FANTAST IN FOCUS: OSKA Oska is an illustrator and graphic designer from Montreal, Canada. His futuristic artworks, which feature both atmospheric megastructures and contemplative portrait-like miniatures, are frequently shared on Tumblr and Reddit and have been featured in a number of different places, such as Booooooom and My Modern Met. After seeing his pensive piece “Illusion”, we…
FANTAST IN FOCUS: IVAN CENZI Ivan Cenzi is a kindred spirit. As the curator of the virtual wunderkammer Bizzarro Bazar, he trawls the depths of the human and animal kingdoms to unearth strange, bizarre, and often macabre stories. When he isn’t clambering through ancient catacombs or writing about “invisible” castles, he shares spooky videos like this. One could…
FANTAST IN FOCUS: PAUL LEWIN Storytelling is Paul Lewin’s passion. His sources of inspiration are thousand-year-old tales—all of which are linked to the oral traditions and folkways of West Africa. But the vision that Paul depicts in his acrylic artworks is a surreal inter-dimensional realm of past, present, and future, a world which beams up…
FANTAST IN FOCUS: CHRISTY LEE ROGERS Millions of years ago, creatures rose from the depths of ancient seas and transformed into divergent populations over vast stretches of time. In a way, we still repeat this primeval origin story. After nine months submerged in a shadowy womb, we emerge from an embryonic ‘ocean’ and ascend into a new…
FANTAST IN FOCUS: JAKE BADDELEY Jake Baddeley’s art is visual alchemy, an exercise in the sublimation of wide-ranging cultural influences. Like an alchemist who synthesises base metals to create the philosopher’s stone, Jake draws on the primeval symbols of Greco-Roman mythology and his own subconscious to produce paintings that seem to shimmer with an ethereal…
ODD TRUTHS: SILK FROM THE DEPTHS OF THE SEA The ocean, as William Shakespeare describes it in Henry V, is full of “sunken wrack and sumless treasuries”. Some of these riches have yet to be discovered, while others have been harvested and cherished for generations. In this regard, sea-silk is truly a gift of the…
ODD TRUTHS: THE ALCHEMICAL LIFE OF GLASSMAKER ANTONIO NERI Conciatore: The Life and Times of 17th-century glassmaker Antonio Neri chronicles Antonio Neri’s life as an apparent jack-of-all-trades in Baroque Florence. Neri worked as an alchemist, priest, and physician, but he struck gold with his seminal work, L’Arte Vetraria (The Art of Glass). In this treatise, he…
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FANTAST IN FOCUS: HEATHER THEURER Heather Theurer’s art combines the best of high fantasy with mythic and religious symbolism. In her oil paintings, the heavenly clashes with the infernal, and dragons, devils, and angels have it out as they contest for the salvation of souls. Heather hails from the idyllic town of Paradise, Utah, and,…
FANTASTS IN FOCUS: ARCHITECTS OF AIR For the past two decades, Architects of Air have been constructing buildings from nothing but air, spirit, and light. Their luminaria have toured the world; forty-one countries to be exact. Known as “pneumatic sculptures”, the globular and polygonal miniature worlds are brought to life by their colourful interiors and…