All in Painting
Tom pursued his natural sciences studies at the universities of Berlin, Rochester (New York), and Paris, while also attending fine arts classes at academies in each of these cities. After earning his PhD in radiation chemistry from the University of Paris, he focused on research and projects in artificial intelligence, knowledge management, and innovation strategy.
John Chehak, life-long resident of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, is a self-taught, award-winning artist who has been painting professionally for more than 25 years. John’s medium of choice is acrylic on paper and canvas using brush and palette knife. His original work has taken on new and unique personalities with vibrant colors, symmetry, and compelling presentation. Chehak describes his many mesmerizing styles as having developed from the need to “un-trap himself” from an artistic routine to explore other expressive and imaginative opportunities.
The creation of images in the "New Pointillism" requires a significant amount of time. This highly meditative process stands in stark contrast to the fast-paced, digital age and invites the viewer to appreciate the slow, conscious creation of beauty. The experience of standing before one of these images should be a journey into silence, a rare commodity in today's art world, where shock value is often prioritized over substance. My paintings, beyond their aesthetic beauty, convey a message about the necessity of slowness and contemplation in our fast-paced world.
Stephanie Bing (born 1967 in Mannheim, Germany) is an internationally recognized contemporary artist whose vibrant, multi-layered paintings reimagine interiors as poetic sanctuaries. She studied Fine Arts, Painting, Photography, Art History, German, and Literature at Johannes Gutenberg University and the Academy of Fine Arts in Mainz, graduating with distinction under the mentorship of Professor Klaus Jürgen-Fischer and Professor Dr. Vladimir Spacek.
Stefan Fransson is a Swedish contemporary artist who blends digital collage, sculpture, and organic forms to create layered images. He combines soft tones with sharp contrasts, adding transparency and depth to each composition. His art often features geometric fragments and natural textures that form complex visual structures—through which he explores space, memory, and perception.
While painting the gold, I enjoy it's beauty and the technique I use. I experiment with different colors, in the gold or silver and in the shadows, because the standards are never set. This is the technical part on which I focus, compartmentalized is the connotation of sadness and melancholy. It is an intuitive process rather than something planned or thought out, and it changes as the painting progresses. The figures surely feel protected, but in a certain way are exposed at the same time because you can't help but wondering what lies underneath, which is the relationship between surface and depth.
I’m a contemporary paintress based in Switzerland. My works blends abstraction, symbolism and emotional depth, creating a visual language that feels both intimate and universal. With a distinctly modern sensibility, I’m explore the spaces between forms and feelings, guiding art lovers into dream like atmospheres that often evoke memory, introspection and quiet transformation.
As I approach my 74th year, various happenings have brought about big changes in my art involvements. I now concentrate more on solo exhibitions and have increased time spent on mailart and the making of art books. I prefer solitude, retreating more and more into the silence of my studio. Art continues to soothe the soul, providing a comforting balm for both mind and body.
Katinka Lampe paints portraits. Or at least, you can clearly recognise the representation of a person. Yet, this is not the main motive of the painting. The portrait merely serves as reason to make the painting. The portrait is the imagery concept. Her paintings greatly appeal to the beholders.
I conceive of roses and cranes as living entities endowed with mind and emotion. This perception arises from an inner, multidimensional worldview that is liberated from physical and temporal constraints, within which such beings reveal themselves in this form. What appears there is not the object itself, but the manifestation of mind and emotion; at times, the universal ideals of truth, goodness, and beauty—which each being may inherently possess—are reflected with clarity and dignity within the rose.
I am interested in the tension between escapism and the weight of the real because I don’t think we ever fully move from one to the other. Screens offer us moments of escape, projection, and imagination, but they are also where anxiety, comparison, loneliness, and desire accumulate. What looks like lightness or play often carries a quiet heaviness underneath. In that sense, fantasy and the ordinary are not opposites in my work—they coexist and constantly bleed into each other.
I am guided almost entirely by intuition, an inner voice that speaks through the process. When something is missing, the painting carries a sense of visual emptiness; it has not yet found its soul. The moment of equilibrium arrives when that inner voice becomes clear. A sense of fullness rather than excess. That is when I know the painting has reached its emotional balance, and that nothing more needs to be added or taken away.
Michel Testard is a contemporary painter whose work is shaped by long-term travel and lived experience across Asia, India, Europe and the polar regions. Born in Japan and raised between continents, he has developed a practice rooted in travel, cultural immersion and sustained encounters with distant places. His paintings explore landscapes, interiors and human figures as emotional spaces rather than documentary subjects, blending observation, memory and imagination.
I don’t see anything particularly abstract in my work. I see a mode of expression through colors, texture, and theme. I see a transmission of emotion much more than abstraction.
For me, it’s visual, it’s emotional, but not abstract.
When I choose something that evokes liquid, metallic, or cosmic surfaces, it’s a choice. When I choose a reserved woman or a child with a bear, it’s a choice, but it’s not abstraction.
I want the audience to feel an intense sensation, an intense emotion, something that touches them. It’s not an endpoint; it’s the beginning. It’s a choice to choose colors, forms.
I want both recognizable iconography and visual density.
Aesthetic perception has a great deal to do with ray and mathematics. And then there is untamed human nature, in its search for expansiveness and freedom of spirit. This tendency towards sequences has stayed with me to this day.
The painting itself is a portal to the realm of beyond. It encourages a different way of perception. Someone has to be a little distracted, a little scared, and confused to start seeing things differently or as they are. First must be reluctance, then awareness of worth looking further, and the perception of vision afterward. The mind should get preparation in order to be focused differently. We live in a world where focus is fixed, as life is. To a much greater extent, this is established by the system and could be shifted. I encourage the spectator to learn to look without prejudice. This is my goal.
My creative process is absolutely an excavation of my internal landscape on all layers, mental, emotional, physical and spiritual in that given moment and to use the archaeology reference, some things are easier to excavate than others depending on how many layers it is buried beneath. This is reflected in my work, the deeper the emotion, the memory or experience, the more layers of paint, the more activity and energy is required to achieve the release.
Iyad Almosawi is a versatile and talented artist with award-winning works across various genres. He masterfully blends technique and vision in his paintings, sculptures, murals and installations, exploring inner energies and emotions. His murals, which bring color and life to public spaces reflect his love for nature. Through his art, he transforms spaces, making them accessible and inviting for people to admire and engage with.
Most of my chosen canvases and surfaces are conscious decisions. It begins with the size of the canvas and then the structure. This decision is very important. The painting process is a constant making of choices which influence, enormously, the result. Sometimes I struggle with the surface and ask it what it wants. To work against the surface is contradictory. For example, I chose a very plain canvas surface for the painting -love- , as I wanted the black color to drop down on it, to express the fluid existence of love. According to the philosopher Heraclitus, “Everything flows…”
Rose Masterpol is an artist of considerable importance. Her paintings do not imitate the world. They reorganize it. They reveal the underlying patterns that shape experience. They invite the viewer to slow down, to recalibrate attention, and to discover the richness that exists beneath the surface of perception. Her three decades of creative exploration have culminated in a body of work that speaks with remarkable authority and poetic intelligence.
