Author: Adeline Brooks

Roughly eight years ago, Lib Mason found herself facing a question most artists never get to ask cleanly: what would she paint if there were no client, no assignment, and no brand waiting for the final product? For decades, her working life as a commercial illustrator creating imagery for major publications including Rolling Stone and Time Life Warner, and later developing product lines and artist-branded licensed collections had been defined by other people’s needs. When that career ended, the silence that followed wasn’t empty. It was an opening. The Question Behind the Return Mason had studied editorial illustration at the…

Karla Ochoa Pesantez remembers her mother’s workshop the way some people remember a favorite room in a childhood home, not as a single image but as a collection of sensations: the smell of fabric, the sound of a needle pulling thread, the particular patience required to finish something by hand. She grew up in Cuenca, Ecuador, and spent much of her early years in the nearby town of Paute, where her mother, Sara Isabel Pesantez, worked as a local artisan and artist, painting, sewing, knitting, and decorating. Whatever free time Karla had as a girl, she spent nearby, watching. She…

Natalie Angel begins each painting without a plan. This is not carelessness; it is method. She lets emotion arrive first, unnamed, unsorted, and only afterward does the imagery form around it. The result is a body of work that reads less like a set of finished statements and more like a series of unfinished conversations between an inner life and the world that shaped it. This intuitive approach places Angel’s practice within a broader avant-garde sensibility, one less concerned with technical formula than with honesty. She paints identity, transformation, freedom and resilience not as abstract concepts but as felt experiences,…

Somewhere in a crowded street, a market stall, or the quiet interior of a café, a stranger’s face holds someone’s attention for a moment longer than politeness requires. Most of us let that moment pass. Sylvianne Blum Cassereau does not. The Mexican artist has built an entire practice around that instinct to pause to notice a person fully, to wonder about the life behind their expression, and eventually, to translate that noticing into portraiture rendered in soft pastel. Her work is not about faces in the abstract. It is about specific people: their worth, their dignity, their right to be…

Before there was a body of work, there was a decision. Jane Gottlieb did not arrive at her distinctive photographic style through a straight line from art school to gallery wall. She arrived at it the way most artists eventually do: slowly, through false starts, professional detours, and the gradual accumulation of confidence in her own instincts. From the Classroom to Madison Avenue Gottlieb’s foundation was academic. She studied at UCLA and later at Berkeley, institutions that gave her a grounding in the fundamentals of art before she ever set out to build a career around a camera. That path…

Chin Kong Yee is a contemporary Malaysian artist whose distinctive approach to painting explores the complex relationship between reality, memory, perception, and time. Through his unique artistic philosophy, which he calls Actuality Accorded Painting (AAP), Kong Yee investigates how people experience the world through observation and how a single moment of seeing can connect the past, present, and future. His paintings often create a surreal and cinematic atmosphere, combining realistic and unrealistic perspectives within the same composition. The result is a body of work that challenges conventional ways of representing reality while inviting viewers to consider how perception shapes their…

Anuar Dan is a Malaysian artist whose paintings explore the vibrant relationship between urban environments, natural landscapes, cultural heritage, and the passage of time. Through expressive brushwork, bold colors, and abstracted geometric forms, he creates compositions that capture both the energy of modern life and the enduring beauty of traditional surroundings. Working primarily with acrylic on canvas, Anuar Dan brings architectural structures and natural elements together in dynamic visual arrangements. His paintings often reflect the changing character of the environments around him, particularly the gradual transformation of traditional ways of life as modern urban development continues to reshape familiar landscapes.…

The objects, a stone mask and an intricate ceramic figure, are scheduled to be auctioned Thursday morning in New York The Mexican government has published a statement calling on Sotheby’s in New York to withdraw two pre-Columbian artefacts from its Art of Africa, Oceania and the Americas sale being held Thursday (18 June). Mexico’s secretary of culture, Claudia Curiel de Icaza, wrote on social media that the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) had analysed the works and determined that they are “part of the cultural heritage of the nation”. Curiel de Icaza said “necessary actions” were already taken to demand their withdrawal from the…

Martin Wood-Malacca is an artist whose work is deeply connected to the architectural, historical, and cultural character of Malacca, Malaysia. Through painting, he captures the distinctive atmosphere of the city’s historic waterways, heritage streets, traditional buildings, and lively urban spaces. Working primarily with acrylic and oil paints on canvas, Martin explores the character of Malacca through a variety of artistic approaches. His work moves between impressionism and cubism, allowing him to present the city from different visual perspectives. While his impressionistic paintings often evoke nostalgia and the quiet charm of old river scenes and traditional houses, his cubist compositions emphasize…

In the midst of a tumultuous tour, The Beatles discovered artistic refuge, creating a collaborative painting that captures their shared creativity and marks a turning point in their career. ‘Images of a Woman’ stands as a testament to their enduring legacy and the transformative power of art. A previously undisclosed collaborative painting by The Beatles is set to go under the hammer at Christie’s New York auction house on 1 February 2023. Created during their 1966 tour of Japan, the artwork offers a unique glimpse into the minds of the legendary musicians and their creative process. In the midst of a tumultuous…