how you began creating your art.

It was baby steps that grew to become giant strides. I harness my God given talent through the corridors of passion and personal development. I was drawing cartoons and my family members and it got better by the day – and we are here. I am still getting better. 

Are you using models for your images or are you creating your figures from your imagination

Well, both. I use models and re-create what I want to see.

What encouraged or inspired you to pursue visual arts, especially in the form that you do?

My own passion and the happenings around my society; these occurrences present topics for a visual form and allow me to pass the message on to others. 

Tell me about your artistic process. What sort of headspace do you find is the most inspiring for you?

My artistic process comes in stages. First, I get an inspiration then get a model that will best present the idea. Next, I prepare my tools and carve my wood. After all is set, I start using fire and a razorblade to start drawing my pieces into reality.

My themes are based on African realities, the freedom, advocacy for change, and solutions to challenges. Art is a language that people can read. As long as you connect and interpret your heart, people will always understand that language.

Do you have any superstitions regarding new pieces?

I’m usually on the calm side so I just ensure my environment is quiet and I’m good. I don’t have any superstitions, I just pray and listen to inspirational music.

How long does an image usually take you to complete? How many steps are involved?

Depends on the piece I’m drawing. It takes a month, sometimes two. They are couple of steps in putting my pieces together, a lot of [individual] processes. I sincerely haven’t calculated the number of steps, but there are surely more than 10 steps.

Can you tell me more about how you use light values to make glossy effects of droplets and the whites of your figures’ eyes?

Hmm, how can I explain this? It depends on the piece I am trying to create. If it’s a piece with droplets, I go slowly by following all the patterns and highlights of the droplets to bring it to reality. I scrape the eyes very well with a razorblade after burning it with fire to make the eyes white – and sometimes add a little touch of white charcoal.

Tell me about the themes you have chosen to depict. How does your artwork represent you and your values?

My themes are based on African realities, the freedom, advocacy for change, and solutions to challenges. Art is a language that people can read. As long as you connect and interpret your heart, people will always understand that language.

Aside from wood, have you worked on other mediums to burn?

No, haven’t worked on any other medium to burn yet, but let’s see how the journey goes.

Who or what has been the single most important influence for your work today? Who are some of the other artists that have influenced you?

My [greatest] source of inspiration has been God, but also my environment and the things happening around me. I’ve been influenced by artists like Arinze, Salvador Dali, and Asiko. 

How do you see your work influencing the art scene on a global scale?

There is so much about my art that I’m still unveiling. I trust that the language will be more global than it is right now. 

Tell me about the piece you submitted entitled Freedom’s Rhythm. What is the message behind this beautiful piece? How long did it take you to complete?

Freedom’s Rhythm captures not only the idea of one finally breaking free, [but it also] captures one’s total surrender to authority that would in return command the freedom desired. It also shows [both] the flow and impact power has from its source to its destination when decrees are made. The portrait showcases a bound woman who has finally decided to rely on a stronger external force; the crown signifies royalty and authority to help her out of her predicament. The bruises on her shoulder and feet show a previous struggle to break free on her own accord. While the crown is above her head like a covering, it is gradually flowing over her body like a volcano and setting her free. This flow represents a sent word or decree that has the power to break chains.

Why did you enter the Beautiful Bizarre Magazine Art Prize?

One of my art collectors shared the link with me and said he believed that I’d do well. 

What do you feel you have gained from this experience?

A lot. It made me appreciate my own art [along with] other genres of art.

Would you recommend it and encourage others to enter? If so, why?

Yes, I would. The process will build your confidence and boost your art process.

Alex Peter Idoko Social Media Accounts

Website | Facebook | Instagram

The post An Inferno Starts With a Single Flame: Pyrography by Alex Peter Idoko appeared first on Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.

Captivating and vivid, Lilli Waters’ photographs are visions of serenity, but beneath the surface lies a message of disenchantment. Her subjects drip with a mythos all Waters’ own, hiding faces and identifying features behind veils and natural elements to create space for the viewer to project their own hopes and fears onto the figures. Inspired by ancient myths, the experience of living in a female body in a society bent on exploitation of the female form, and the growing ecological crisis, Lilli Waters brings a critical feminine lens to her craft, creating imagery that is at once visually alluring and hyperaware of the space in which it exists.

Through her camera, Waters sees an imperfect world filled with visceral loveliness interspersed with the terrors which stalk the nights of our 21st century collective consciousness. With her work, she explores beauty and suffering with the understanding that the two are never as far apart as they may seem. In this exclusive interview, learn more about how Waters came to her craft, the woman behind the lens, and what fans of her work have to look forward to in the future.

How did you get started in photography?

It was a bit of an accident. I made short films in high school and was invited to go to a filmmaking school, but the class ended up being cancelled as not enough students were attending, so I continued on with the major subject which was photography. It was all dark room printing back then, no one I knew owned a digital camera.

Can you tell us more about the process behind your winning piece, Where Dreams Inhabit? What inspired the piece? How did you choose the title?

‘Where Dreams Inhabit’ is from the series ‘Orpheus’. Offering a nuanced mix of hope and despair, promise and foreboding, this series of photographic vignettes was created during a lockdown reprieve in mid-2021, when Melbourne residents thought they were at last free from government restrictions. After the first few lockdowns, there was a small window of time where we were relatively Covid-free and life returned to some kind of normal. The ideas behind Orpheus emerged from a feeling of excitement, optimism and gratitude to be able to make work, be creative and get out in nature again. Being able to visit these incredible landscapes was a beautiful and surreal experience for me. The title came quite naturally, as this faceless female form reminded me of some kind of dark, beautiful & mysterious dream.

‘Where Dreams Inhabit’ is from the series ‘Orpheus’. Offering a nuanced mix of hope and despair, promise and foreboding, this series of photographic vignettes was created during a lockdown reprieve in mid-2021, when Melbourne residents thought they were at last free from government restrictions.

Your work is soft, feminine, beautiful, alluring—yet, you contrast those qualities with darker elements to point to the complex issues facing women in the era of ‘Me Too’ and a world facing ecological crisis. What led you down this pathway artistically?

Whilst I am a lover of aesthetically beautiful fantasy imagery and strongly relate to the feminine, I am also a realist and feel strongly about issues facing how women are treated in society and mass environmental destruction. I come from a long line of strong women activists and environmentalists who suffered at the hands of men, and so if I am going to make work, for me, it is important to me that it explores these themes and holds some kind of message and meaning for others to consider when they look at these works. There is also always some kind of beauty in the darkness, this is something I have had to learn and lean into over the years, that the darkness doesn’t have to be only the fear & dread that comes with the human experience.

Can you take us through how you go about creating a new piece from start to finish?

Whilst planning this body of work, I was unable to go to the shops to source new materials due to lockdowns. I dug the gold netted material out of my fabric box. It became the thread that tied both the female form and underwater still life images for Orpheus together. I planned a week-long trip to Wilsons Promontory National Park, southeast of Melbourne, during a window between lockdowns. My subject and I spent our days driving, scouting, waiting… then shooting, during the small windows of the right light.

We would work at dawn, rising at 4am to venture out when there was no one else around. Then again at dusk when all the tourists had finally gone home. I like to work intensely for many consecutive days, to fully immerse myself in the process. I find the combination of pushing my mind and body to the limit with no distractions and building momentum, takes the work to a different place. It helps me to enter a deeper, more focused frame of mind, which wouldn’t happen if I shot a day here or there.

Orpheus was the first time I was working with the ocean tides, so it added a whole extra layer of challenges, as we had to ensure we didn’t get trapped with camera equipment when the tide came in.

I spent many months in post-production, working on the images and going through a series of test prints together with my printer, before the ten final large scale prints were hung for my solo exhibition in the gallery.

You use elements like fabric and hair to obscure certain features and draw attention to others. How do you select your props? What kind of processes do those go through to be ready for your photographs?

I am always collecting and searching for vintage fabrics, I either hire them or find them in op shops, or if I am looking for something specifically, I purchase them online. Wigs are often hired from my favourite costume shop. Being out in the bush without an assistant doesn’t allow for any steaming or organisation of any kind, so I pull things out whilst on location to see what will work best for that particular landscape.

Your work often draws on the stark contrast between darkness and light to draw attention to specific visual elements. What inspires that contrast?

Paintings are some of my biggest inspirations. I recall flipping through books on Monet, Rembrandt, Caravaggio, and painters from the Pre-Raphaelite era like John William Waterhouse during my years at photography school, they have obviously left a visual imprint on me. The rich colours that emerge from the velvety blackness – the passionate reds, emerald greens, sapphire blues – the harmony and discord, beauty and decay found in so many masterpieces are themes I keep returning to. The atmosphere in my own work can often be both gloomy and tranquil, marbled skin luminous in the dark landscapes offers a contrasting portrait of women, both strong and vulnerable.

My work touches on the fragility and acute vulnerability of our natural world and the devastating impact of humans on our planet. It also questions feminine stereotypes, allowing vulnerability, strength, power, myth, darkness and light to all co-exist.

What do you hope viewers will see when they look at your work?

My work touches on the fragility and acute vulnerability of our natural world and the devastating impact of humans on our planet. It also questions feminine stereotypes, allowing vulnerability, strength, power, myth, darkness and light to all co-exist. I hope that my work can be both a reminder of the magical beauty of nature and also point to an awakening from consumerism and capitalism. We all need to reconnect with nature to be able to discover our true selves. I love this quote by Nina Simone, “You can’t help it. An artists’ duty, as far as I’m concerned, is to reflect the times.”

In addition to your artistic focus on the divine feminine and complexities of feminine identity, you’re also an accomplished still life photographer. What inspires your work with objects?

I get high on the huge old realist oil paintings in museums. It’s like a kind of time travel experiencing these images, so I guess it makes sense that my work leans into this timeless aesthetic. I love to ruminate on the beauty of old-world impressions of nature. I draw inspiration from paintings by the old Dutch masters that I have loved for years, many of these are images of flowers symbolising beauty, nobility and prosperity, which is a major influence in my still life work.

I’ve also been influenced by my mother, a botanical painter who hung paintings of flowers in my childhood home, and my grandmother who liked to collect precious found objects. My still life arrangements often at first appear to be beautifully arranged underwater scenes decorated with Rembrandt-esque blooms. But upon closer inspection, you’ll notice added pieces of litter that literally choke some of the floral arrangements, and the murky blackness that imparts a sense of loneliness. It’s a direct comment on consumerism, human darkness and the rampant quest for prosperity. Prosperity has typically been lauded as something to desire and celebrate, yet now more than ever, the unpleasant complexities of wealth and indulgence are apparent. We nonchalantly poison the environment in pursuit of it.

Is there any image in your repertoire that holds special meaning for you? What about that image do you connect with?

I am not sure that I have a specific favourite image, I have a love-hate relationship with my work, some days I admire it, some days find it hard to connect to. Sometimes it can take me years to like a series. At the moment, I do actually love ‘Where Dreams Inhabit’; I love how the gold threads shimmers out from the darkness, how she looks like she has webbed-fingers, and the way the fabric makes it look like she has an old-world helmet of gold sparkles.

What equipment do you work with to craft your photos?

I use a Canon Mark IV or 5DSR, a sturdy tripod, a stepladder, and a bunch of different lights to experiment with.

Do you have anything exciting planned for the future? What can our readers look forward to seeing from you next?

I am about to embark on creating a new photographic series for a solo exhibition opening in Sydney in 2023. There may be some more exciting news coming soon but it’s still a secret!

What advice would you give to new artists who are just beginning in your medium?

Shoot at every chance that you have and don’t look to other photographers for inspiration too much. Find your own voice.

Why did you enter the Beautiful Bizarre Magazine Art Prize?

I have entered the Beautiful Bizarre Magazine Art Prize for many years and have been fortunate enough to have been a finalist previously and had a feature and interview in the magazine. I am a huge supporter and fan of this art prize and thank them for supporting my work.

To have acknowledgement from this art community and be in the company of so many incredible artists is a great honour.

What do you feel you have gained from this experience?

To have acknowledgement from this art community and be in the company of so many incredible artists is a great honour. Having my work exhibited at the Halycon Days exhibition at Modern Eden Gallery in California is so exciting!

Would you recommend it and encourage others to enter? If so, why?
I would highly recommend entering the Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize, they have such a broad range of different artists and categories, with such a high standard of work and wonderful prizes.

Lilli Waters Social Media Accounts

Website | Instagram | Facebook

The post Images from the Ethereum: The Striking and Enigmatic Photography of Lilli Waters appeared first on Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.

Ron Hicks bridges the gap between two polarizing art styles with true sophistication. He’s cultivated a style that blends the intricacy and detail of realism with the looser, more gestural brush strokes of abstract. His current work is devoid of traditional backgrounds, instead, he opts for a minimalistic canvas full of expressive strokes of various hues. These gestural strokes melt into realistic portraiture as delicate skin, softly paint lips and luscious hair emerges from the canvas. Eyes that could tell a thousand different stories of their own gaze upon the viewer with curiosity. As the viewer asks themselves what this artwork means to them, the painting stares back awaiting an answer.

Born in Columbus, Ohio in 1965, Ron Hicks is an American oil painter who currently specialises in abstract realism. Hicks has been drawing for as long as he can remember and found a great deal of comfort in art throughout the tougher times of his childhood. At school he found himself in the art room surrounded by people who helped nurture his artistic talents. When he was 16 years old Hicks began attending classes at Columbus College of Art and Design and was awarded a scholarship there which he attended for two years before transferring to Colorado Institute of Art to study commercial art.

Hicks began his career as a representational artist with a traditional approach to painting, which was reminiscent of the styles cultivated by the old 19th-century masters. Whilst Hicks has been exhibiting his work all across the United States since 1993, his style and approach to painting have changed quite drastically into what we now recognise as his current body of work. Instead of keeping to a more traditional approach, he’s branched out into a more expressive and experimental style that draws from his own emotions and experiences in life.

Recently Ron Hicks found himself in the spotlight in Beautiful Bizarre’s Art Prize as his painting titled “Amber Eve” won him the top spot in the RAYMAR Traditional Art Award. The painting sits at a size of 48″ x 36″ as is done using oils on a birch wood panel.

My dialogue on the canvas is out there for the world to see. All of the passages, markings, scrapings, etc. mean something to me emotionally and directly relate specifically to each piece. I don’t speak a whole lot about what these things mean to me. Truthfully, I feel it’s irrelevant because I see my paintings as an open book.

Interview With Ron Hicks

A big congratulations to you on your win! I’d love to learn more about your winning piece “Amber Eve”. What was the inspiration behind this painting?

As with most of my paintings, “Amber Eve” started out very abstractly. Unlike how I approached my paintings early in my career, there are no preliminary sketches – I just start painting. Some of my initial passages or markings are intuitive, and non-objective in nature. I’d like to think of this as the ‘opening of dialogue’ where I am searching myself emotionally and spiritually, asking the work to tell me where to go. I feel there is always going to be a figurative aspect or a series of abstract shapes that are recognizable, as I [personally] like to refer to them. As for the inspiration for “Amber Eve”, I’d have to say it’s a byproduct of this process. Most of my recent paintings are born from my response to connection — i.e., things that are harmonious — and humanity.  

Why did you decide to enter the Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize?

I’ve been a huge fan of Beautiful Bizarre Magazine for quite some time. I’ve enjoyed the content and follow them on IG. It’s been difficult to place my work categorically because it has facets that could belong to a number of artistic disciplines. When I saw the call for Art Prize, I thought it’d be a great fit for my work because of the magazine’s diverse and eclectic content.  

What made you decide that this was the piece you wanted to submit for the Art Prize?

I decided to submit “Amber Eve” for consideration for Art Prize because I felt it speaks to the core of what I believe I most want to convey: My truth. Also, I want to create an open dialogue about the painting.  

Your paintings, especially your faces, feel so delicate, organic, and effortless. What kind of painting techniques do you use to get such a soft and free-flowing finish?

I’m not sure I can say there’s a specific painting technique I use when painting faces. I tend to treat the face the same way I do while expressing all of the shapes in my works. The face is just another shape. There’s a specific placement, balance, and treatment for all of the elements harmoniously that I try to achieve in every composition. I will add this, I have yet to find a way to create some of the things I achieve emotionally with figurative shapes in a non-objective way. But I’ll keep on trying!

Faces are a vital part of your work and many of your subjects gaze intently at the viewer, would you say the face, especially the eyes, are the window to the soul?

The face is a vital component in my current body of work. As aforementioned, I find that the figurative shapes often open up a different emotional avenue in the works that take the expressions to a place I’m not able to achieve non-objectively.   

I look at the adage “The eyes are the window to one’s soul” a couple of ways. From biblical scripture to Shakespeare to the present day, time and again, it’s been said that ‘seeing in one’s eyes can tell you what a person thinks or feels’ [paraphrased]. I can also make a case that the face or eyes can be a point of reflection for the viewer, perhaps inspiring one to look introspectively, for self-examination. 

Unlike how I approached my paintings early in my career, there are no preliminary sketches – I just start painting. Some of my initial passages or markings are intuitive, and non-objective in nature. I’d like to think of this as the ‘opening of dialogue’ where I am searching myself emotionally and spiritually, asking the work to tell me where to go.

What challenges did you face when working on “Amber Eve”?

There really weren’t any challenges I can think of during the course of working on “Amber Eve”. I try to make it a point to only work on a painting when I feel I should be working on it. When challenges do arise, it’s usually when I’m operating from a place of fear, not trusting and second-guessing my intuitive meanderings on canvas. These moments were more frequent at the beginning of my quest, many years ago, to find out who I am as an artist. I believe it’s difficult to know what you should be doing unless you address this. You have to know you. 

I understand that your work is emotionally driven, and you often pull from your own life story and memories to craft your paintings. What does “Amber Eve” mean to you as a piece of work?

My dialogue on the canvas is out there for the world to see. All of the passages, markings, scrapings, etc. mean something to me emotionally and directly relate specifically to each piece. I don’t speak a whole lot about what these things mean to me. Truthfully, I feel it’s irrelevant because I see my paintings as an open book. I encourage the viewer to engage and have their own relationship with the work, drawing their own conclusions. I truly believe I shouldn’t dictate or influence how someone should respond to my work.

Seek to understand who you are as a person and an artist.

What do you feel you have gained from participating in the Art Prize?

Anytime one receives recognition at any level, from a prestigious organization such as this, it comes with a sense of accomplishment and pride. I’m honored and grateful.   

Would you recommend it and encourage others to enter the Art Prize? If so, why?

Absolutely! The Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize is first class and I have nothing but great things to say about them. I’d encourage anyone who has a voice — no matter your artistic contribution — to enter. You never know what could become of entering!

You’ve accomplished so much throughout your career; you’ve experimented with painting and have found your own signature style. If given the opportunity to chat with your younger self when they were first starting out as an artist what words of wisdom would you bestow upon them?

This will sound redundant but if I could chat with my younger self or someone just starting out I’d say this: 

Seek to understand who you are as a person and an artist. This will not be an overnight process, however, I believe this is vital to understanding yourself stylistically. To me, one’s style is really a byproduct. Your art is really you. If you work on you, your path will be clearer.

When you’re not painting, what do you like to get up to?

When I’m not painting, I enjoy playing bass guitar and working in my wood shop, and of course, spending time with my wife. None of which I’ve had much time to do lately. Lol. Thankfully, my wife is my business partner, and we work closely together so at least I do get to spend a little bit of time with her.

What’s next for you? Do you have any exciting projects coming up that you can tell our readers a bit about?

Most of my time will be working on my 2023 and 2024 exhibitions. I do have some larger personal works in the making in the 8” x 12” range. Also, I have a couple of projects I’m working on that I can’t reveal at this time so stay tuned!  

Ron Hicks Social Media Accounts

Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook

The post The Intuitive and Expressive Work of Ron Hicks appeared first on Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.

Halcyon Days: A period of tranquility and happiness, often nostalgic, used to describe an idyllic time in the past that is remembered. 

An exhibition to remember

This exhibition marks our fifth curated show with Beautiful Bizarre Magazine and we are always so thrilled to host Danijela Krha Purssey’s vision and esteemed artist selection at the gallery. ‘Halcyon Days’ is no exception, bringing together over 80 top contemporary artists from all over the world in an uplifting and positive theme. It’s exactly what our gallery patrons and really, the world as a whole, needs right now.

Kim Larson, Modern Eden Gallery Director

Once again, I am incredibly grateful to Gallery Director’s Kim Larson & Bradley Platz for their continued support of Beautiful Bizarre Magazine. Their incredible passion and dedication to the arts is uplifting and matches our own ethos. It is always a pleasure to work with you. You are both a huge inspiration – thank you!

Of course, my deepest gratitude also goes to the 80+ artists that have contributed work to this exhibition. This also includes the winners of the 2022 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize. Myself and my team have all been blown away by the calibre of the work! Take a peek at all the photographs from the opening reception, installation, and Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize Award presentation here.

2022 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize – Award Presentation

Thank you, THANK YOU, a million thank yous to everyone involved in bringing this exhibition to life, including my amazing Beautiful Bizarre Magazine team. This has been another huge success and I feel incredibly grateful! If you are interested in seeing the entire exhibition online or purchasing any of the works you can do so via the Modern Eden Gallery website now.

The exhibition closes on December 3, 2022. If you would like to see the exhibition in person, please email Kim Larson to make an appointment.

Exhibiting artists, including the Winners of the 2022 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize

Alessandra Maria, Alexandra Manukyan, Allison Reimold, Andi Soto, Andie Taylor, Anna Karvounari [2022 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize, Photography Award 3rd Prize Winner] Annie Montgomerie, Basia Wesolowska, Ben Ashton, Bradley Platz, Brian Mashburn, Brittany Ryan, Calvin Ma, Carolynda Macdonald, Chie Shimizu [2022 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize, Sculpture Award 1st Prize Winner] Chie Yoshii, Chris Guest, Clairy Laurence, Colleen Southwell, Crystal Morey, Daniel Bilmes, Darian Mederos, Darya Dolgareva, Dewi Plass, Ebony Russell, Edith Lebeau, Erica Rose Levine, Erika Sanada, Forest Rogers, Hannah Flowers [2022 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize, Traditional Art Award 3rd Prize Winner], Heidi Taillefer, Hikari Shimoda, Hiroshi Hayakawa, Jason Mowry, Jennifer Allnutt, Jennifer Bruce [2022 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize, Digital Art Award 1st Prize Winner], Jenny Boot [2022 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize, Photography Award 1st Prize Winner], Jessica Dalva, Jon Ching, Jordi Diaz Alama, Jorge Vascano [2022 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize, Sculpture Award 3rd Prize Winner], Juli About, Juliet Nneka [2022 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize, Digital Art Award 3rd Prize Winner], June Stratton, Justin M Zielke, Kelsey Beckett, Kent Williams, Kevin Peterson, Kim Slate, Kisung Koh, Kremena Chipilova [2022 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize, Traditional Art Award 2nd Prize Winner], Kristin Kwan [2022 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize, Grand Prize Winner], Kristine & Colin Poole, Kseniia Boko, Lavely Miller, Leilani Bustamante, Lilli Waters [2022 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize, Photography Award 2nd Prize Winner], Lindsey Carr, Makoto Chi, Marcela Bolívar [2022 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize, Digital Art Award 2nd Prize Winner], Martine Johanna, Mary Jane Ansell, Mary Syring, Nadezda, Naoto Hattori, Natalia Fabia, Nicole Evans, Olga Esther, Pablo Santibañez, Paul Neberra, Robin Whiteman, Rodrigo Luff, Ron Hicks [2022 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize, Traditional Art Award 1st Prize Winner], Sandra Yagi, Sarah Joncas, Shana Levenson, Sharon England, Soey Milk, Stephanie Kilgast, Stephanie Rew, Susannah Montague, Tania Rivilis, Tina Yu, Troy Brooks, Yoko d’Holbachie.

Enjoy some of the wonderful pieces from the exhibition!

Kisung Ko
“Magic Gathering”, Oil on canvas, 24” x 24″

Jessica Dalva [2019 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize, 2nd Prize Sculpture Award Winner]
“Water’s Edge”, Mixed media sculpture: polymer clay, epoxy clay, acrylic, vintage velvet, resin, rhinestones, crystal beads, wire, acetate, and mohair, 15 x 10 x 12″ 

Kevin Peterson
“Charged”, Oil on panel, 12.5 x 16.5″ 

Martine Johanna
“Alcy-One”, Acrylic on panel, 31.5 x 24”

Ebony Russell
“Enchanted Kingdom” (9 pieces), Hand piped porcelain, glaze, and mother of pearl lustre, 35 x 16 x 24″

Yoko d’Holbachie
“Secret Stash”, Acrylic on wooden blockboard, 16 x 16 x 1″

Chié Shimizu [2022 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize, 1st Prize Sculpture Award Winner]
“Head No.4 (Ko-Omote Gold)”, Ultra-cal 30, plaster, seashell powder, pigments, gold leaf, 9 x 5.5 x 8″

Ron Hicks [2022 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize, 1st Prize Traditional Art Award Winner]
“Modal Harmony”, Oil on cradled panel, 27.25 x 24″

Stéphanie Kilgast
“Plastic Play”, Mixed media on reclaimed plastic toy, 4 x 5 x 4” 

Chie Yoshii
“The Dream”, Oil on canvas, 18 x 24” 

Jorge Vascano [2022 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize, 3rd Prize Sculpture Award Winner]
“Silence”, Laminated wood, 18 x 15.25 x 3.5″ 

Leilani Bustamante
“Remembrance”, Acrylic on panel, 11 x 14” 

Colin and Kristine Poole [2020 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize, 1st Prize Sculpture Award Winner]
“Dove Dreams of Flying”, Ceramic, cold finish, 20 x 4.5 x 3.5″

Jenny Boot [2022 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize, 1st Prize Photography Award Winner]
“Origin”, Fine Art op dibond – Hahnemuhle Photo Rag Bright White, 17 x 22″

Kristin Kwan [2022 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize, Grand Prize Winner]
“Gulf”, Oil on panel, 30 x 24″

Juliet Nneka [2022 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize, 3rd Prize Digital Art Award Winner]
“Apolysis”, Digital artwork on archival rag paper, 12 x 16″

Tania Rivilis
“Floating on the Boundless Realms of Nostalgia”, Oil on OSB, 16 x 24″ 

Lilli Waters [2022 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize, 2nd Prize Photography Award Winner]
“Where Dreams Inhabit”, Archival pigment print on fibre rag, 16.5 x 25″

Sharon England
“Beat Surrender”, Watercolour and acrylic on Arches watercolour paper, 22 x 30″.

Troy Brooks
Angel Eyes, Oil on panel, 24 x 18″

The post Halcyon Days appeared first on Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.

Now it’s time for the biggest reveal yet! Below we unveil the Grand Prize Winner of the 2022 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize, the seven Honourable Mentions selected by each of this year’s wonderful gold sponsors, Directors of Modern Eden Gallery in San Francisco, and our Editor-in-Chief Danijela Krha Purssey, PLUS the Winner of the ArtStation People’s Choice Award, which saw our amazing community contribute over 11,586 votes from 106 different countries!

Thank you to everyone that voted for the People’s Choice Award. We sincerely appreciate your thoughts and opinions!

As an international ambassador of the arts, Beautiful Bizarre Magazine’s long term vision for the Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize is to make contemporary representational art accepted, valued and respected, alongside traditional “high brow art” in homes and cultures around the world. Now it its 5th year, the Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize already surpasses all known Australian and many international prizes both in volume and caliber of entries!

Our Thanks

I would like to once again sincerely thank the 2022 Jury Panel: Dan dos Santos (Digital Art juror), Martin Wittfooth (Traditional Art juror), Joan Coderch and Javier Malavia of CODERCH & MALAVIA (Sculpture jurors), and Bella Kotak [1st Prize winner of the Photography award 2021] (Photography juror), as well as the Directors of Modern Eden Gallery, Kim Larson and Bradley Platz, and Founder of Quirky Fox, Vicki Fox. I would also like to thank our amazing major partners: INPRNT, RAYMAR, Yasha Young Projects, iCanvas and ArtStation for their support of this year’s Prize. It is through their generous contributions that we are able to assist the Winners to grow and develop their practice through cash and amazing product and service prizes, and of course receive the visibility their work deserves.

Finally I would like to thank the Beautiful Bizarre team for their dedication and hard work over the many months it takes to put the Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize together and administer it.

On behalf of Beautiful Bizarre Magazine and the global arts community: thank you for once again championing the Arts. This kind of support and backing of the representational visual arts is important now more than ever – so thank you, we are deeply grateful!

Beautiful Bizarre Magazine will continue our work to ensure that the 2023 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize adds even more value to artists globally. The 2023 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize will open on 1 February 2023, so to ensure you don’t miss the news, please join the email mailing list here.

‘Halcyon Days’ Exhibition

The 1st, 2nd and 3rd Prize Winners in each Award category, and the Grand Prize Winner of the 2022 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize have been invited to participate in this year’s Beautiful Bizarre Magazine exhibition ‘Halcyon Days‘, at Modern Eden Gallery in San Francisco later this year. We look forward to presenting their work as part of this prestigious annual exhibition! These works will be shared in the coming weeks leading up to the opening.

‘Halcyon Days’ opens on 5 November and the Editor-in-Chief and Deputy Editor of Beautiful Bizarre Magazine will be in attendance. We hope to see many of you at the special opening reception!

The entire exhibition will also also be available to enjoy online. If you would like to be added to the Collector’s Preview, please email Gallery Director, Kim Larson at info@moderneden.com.

Grand Prize Winner of the 2022 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize

The Grand Prize Winner will receive:

• US$13,500 cash prize! Generously donated by sponsors RAYMAR, INPRNT, iCanvas, Yasha Young Projects and ArtStation.
• Receive a beautiful, specially commissioned glass art award trophy.
• A coupon to enjoy Linktree PRO for free for 12 months.
• The opportunity to exhibit in the prestigious annual Beautiful Bizarre Magazine exhibition alongside 80+ of the world’s best contemporary representational artists at Modern Eden Gallery, in San Francisco, CA, USA.
• Exposure to a successful commercial gallery’s collector base with the opportunity to sell their work
• Print editorial in Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.
• Exclusive in-depth interview published on the Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize and Beautiful Bizarre Magazine websites + shared on social media.
• 12 month social media advertising package (Beautiful Bizarre Magazine: 1 million+ followers across all social platforms).
• A year’s worth of inspiration – a print subscription to Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.
• + most importantly, receive worldwide exposure!

Winner of the ArtStation People’s Choice Award

The ArtStation People’s Choice Award winner will receive:

• US$2,000 cash, generously donated by ArtStation. ArtStation provides you with a simple, yet powerful way to show your portfolio and be seen by the right people in the industry. Host your website, sell your products and learn.
• 12 month social media advertising package (Beautiful Bizarre Magazine: 1 million+ followers across all socials platforms)
• Exclusive in-depth interview published on the Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize and Beautiful Bizarre Magazine websites + shared on social media
• A year’s worth of inspiration – a print subscription to Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.
• + most importantly, receive worldwide exposure!!

Winners & Honourable Mentions

So without further ado, it is with great pleasure and much pride that we share with you the Grand Prize Winner of the 2022 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize, the Honourable Mentions, and the Winner of the ArtStation People’s Choice Award.

Grand Prize Winner

2022 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize

Kristin Kwan

Born and resides in: USA

“The Golden Afternoon”, Oil on panel, 36″ x 24″

Kristin Kwan is an artist who makes illustrative paintings and drawings. She works primarily in oil on panel, her subjects being nature, animals, and the human figure. Inspired in turns by the natural world, and by legends and myths, she uses elements of fantasy and allegory to explore themes of life, death, and rebirth. Kristin lives in Lincoln, NE, USA.

“The Golden Afternoon”: There is a time of day cherished by photographers, the golden hour, when the sun slants in a dramatic way and colours are heightened and there is an intensity to the atmosphere. I find this time of day to bring painful anxiety, the golden hour hurts. But to sit in that buzzing distraction, sweetness.

Honourable Mentions

Kim Anderson

“Only Breath and Shadows”, Ink, charcoal and graphite on paper, 100cm x 64cm

Awarded by Beautiful Bizarre Magazine’s Editor-in-Chief Danijela Krha Purssey

Kesja Tabaczuk

“Dove and Crow”, Oil on linen, 70cm x 60cm

Awarded by RAYMAR

Ruby Hyde

“This is No Place”, Digital photography (Sony A7RIII)

Awarded by INPRNT

Nikolina Petolas

“Whispers”, Digital collage (Canon 5DSR, Procreate, Photoshop)

Awarded by iCanvas

Georgie Seccull

“She Who Demands Devotion”, Treated stainless steel, 18″ x 32″ x 19″

Awarded by Yasha Young Projects

Win Wallace

“Parishioner #8″, Charcoal, conte’, pencils, 36″ x 24”

Awarded by Modern Eden Gallery

Francesca Resta

“Ancient Stones”, Digital painting (Corel Painter)

Awarded by ArtStation

ArtStation People’s Choice Award Winner

Alex Peter Idoko

“Freedom’s Rhythm”, Fire, razorblade, sandpaper, charcoal, wood, 47″ x 36″

Congratulations to all of the Winners and Honourable Mentions!

The Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize is administered by Australian based, international contemporary art magazine, Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.

The 2022 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize

The post Winner of the 2022 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize Announced + People’s Choice Winner & Honourable Mentions! appeared first on Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.

Once again, we would like to thank all of the artists that entered, sharing their work and their artistic passion with us. It was such a pleasure to immerse myself in the work of so many creatives from all corners of the globe and read their inspirational stories.

As Beautiful Bizarre Magazine’s Editor-in-Chief I have the pleasure and honour of curating each issue of the magazine and our yearly exhibitions. The many wonderful and talented Art Prize entries we received continue to give me a plethora of new ideas and choices to pursue in future. So thank you again for your interest in the Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize, I very much hope to see how your work has grown and developed in next year’s Prize.

I would also like to sincerely thank the 2022 Jury Panel, particularly the Traditional Art Category Judge Martin Wittfooth, who gave his time and expertise to the panel. Additionally I warmly thank the other Category Judges: Joan Coderch and Javier Malavia of CODERCH & MALAVIA (Sculpture jurors), Bella Kotak [1st Prize winner of the Photography award 2021] (Photography juror), and Dan dos Santos (Digital Art juror), as well as the Directors of Modern Eden Gallery, Kim Larson and Bradley Platz, and Founder of Quirky Fox, Vicki Fox.

I would also like to thank our major partners: INPRNT, RAYMAR, Yasha Young Projects, iCanvas and ArtStation; the Beautiful Bizarre team for their dedication and hard work on behalf of the prize and winners all-year round, and of course to my partner, Beautiful Bizarre Magazine‘s Co-Founder Richard Purssey. The judging process was extremely difficult with an incredible amount noteworthy entries, so thank you again!

Our sincere thanks to this year’s Traditional Art Award sponsors listed below. It is through their generosity that the Traditional Art Award Winners will be able to enrich their practice.

RAYMAR Traditional Art Award

The RAYMAR Traditional Art Award, 1st prize winner will receive:

• $3,000 cash, generously donated by RAYMAR, creators of the finest panels! Panels are their passion. They craft their panels with the world’s finest materials to serve as the foundation for your artwork. 
• $1,500 cash, generously donated by SmArt School, providing superior online art mentorships since 2011, where you learn from professional artists. 
• $1,500 cash, generously donated by Rosemary Brushes, the finest quality handmade Artists’ Brushes.
• A coupon to enjoy Linktree PRO for free for 12 months.
• Receive a beautiful, specially commissioned glass art award trophy.
• The opportunity to exhibit in the prestigious Beautiful Bizarre Magazine exhibition at Modern Eden Gallery, in San Francisco, CA USA, alongside 80+ of the world’s best contemporary representational artists.
• Exposure to a successful commercial gallery’s collector base with the opportunity to sell their work.
• 3 month social media advertising package (Beautiful Bizarre Magazine: 1 million+ followers across all social platforms).
• Exclusive in-depth interview published on the Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize and Beautiful Bizarre Magazine websites + shared on social media.
• A year’s worth of inspiration – a print subscription to Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.
• + most importantly, receive worldwide exposure!

2nd and 3rd prize winners will receive:

• A coupon to enjoy Linktree PRO for free for 12 months.
• The opportunity to exhibit in the prestigious Beautiful Bizarre Magazine exhibition at Modern Eden Gallery, in San Francisco, CA USA, alongside 80+ of the world’s best contemporary representational artists.
• Exposure to a successful commercial gallery’s collector base with the opportunity to sell their work
• An exclusive in-depth interview published on the Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize and Beautiful Bizarre Magazine websites.
• A year’s worth of inspiration – a print subscription to Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.
• + most importantly, receive worldwide exposure!

Congratulations to the 2022 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize RAYMAR Traditional Art Award Winners: Hannah Flowers, Kremena Chipilova, and Ron Hicks!

3rd Prize Winner: Hannah Flowers

3rd Prize Winner

Hannah Flowers

Born: Australia. Currently resides: Scotland.

“Devouring of the Odalisque”, Oil on wood panel, 50″ x 70″

Hannah Flowers is a self taught artist from Tasmania, Australia, currently residing in Scotland, UK. She began her artistic career as a tattoo artist and is well known in this field. In recent years she has turned her attention to painting, to be able to create work of a more personal nature. She combines the design skills learned from many years of tattooing with a love of the unique and subtle textures and colours that oil paint can achieve. She is currently exploring the push and pull between the grotesque and the beautiful within her work.

“Devouring of the Odalisque“: As the hunter’s daughter grew rich and succulent on the flesh of her fellow forest dwellers, she scarcely suspected her slothfully tenderized luck. Now in the forest’s fortune, she passes back those wantonly pilfered nutrients; returning them to the blissful ignorance of life’s humble embrace.

2nd Prize Winner: Kremena Chipilova

2nd Prize Winner

Kremena Chipilova

Born: Bulgaria. Currently resides: Finland.

“Her Shadows Caress Me”, Oil on panel, 40cm x 30cm

Kremena Chipilova is an artist who paints in oils and works in the areas of fantasy and magic realism. In her art, she likes to include the promise of the supernatural, the encounter of something that is unknown, that attracts and maybe scares us. Sometimes she wants to convey a strange feeling of disquiet. She draws inspiration and ideas from a variety of sources – from the delicate beauty and mystery found in nature, to the fairy and folk tales, myths and legends of mankind. The exploration of these themes in literature captures her imagination and, combined with her personal experiences, evokes feelings that she wants to put in her paintings.

“Her Shadows Caress Me”: Her Shadows Caress Me is a painting that can be interpreted in many ways and I prefer that people see it with their own eyes. The main goal is to evoke an intimate, serene moment that has been a long time coming; or a memory, shadow of one.

1st Prize Winner: Ron Hicks

1st Prize Winner

Ron Hicks

Born and currently resides: USA.

“Amber Eve”, Oil on birch panel, 48″ x 36″

Ron Hicks’ career began as a representational artist with a traditional approach that closely resembled the style of the 19th Century masters. His current body of work is a blend of several disciplines, marrying abstraction with realism, drawing on experiences and emotions to galvanize his thoughts, then transferring the collection of these to his substrate. Hicks uses texture, abstract passages and emotive movements to strike an emotional response and allow the viewer to derive at his or her own inference. When asked about his current body of work Hicks says, “We have to ask ourselves, ‘What do we glean when we look through a metaphorical lens? And, what is perceived of us through the lenses of others? Does a lens hide or enhance? Do we arrive at the same conclusion and have we processed the same information equally?’ If the only lens you’re looking through is obscured, then is that the actual truth… is it really YOUR truth?”

“Amber Eve”: How do we shield ourselves while yet allowing ourselves to be vulnerable? Can these two things exist in the same space? Vulnerability requires one to take emotional risks — to uncover, so to speak. Life has an interesting way of creating defense mechanisms which become our truths.

The Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize is administered by Australian based, international contemporary art magazine, Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.

The 2022 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize

The post 2022 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize, RAYMAR Traditional Art Award Winners appeared first on Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.

Once again, we would like to thank all of the artists that entered, sharing their work and their artistic passion with us. It was such a pleasure to immerse myself in the work of so many creatives from all corners of the globe and read their inspirational stories.

As Beautiful Bizarre Magazine’s Editor-in-Chief I have the pleasure and honour of curating each issue of the magazine and our yearly exhibitions. The many wonderful and talented Art Prize entries we received continue to give me a plethora of new ideas and choices to pursue in future. So thank you again for your interest in the Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize, I very much hope to see how your work has grown and developed in next year’s Prize.

I would also like to sincerely thank the 2022 Jury Panel, particularly the Digital Art Category Judge Dan dos Santos, who gave his time and expertise to the panel. Additionally I warmly thank the other Category Judges: Martin Wittfooth (Traditional Art juror), Joan Coderch and Javier Malavia of CODERCH & MALAVIA (Sculpture jurors), and Bella Kotak [1st Prize winner of the Photography award 2021] (Photography juror), as well as the Directors of Modern Eden Gallery, Kim Larson and Bradley Platz, and Founder of Quirky Fox, Vicki Fox.

I would also like to thank our major partners: INPRNT, RAYMAR, Yasha Young Projects, iCanvas and ArtStation; the Beautiful Bizarre team for their dedication and hard work on behalf of the prize and winners all-year round, and of course to my partner, Beautiful Bizarre Magazine‘s Co-Founder Richard Purssey. The judging process was extremely difficult with an incredible amount noteworthy entries, so thank you again!

Our sincere thanks to this year’s Digital Art Award sponsors listed below. It is through their generosity that the Digital Art Award Winners will be able to enrich their practice.

iCanvas Digital Art Award

The iCanvas Digital Art Award 1st prize winner will receive:

• US$3,000 cash, generously donated by sponsor iCanvas, printers of high quality canvas art prints, priced for every lover of art.
• US$1,500 cash, generously donated by digitalprintmaker, prints and services for photographers & artists by Master Printmaker with over 20 years experience.
• A Wacom One, Creative Pen Display.  It comes with all the essentials to spice up your digital life. There’s the natural pen feel on the 13.3” screen, the included creative software – even the ability to connect to certain Android devices.
• Receive a beautiful, specially commissioned glass art Award trophy.
• A coupon to enjoy Linktree PRO for free for 12 months.
• The opportunity to exhibit in the prestigious Beautiful Bizarre Magazine exhibition at Modern Eden Gallery, in San Francisco, CA USA, alongside 80+ of the world’s best contemporary representational artists.
• Exposure to a successful commercial gallery’s collector base with the opportunity to sell their work.
• 3 month social media advertising package (Beautiful Bizarre Magazine: 1 million+ followers across all socials platforms).
• Exclusive in-depth interview published on the Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize and Beautiful Bizarre Magazine websites + shared on social media.
• A year’s worth of inspiration – a print subscription to Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.
• + most importantly, receive worldwide exposure!

2nd and 3rd prize winners will receive:

• A coupon to enjoy Linktree PRO for free for 12 months.
• The opportunity to exhibit in the prestigious Beautiful Bizarre Magazine exhibition at Modern Eden Gallery, in San Francisco, CA USA, alongside 80+ of the world’s best contemporary representational artists.
• Exposure to a successful commercial gallery’s collector base with the opportunity to sell their work.
• 2nd Prize: Wacom Intuos Pro Medium which offers you more natural creative control than ever before. Combined with the super-sensitive Wacom Pro Pen 2, Wacom’s sleek new tablet looks and feels amazing.
• 3rd Prize: Wacom Intuos, with a light, super-accurate pen and free downloadable software to suit your style; Wacom Intuos is built to bring your wildest ideas to life.
• An exclusive in-depth interview published on the Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize and Beautiful Bizarre Magazine websites.
• A year’s worth of inspiration – a print subscription to Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.
• + most importantly, receive worldwide exposure!

Congratulations to the 2022 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize iCanvas Digital Art Award Winners: Juliet Nneka, Marcela Bolívar, and Jennifer Bruce!

3rd Prize Winner: Juliet Nneka

3rd Prize Winner

Juliet Nneka

Born: Nigeria. Currently resides: The Netherlands.

“Aftergrowth”, Procreate and iPad Air

Juliet Nneka – a.k.a. NK Jules – is a Nigerian born artist living in the Netherlands. As a digital painter, her work addresses escapism and navigates femininity through the use of surrealistic florals, biomorphism, portraiture, and figuration. She makes use of textures and some elements of mark-making to preserve the traditional feel within her digital paintings. Furthermore, she feels that the connection and emphasis between blackness and gentleness is rare in western art circles. She does not let this bother her; Juliet simply ensures that she comes as she is.

“Aftergrowth“: This is a painting that served as a confrontation between the past and the present. It is obvious when a surface has been damaged. Yet, leaves can grow through the cracks and continue the song of life through the partition. With hope, we slowly become entangled within new blooms.

2nd Prize Winner: Marcela Bolívar

2nd Prize Winner

Marcela Bolívar

Born: Brazil. Currently resides: Germany.

“Chthonic Tide”, Wacom Intuos Pro, Nikon750, Photoshop, Painting, Textures

Marcela Bolívar is digital artist from Colombia, currently based in Germany. Currently she works as an illustrator for various international publishing houses while developing further her personal work. Her images aim to disengage photomontage of its technologic and automated nature, pushing the technical limits of photography and digital media as they are merged with a variety of pictorial expressions. The mixture of diverse media such as painting, photo, 3d elements and sculpture brings forth a personal interpretation of the world that lingers between reality and fiction, disguise and truth.

“Chthonic Tide”: An artwork about the creative force incarnated in the tarot figure of the Magus. She is a servant of the Great Work and her influence touches earth and air.

1st Prize Winner: Jennifer Bruce

1st Prize Winner

Jennifer Bruce

Born and resides in: USA.

“A Particular Blindness”, Procreate, iPad Pro, Apple Pencil

Jennifer Bruce is a Creative and detail-oriented professional artist with a passion for storytelling, experiencing new adventures, and learning new ways to bring beauty to the world. Her style of art fuses her experience working with traditional art with the flexibility of digital painting. Skilled and hardworking with 4+ years of experience as a professional artist creating book covers for independent fantasy authors and focused personal work in pursuit of a career in book cover illustration for middle-grade and young-adult fiction publishers. A graduate of The College for Creative Studies in 2019, she received a Bachelor’s in Illustration (and a minor in Concept Art), with honors and currently resides near Detroit with her husband Steven and their pets Misa (adorable kitty) and Suki (tiny gremlin-cat).

“A Particular Blindness”: This painting portrays the common unwillingness to seek professional therapy when needed. The woman holds her injured heart close, not realizing that by keeping it so protected she is preventing her own healing through the help of caring people.

The Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize is administered by Australian based, international contemporary art magazine, Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.

The 2022 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize

The post 2022 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize, iCanvas Digital Art Award Winners appeared first on Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.

Once again, we would like to thank all of the artists that entered, sharing their work and their artistic passion with us. It was such a pleasure to immerse myself in the work of so many creatives from all corners of the globe and read their inspirational stories.

As Beautiful Bizarre Magazine’s Editor-in-Chief I have the pleasure and honour of curating each issue of the magazine and our yearly exhibitions. The many wonderful and talented Art Prize entries we received continue to give me a plethora of new ideas and choices to pursue in future. So thank you again for your interest in the Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize, I very much hope to see how your work has grown and developed in next year’s Prize.

I would also like to sincerely thank the 2022 Jury Panel, particularly the Photography Category Judge Bella Kotak [1st Prize winner of the Photography award 2021], who gave her time and expertise to the panel. Additionally I warmly thank the other Category Judges: Martin Wittfooth (Traditional Art juror), Joan Coderch and Javier Malavia of CODERCH & MALAVIA (Sculpture jurors), and Dan dos Santos (Digital Art juror), as well as the Directors of Modern Eden Gallery, Kim Larson and Bradley Platz, and Founder of Quirky Fox, Vicki Fox.

I would also like to thank our major partners: INPRNT, RAYMAR, Yasha Young Projects, iCanvas and ArtStation; the Beautiful Bizarre team for their dedication and hard work on behalf of the prize and winners all-year round, and of course to my partner, Beautiful Bizarre Magazine‘s Co-Founder Richard Purssey. The judging process was extremely difficult with an incredible amount noteworthy entries, so thank you again!

Our sincere thanks to this year’s Photography Award sponsors listed below. It is through their generosity that the Photography Award Winners will be able to enrich their practice.

INPRNT Photography Award

The INPRNT Photography Award 1st prize winner will receive:

• US$3,000 cash, generously donated by INPRNT, printers of high quality art prints. INPRNT is run by artists, for artists.
• US$1,500 cash, generously donated by PoetsArtists, a diversified contemporary realism art community and publication.
• US$1,500 worth of art photography and/or Fine Art archival print reproduction from Static Medium.
• Receive a beautiful, specially commissioned glass art award trophy.
• A coupon to enjoy Linktree PRO for free for 12 months.
• The opportunity to exhibit in the prestigious Beautiful Bizarre Magazine exhibition at Modern Eden Gallery, in San Francisco, CA USA, alongside 80+ of the world’s best contemporary representational artists.
• Exposure to a successful commercial gallery’s collector base with the opportunity to sell their work.
• 3 month social media advertising package (Beautiful Bizarre Magazine: 1 million+ followers across all socials platforms)
• Exclusive in-depth interview published on the Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize and Beautiful Bizarre Magazine websites + shared on social media.
• A year’s worth of inspiration – a print subscription to Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.
• + most importantly, receive worldwide exposure!

2nd and 3rd prize winners will receive:

• A coupon to enjoy Linktree PRO for free for 12 months.
• The opportunity to exhibit in the prestigious Beautiful Bizarre Magazine exhibition at Modern Eden Gallery, in San Francisco, CA USA, alongside 80+ of the world’s best contemporary representational artists.
• Exposure to a successful commercial gallery’s collector base with the opportunity to sell their work.
• A year’s worth of inspiration – a print subscription to Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.
• An exclusive in-depth interview published on the Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize and Beautiful Bizarre Magazine websites.
• + most importantly, receive worldwide exposure!

Congratulations to the 2022 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize INPRNT Photography Award Winners: Anna Karvounari, Lilli Waters, and Jenny Boot!

3rd Prize Winner: Anna Karvounari

3rd Prize Winner

Anna Karvounari

Born and currently resides: Greece.

“The Statue”, Digital photograph (Nikon D5600 / 18-55 mm)

Anna Karvounari is a Greek born, self-taught photographer, based in Athens. She creates conceptual self-portraits and she uses the solitary female figure in her images, trying to touch on some affairs of female nature, but also to give voice on some personal feelings. Self-portraiture for her is an exercise in self-exploration. An endless internal dialogue.

“The Statue“: The Statue is a self portrait.

2nd Prize Winner: Lilli Waters

2nd Prize Winner

Lilli Waters

Born and currently resides: Australia.

“Where Dreams Inhabit”, Digital photograph (Canon 5D Mark IV, 24-70mm)

Lilli Waters is a fine arts photographer whose work explores the human condition through dramatic images of the female form in haunting, windswept landscapes. Waters makes use of translucent fabrics and long hair to obscure the identities of her subjects, suggesting that the image might be just as much a mirror for the viewer, as it is a portrait. These images initially appear to represent a romantic idea of beauty and equivalence between the fertility of the female body and the landscape. Yet in the era of ‘Me Too’ and ecological crisis, Waters’ work offers a critical feminine gaze. Her portraits allude to the conundrum of simply being in a woman’s skin: of how to express physical agency and ease in a society that constantly objectifies women and irrevocably wreaks damage on the environment.

“Where Dreams Inhabit”: This underwater feminine figure invites the viewer to embrace the unknown and awaken to the sense of wonder that lingers below the surface. While invoking a sense of entrapment, this photograph invites the viewer to move beyond darkness and towards the light.

1st Prize Winner: Jenny Boot

1st Prize Winner

Jenny Boot

Born and currently resides: Netherlands.

“Origin”, Digital photograph (Fuji GFX 50S2). Model: Norah Namuddu

Jenny Boot once started painting as a form of expression. After many wanderings, she finally chose photography. In 2012, she graduated in Amsterdam as a fashion photographer. Although she already had exhibitions in Paris and New York during her graduation year, Jenny saw herself working for the fashion magazines rather than making art. In 2015, Jenny was discovered and her work was shown at all the world’s leading art fairs. Her works are now in various prestigious collections. Jenny Boot’s work can best be described as that of a modern artist with ‘roots’ in the 17th century. Beautiful young women in the light of Rembrandt with millstone collars who are never what they seem. The Girl with a Pearl Earring by Vermeer in black on the intersection of light and dark. Boot masters the Claire obscure use of light like no other.

“Origin”: If something as small as a germinating seed can push the earth up, even move concrete out of place – what else can be done? Sprouting new life has tremendous power. But when the seed germinates, nothing remains. It has to let go of everything, give everything to bear fruit, to get up.

The Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize is administered by Australian based, international contemporary art magazine, Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.

The 2022 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize

The post 2022 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize, INPRNT Photography Award Winners appeared first on Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.

Once again, we would like to thank all of the artists that entered, sharing their work and their artistic passion with us. It was such a pleasure to immerse myself in the work of so many creatives from all corners of the globe and read their inspirational stories.

As Beautiful Bizarre Magazine’s Editor-in-Chief I have the pleasure and honour of curating each issue of the magazine and our yearly exhibitions. The many wonderful and talented Art Prize entries we received continue to give me a plethora of new ideas and choices to pursue in future. So thank you again for your interest in the Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize, I very much hope to see how your work has grown and developed in next year’s Prize.

I would also like to sincerely thank the 2022 Jury Panel, particularly the Sculpture Category Judges Joan Coderch and Javier Malavia of CODERCH & MALAVIA, who gave their time and expertise to the panel. Additionally I warmly thank the other Category Judges: Martin Wittfooth (Traditional Art juror), Bella Kotak [1st Prize winner of the Photography award 2021] (Photography juror), and Dan dos Santos (Digital Art juror), as well as the Directors of Modern Eden Gallery, Kim Larson and Bradley Platz, and Founder of Quirky Fox Gallery, Vicki Fox.

I would also like to thank our major partners: INPRNT, RAYMAR, Yasha Young Projects, iCanvas and ArtStation; the Beautiful Bizarre team for their dedication and hard work on behalf of the prize and winners all-year round, and of course to my partner, Beautiful Bizarre Magazine‘s Co-Founder Richard Purssey. The judging process was extremely difficult with an incredible amount noteworthy entries, so thank you again!

Our sincere thanks to this year’s Sculpture Award sponsors listed below. It is through their generosity that the Sculpture Award Winners will be able to enrich their practice.

Yasha Young Projects Sculpture Award

The Yasha Young Projects Sculpture Award 1st prize winner will receive:

• US$3,000 cash, generously donated by Yasha Young Projects, arts philanthropist and Executive Curatorial Director for the FOR_M, a new institution currently being developed in New York city.
• US$250 worth of supplies of your choice from Sculpey, making polymer oven-bake clays for over 50 years.
• A coupon to enjoy Linktree PRO for free for 12 months.
• Receive a beautiful, specially commissioned glass art Award trophy.
• The opportunity to exhibit in the prestigious Beautiful Bizarre Magazine exhibition at Modern Eden Gallery, in San Francisco, CA USA, alongside 80+ of the world’s best contemporary representational artists.
• Exposure to a successful commercial gallery’s collector base with the opportunity to sell their work.
• 3 month social media advertising package (Beautiful Bizarre Magazine: 1 million+ followers across all socials platforms).
• Exclusive in-depth interview published on the Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize and Beautiful Bizarre Magazine websites + shared on social media.
• A year’s worth of inspiration – a print subscription to Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.
• + most importantly, receive worldwide exposure!

2nd and 3rd prize winners will receive:

• A coupon to enjoy Linktree PRO for free for 12 months.
• The opportunity to exhibit in the prestigious Beautiful Bizarre Magazine exhibition at Modern Eden Gallery, in San Francisco, CA USA, alongside 80+ of the world’s best contemporary representational artists.
• Exposure to a successful commercial gallery’s collector base with the opportunity to sell their work
• An exclusive in-depth interview published on the Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize and Beautiful Bizarre Magazine websites.
• A year’s worth of inspiration – a print subscription to Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.
• + most importantly, receive worldwide exposure!

Congratulations to the 2022 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize Yasha Young Projects Sculpture Award Winners: Jorge Vascano, Brian Booth Craig, and Chie Shimizu!

3rd Prize Winner: Jorge Vascano

3rd Prize Winner

Jorge Vascano

Born: Peru. Currently resides: USA.

“Silence”, Laminated wood, 6″ x 4″ x 3″

Born in 1982, Lima-Peru, Jorge “Vascano” Vasquez-Elescano grew up in the tropical surroundings of Tarapoto where he initially develop his affinity for the arts. It was after moving to the US that he received formal training in various educational institutions such as: Northern Virginia Community College, Corcoran College of Art and Design, Maryland Institute College of Art and The New York Academy of Art, where he received his MFA in 2017. During that time and after, Jorge has had a solo show, and participated in numerous group and international exhibitions as well. Also he’s been awarded merit international residencies to Giverny, France, Kylemore, and Ireland in painting, and Carrara, Italy, in stone carving. Moreover, he has been published in literary journals and news articles. Lastly, had his works featured in the Golden Globe and Academy Award nominated motion picture If Beale Street Could Talk. Jorge currently resides in Virginia where he continues developing his professional practice.

“Silence“: The piece is about the uncomfortable and overwhelming Silence one can experience in the search for meaning in life. The uneasy feeling of reaching to the universe for answers, but hearing nothing in return without realizing the freedom that lies in Silence.

2nd Prize Winner: Brian Booth Craig

2nd Prize Winner

Brian Booth Craig

Born and currently resides: USA.

“Exotherm”, Bronze, 38″ x 12″ x 7″

Brian Booth Craig is a contemporary figurative sculptor who specializes in the bronze medium. Sculpting from life, Booth Craig’s work translates traditionally derived figures into contemporary icons. His nudes are imbued with a sense of agency. Mixing 21st century gestures with surprising talismans, his statues are very much of our time, despite the medium’s classical origins. Verist in nature, Booth Craig’s figures capture moments of individual self-assertion. Booth Craig holds a B.A. from Pennsylvania State University as well as an M.F.A. from the New York Academy of Art, and is an Honorary Member of the International Sculpture Center. He is a former apprentice and assistant of the painter and sculptor Audrey Flack.

“Exotherm”: Presents to the viewer a display of equipoised dichotomies: calm against fury, human nakedness against a mechanism of civilization. The pose and demeanor of the subject are intended to confront the viewer and challenge assumptions about representations of the female human form.

1st Prize Winner: Chie Shimizu

1st Prize Winner

Chie Shimizu

Born: Japan. Currently resides: USA.

“Immovable mind”, Ultra-cal, plaster, seashell powder, pigments, white gold leaf, 17″ x 12″ x 12″

Chie Shimizu was born in Japan in 1971. Shimizu’s art in the 1990s consisted of metalwork and oil painting. Since the beginning of the new millennium, her work has been predominantly in the medium of realistic figure sculpture with Japanese traditional painting, and partially with metal leaf. Shimizu earned her BFA from Tokyo University of the Arts in 1993 with a major in metal crafts, and received Salon De Printemps Prize at graduation. She had several shows of both metalworks and oil paintings in Japan, before moving to New York in 1996. She earned her MFA in sculpture from the New York Academy of Art in 2001 and received a grant from the HRH Prince of Wales and Forbes Foundation for the artist residency program in France. Her work has been exhibited in numerous venues in New York. Shimizu’s work has also been included in private collections worldwide, from the United States to Germany, Turkey, Israel, Peru, and Japan. She currently lives and works in Queens, New York.

“Immovable mind”: My oldest memory of the immovable mind is from a painting of Fudo-myo-o I saw in my grandparents’ house when I was a child. The hair that stands upward like a fire whirl is inspired by the aureole of Fudo-myo-o, which symbolizes the burning of worldly human desires to free one’s mind and body.

The Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize is administered by Australian based, international contemporary art magazine, Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.

The 2022 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize

The post 2022 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize, Yasha Young Projects Sculpture Award Winners appeared first on Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.

Make your voice heard – vote for your favourite artworks today!

The Grand Prize Winner of the 2022 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize, along with the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Prize Winners of each Award category, Honourable Mentions, and the Winner of this year’s ArtStation People’s Choice Award will be announced in mid September, after the ArtStation People’s Choice Award voting closes at midnight 9 September [Sydney Australia time].

6 Honourable Mentions will also be awarded by this year’s sponsors in their respective Award category, plus the Directors of Modern Eden Gallery, Kim Larson and Bradley Platz, and Danijela Krha Purssey the Editor-in-Chief of Beautiful Bizarre Magazine will also choose one outstanding work to be receive an Honourable Mention.

ArtStation People’s Choice Award

Who do you think should win the ArtStation People’s Choice Award? Let your voice be heard – vote for your favourite artworks from the 125 Finalists today! Everyone is invited to participate.

The ArtStation People’s Choice Award winner will receive US$2,000 cash, plus a year’s worth of social media advertising through the Beautiful Bizarre Magazine socials to ensure they are able to connect with the right audience of engaged creatives, collectors and gallerists, raise their profile, associate their work with other leading creatives, and of course to grow their social media following.

The ArtStation People’s Choice Award winner will receive:

• US$2,000 cash, generously donated by ArtStation. ArtStation provides you with a simple, yet powerful way to show your portfolio and be seen by the right people in the industry. Host your website, sell your products and learn.
• 12 month social media advertising package (Beautiful Bizarre Magazine: 1 million+ followers across all socials platforms)
• Exclusive in-depth interview published on the Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize and Beautiful Bizarre Magazine websites + shared on social media
• A year’s worth of inspiration – a print subscription to Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.
• + most importantly, receive worldwide exposure!!

Timeline

• 26 August [AEDT, Australian Eastern Daylight Time]: People’s Choice voting opened
• 9 September [AEDT, Australian Eastern Daylight Time]: People’s Choice voting closes
• Week of the 12th of September: Winners announced
• 12 Sept: Yasha Young Projects Sculpture Award Winners announced
• 13 Sept: INPRNT Photography Award Winners announced
• 14 Sept: iCanvas Digital Art Award Winners announced
• 15 Sept: RAYMAR Traditional Art Award Winners announced
• 16 Sept: Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize Grand Prize Winner, Honourable Mentions & ArtStation People’s Choice Winner announced
• 5 November – 3 December 2022: Beautiful Bizarre curated exhibition ‘Halcyon Days’ at Modern Eden Gallery, in San Francisco, CA United States. Winners are invited to participate.

The Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize is administered by Australian based, international contemporary art magazine, Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.

The 2022 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize

The post 2022 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize: ArtStation People’s Choice Award Voting – Now Open! appeared first on Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.