ART from HEART is excited to announce the Winners of the Artist of the Month - December 2021!
4 Artists, 4 Mediums, 3 Countries:
Nancy Calef - Painting - USA
Amy-Leigh Bird - Printmaking & Sculpture - UK
Benoit Baudrin - Digital Art- France
Misti Leitz - Sculpture - UK
The competition is open to multimedia artists worldwide and created to showcase, promote and raised the visibility of the work of emerging and mid-career artists. The winners are featured on our website and social media platforms and considered for any upcoming curatorial projects by ART from HEART. Artworks are selected based on creativity, originality, quality of work, and overall artistic ability.
Apply NOW to be featured in January 2022!
Nancy Calef - Painting - San Francisco, California, USA
©Nancy Calef. All Rights Reserved.
Top Left to Right: Good Life Calef; The Ref Calef
Bottom Left to Right: Beyond the curtain; Inevitability Line
American Artist Nancy Calef, has been creating “Peoplescapes" for decades. Oil, sculptured characters and applied objects on canvas, addressing cultural, political and spiritual issues facing society. By juxta-posing people in recognizable places and situations, each painting weaves together a story about contemporary life, filled with layers of detail, symbolism and humour.
I have come to realize that art is truly a universal language.
Nancy was born in Bronx, New York and attended the College of New Rochelle at age 15 to study painting and sculpture, after completing Bronx HS of Science. She is a certified computer animator, and singer-songwriter.
She continues to create new work and regularly exhibit in solo and group shows. She has also lived in Europe and Thailand, and traveled throughout the U.S., Mexico, Central America, Southeast Asia, India and Nepal while painting in plein air, which has served the development of her painting style and sharpen her understanding of the cultural and spiritual diversity of the world's landscape.
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Amy-Leigh Bird - Printmaking & Sculpture - London, UK
©Amy-Leigh Bird. All Rights Reserved.
Top Left to Right: Show Me Your Teeth, 2021; Beak
Bottom Left to Right: Small Amusement, 2020; Roaming Eyes 2021
British Artist Amy-Leigh's work has always been inspired by the natural world. She enjoys exploring new ways in which to display her work and collections. Her work celebrates material, both natural and manmade and is drawn to the detritus on the shores of rivers and seas, which are regularly ignored by fellow mudlarkers and beach scavengers alike. For the last three years she has been exploring the banks of the Thames, studying and collecting bones found on the foreshore.
Amy is also interested in the psychology of collecting, why people collect and if collecting is an intrinsic part of our lives.
The attitude of disposability prevalent in today’s world can only be confronted once more value is invested in the materials that we consider as waste. Through art, we can reveal new perspectives by elevating these materials beyond images of neglect.
Amy-Leigh Bird graduated from the Painting & Printmaking BAHons at The Glasgow School of Art in 2017 and in 2019 graduated from her MA in Creative Entrepreneurship with a distinction at The University of East Anglia. Whilst studying Amy-Leigh lived and studied in Jerusalem, Israel at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design and has taken part in several group and solo exhibitions including her first solo show at The Anise Gallery, The Other Art Fair and at NO20 Art Gallery in Highbury & Islington.
After her graduation she was selected for Aon’s ‘Community Artist Award’ and awarded the 'Artist in Italy Residency 2018' where she spent ten luxurious days walking about the Tuscan landscape collecting exotic treasures to create new work with. Since graduating the award-winning artist has exhibited alongside Christian Boltanski at the Apple and the Lust Gallery in Edinburgh, at The Edinburgh Art Fair and at An Lanntair in Stornoway after taking part in a two-week sailing residency with Sail Britain.
This year she has exhibited at Avivson Gallery in Highgate, London Lighthouse Company and at Benk + Bo in Shoreditch. Most recently she has shown works at The Dirty Old Gallery in Hastings and was selected as a curators top pick at Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair.
Amy is developing her research on the bones found on the Thames foreshore and researching the psychology of collecting and the emotional significance of objects and place.
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Benoit Baudrin - Digital Art - Provence, France
© Benoit Baudrin. All Rights Reserved.
Top Left to Right: Stars in the Head; Do you want to play a Game?
Bottom Left to Right: Sphinx; Tournesol
French Artist Benoit Baudrin (known as Losange) creates visuals using vector drawing software, that are inspired by mathematical concepts, from simple shapes and primary colors, so that emotion is a solution found through an equation, governed by mathematical rules.
What I want to convey is childish joy, the joy of life, to make people think about the mathematical ideas/truths that underlie reality, and to bring philosophical and mathematical concepts.
Born in Aix en Provence in 1989, studies music and sound techniques, composes and takes photos as art. Benoit started making visuals for his music. This has become an independent activity influenced by his research in music and his taste for kinetic art.
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Misti Leitz - Sculpture - Ludlow, UK
© Misti Leitz, All Rights Reserved.
Top Left to Right: Great Ball of Fire, 2021; I Weep for Nature, 2020
Bottom Left to Right: The Perfectionist, 2020; Flow,
Misti is a UK based sculptor and designer of interiors, furniture, gardens, and architecture. As a sculptor she works mainly in timber and stone, often recycling found or discarded materials, she makes abstract works that comment on her own situation and environment and express her thoughts and feelings about them. She is currently starring in Channel 4's Handmade: Britain's Best Woodworker
In direct contrast to Misti's training as a designer, where every detail of a commissioned piece needs to be rigorously planned from the outset, she will often start a sculpture with no drawing or particular direction, allowing the material itself to guide her until it reaches a point where she can start to consciously refine the form that has begun to appear, and to give it meaning.
Misti is a perfectionist, which means she lives her life in pursuit of something she can never truly attain but is nevertheless driven to keep trying anyway. She believes in striving for excellence in everything she does and spends a great deal of time masking her disappointment in the results she achieves. Despite this, the creative process is, for her, a constant source of delight.
In a world where instant gratification and pandering to the lowest common denominator is accepted as the norm, my work explores the contradiction between the apparent futility of striving for perfection and the joy to be gained from achieving it.
Her primary focus is in imbuing her work with a sense of energy and character, further refining the visual language she unwittingly began to develop in 2003 and using flowing organic forms to give a sense of vitality to her work. The pieces she makes usually feature combinations of contrasting materials, and the amount of time she spends smoothing and finishing each one results in sculptures that are informed as much by touch as they are by design, giving them a sensual tactility.
Misti’s innate feeling for form and volume comes from working with period architectural masterpieces of figurative carving whose inspiration is largely the natural world, and yet much of her own inspiration comes from a more transient source. For her, it is the shapes seen in flames, in flowing water, and at the edges of our peripheral vision; shapes seen in clouds and wisps of smoke; shapes seen in dreams or on the insides of our eyelids when we’re tired. It is the capturing of these ephemeral forms that fascinates Misti – solidifying the ethereal, while at the same time attempting to convey the essence of their movement and fluidity.
Misti has over thirty year's experience working at the highest level of design producing objects and schemes that are firmly rooted in the great tradition of excellence in British design and craftsmanship!
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Apply NOW for an opportunity to be featured in January 2022!