ART from HEART is excited to announce the Winners of the Artist of the Month - February 2023!
4 Artists, 3 Mediums, 3 Countries:
Miranda Donovan - Painting - UK/The Netherlands
Jon Clayton - Mixed Media Collage - UK
Kasia Sifantus - Mixed Media Painting - Poland/UK
Susana Mulas Lastra Drawing - The Netherlands
The competition is open to multimedia artists worldwide and was created to showcase, promote and raise 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 get featured in March 2023!
Increase your outreach, visibility, & artist profile!
Miranda Donovan - Painting - UK/The Netherlands
© Miranda Donovan, Mixed Media Paintings, All Rights Reserved.
Top Left to Right: Warrior, Break Free
Bottom Left to Right: Forever Present, No Limits
Medium: Painting with oils, acrylics & mixed media
Miranda Donovan is a London-based British Dutch artist whose figurative works and 3D “sculptural paintings” focus on the juxtaposition between man and nature, order and chaos, beauty and decay and how these in turn communicate aspects of the human condition. Her featured body of work, a series of urban landscape mixed media paintings, offers a stripped-back continuation of theme and process and heralds a sophisticated rendering in oils of nature combined with concrete as the primary focus.
Within her paintings, Donovan sets out to create worlds wherein polarities co-exist through subject matter and materials used. The intention is for these polarities to be analogous to the differences in the wider world whilst simultaneously inferring the complexity of emotions that speak of what it is to be human.
The genesis of every painting is a “wall”. Walls and the marks left on them, whether by man or the elements, is a recognizable, universal language that constantly draws me in. Using building materials mixed with polymers I lay down a rendered, textured surface applied in a grid like structure. Onto this I apply many layers and marks; text, graphics, characters and dripping paint, constantly working the surface; sanding and reapplying paint until this wall like surface speaks of a passage of time and in so doing tells a story.
Order and chaos, man and nature, beauty, and decay, the urban and the rural are some of the polarities Donovan features in her work as she strives to create worlds wherein these differences not only co-exist but do so harmoniously. To this end, her work is one of hope as Donovan would argue “without hope what is the point”.
Donovan studied Fine Arts at the City and Guilds of London Art School, and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts d’Aix-en-Provence. She has exhibited in the US, Europe and the UK. Her work is in a number of notable collections including that of Cheyenne Westphal, Frank Cohen, the Mugrabis, the Khalili brothers, Mark Hix, Stephen Webster, Jeremy Clarkson, the Groucho Club, Soho House and House of Koko Club.
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Jon Clayton - Mixed Media Collage - UK
© Jon Clayton, All Rights Reserved.
Left to Right:
Emerging, Mixed Media, 2021
Light Wave, Collage and mixed media on wood panel, 2023
After the Rain, mixed media on wood panel, 2021
Below the Crag, Collage and mixed media on wood panel, 2022
Artist Jon Clayton has lived in mid-Cheshire for many years. This is where his family has grown up. The land close by has prompted its own mythology. The fields, woods and trees alongside have sought names and stories from him. Relating this immediate landscape has been an important focus and inspiration for painting.
The core of Jon’s artistic practice and process is responding to the landscape by drawing, using a range of art media and techniques. He likes to go to places that have special meaning, where he feels a connection to the landscape. Jon is a regular visitor to specific places in Wales, Cornwall and the West coast of Scotland.
Jon makes many rapid sketches on paper, using a mixture of art media. His drawing may incorporate marks, washes and colours that represent objects or features in the landscape or movement as well as how he feels at the time. He tries not simply framing what is immediately in front of him but to respond to what grabs his attention, be it near or far away or on the edges of peripheral vision all on the same or many pieces of (usually) paper. However, his practice is evolving and changing all the time.
On a walk, Jon may stop and draw at different points along the way, creating a kind of the story of the journey in the landscape. These drawings will often be collaged back at the studio recomposing to create new works that give a feel of the landscape and the day, finding connections in the marks he has made. Sometimes this is enough and these re-compositions stay in sketchbooks but others are framed as fresh, energetic work in their own right.
Jon refers to his drawing and recompositions or parts of them, for fresh larger artworks, attempting to recall the marks and energy, as far as possible, as he builds layers, typically on cradled wood panels or canvas. At this stage, although he continues to use inks for their intensity and other mixed media such as charcoal and oil pastel he likes to use more acrylic paint and occasionally oils in thin coats and glazes.
Jon got a BA degree in Creative Arts from Manchester Metropolitan University in 1986. He worked briefly as an artist and illustrator for a conservation group. He later qualified as a primary school teacher and after a number of years as a class teacher, continued in education as an Arts Specialist, teaching and delivering workshops from primary-aged children to young adults studying A-level; students in higher education, and adults both in and outside the teaching profession.
Encouraging others to explore new methods made me open to experimenting and virtually all my work contains mixed media. I also write and will often include some text in my work.
Jon has undertaken a wide range of commissions and has recently begun showing work through gallery representation and exhibitions.
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Kasia Sifantus - Mixed Media Painting - Poland/UK
© Kasia Sifantus, All Rights Reserved.
Top Left to Right: Flow of Light; Mercury
Bottom Left to Right: The Inner World; The Journey Home
Medium: Mixed Media Painting using raw earth pigments with acrylic and metallic powders.
Polish artist Kasia Sifantus (b 1986) is a self-taught fine artist, who lives and works in London. She uses her experience and love of art to create unique and powerful abstract and semi-abstract pieces, which are all an evocative response to the landscape, an expression of the transient qualities of nature and the ethereal expanse of seas, land and sky.
Growing up in the scenic countryside in Poland, she credits her admiration of the natural world to her early childhood. Living close to nature provided an early understanding and appreciation of the qualities of the landscape and light that have played the leading role in Kasia’s art.
Her creative process is intuitive, she continuously strives to uniquely conceptualise her creations, producing artworks that have a consistent flow of energy and rhythm. Within the surface of each painting, Kasia applies her own unique medium by blending raw earth pigments with acrylic and metallic powders. The powerful effect of these combined materials is further intensified through her refined use of gold, which she exploits for its enduring quality and ability to catch the light, making her work both veiled and glowing.
My paintings are an abstract memories of experiences of the natural world, often starting with a landscape and gradually evolving to more abstract form through building layers and textures, playing with paint and bringing an element of experimentation into every painting.
Working primarily with natural pigments, and gold, creates both a muted and saturated palette, where light plays such a significant role, changing the appearance of a painting, almost like bringing it to life. Elements of interrupted edges overlap and merge into each other while textures and shapes rise and fall, creating captivating depth.
Eliminating use of ready made paints in my practice, and working with earth pigments brings the nature element into the painting, as well as helps to be more environmentally friendly and sustainable, as capturing the beauty of this world does not go together with polluting it.
Art for Kasia is a form of meditation, a journey inwards, where you lose yourself in the process and each painting helps you to discover a little bit more of your inner self.
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Susana Mulas Lastra - Drawing - The Netherlands
© Susana Mulas Lastra, Breeding in the Deep Sea, diptych, pastel Siberian chalk, 2022
© Susana Mulas Lastra, All Rights Reserved
Left to Right:
Life is a cooperative process, pastel, charcoal, Siberian chalk on paper, 2022
Biodiversity 11, pastel pencil, Siberian chalk on paper, 2022
Sea Flower I, pastel, Siberian chalk, aquarelle on paper, 2022
Sea Flower II, pastel, Siberian chalk, aquarelle on paper, 2022
Susana Mulas Lastra is a Spanish visual artist with a background in ecology, living and working in The Netherlands. Susana's work is inspired by nature that we cannot see at first glance. The beauty, mystery and importance of it for our planet, is what fascinates her the most.
Susana uses paper as a microscope translating her observations and reflections into detailed pastel drawings. She likes to zoom in, enlarge and transform. playing with her imagination while changing perspective and scale. The scientific images, the real organisms that inspired her, disappear. Their shapes and colours change. She creates new physical forms in new environments. Environments in which she sees life as a cooperative process, a network of complex connections.
I am part of nature, we humans are nature. We are connected to the nature that surrounds us, even to the organisms we cannot directly see. My drawings are the 'language' with which I let this invisible nature speak. I am fascinated by its beauty, complexity, mystery and its importance to life on Earth. They are vulnerable, often unknown organisms that are part of virtually every ecosystem on our planet. Many of these species are in danger, biodiversity is threatened by our behaviour and disturbed relationship with nature.
Susana completed her studies in Fine Arts in 2018. She then followed several master classes and completed the Master's program at Drawing Inventions Academy in 2021. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions and has been published in several art magazines, such as the Algerian magazine Al-Tiba 9 and the Dutch online magazine Mister Motley. In 2021 she had her first solo exhibition in Amsterdam.
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Apply NOW for an opportunity to get featured in March 2023
Increase your outreach, and visibility, & raise your artist profile!