ART from HEART is excited to announce the Winners of the Artist of the Month - July 2022!
4 Artists, 2 Mediums, 2 Countries:
Scapa Joe - Painting - UK
Andrew Backhouse - Digital Collage - UK
Leanna Moran - Painting - UK
Irina Kladova - Painting - USA
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 get featured in August 2022!
Increase your outreach, visibility, & artist profile!
Scapa Joe - Painting - Chesterfield, UK
© Artists Scapa Joe, London's Flooding Series, All Rights Reserved
© Artists Scapa Joe, All Rights Reserved
Top Left to Right: Clean our Oceans; London's Flooding Series
Bottom: London's Flooding Series
Spray paint and acrylics on canvas
Scapa Joe is a collaboration between artist Caroline Appleyard (Scapa) and photographer & 3D designer Dean Hodson (Joe). They live and work in Chesterfield. They are artivists working in various media and their work is both informative and fun!
Scapa Joe make art with the aim to raise awareness of climate change, pollution, extinction, habitat loss, and particularly the ecological balance of the oceans. Caroline paints, and they jointly make sculptures showing the possible future, if climate change continues. They describe their work as 'utopian - dystopian'.
Diving for more than 20 years, Scapa has seen a sharp decline in fish stocks, and an increase in plastics and sea trash. Joe is an environmentalist and he designs and 3D prints some of the sculptures, often using upcycled old toys, collected beach trash, even cigarette butts to make their art and sculptures. They show the future if we humans continue on our destructive course; floods, rising sea levels, plague, pandemic, pollution, apocalypse.
We are knowingly trashing our planet; we know that we need to act now, but are not listening to mother nature. We use consumerism in an attempt to buy happiness, obsess over social media, fame, glamour, money, excess, while all the time we are destroying our planet, and very soon it will be too late to stop the damage. We all need to act now and make changes, however small.
Oceans are full of plastic and other trash, including plastic tampon applicators, single use plastic water bottles, carrier bags, ghost fishing nets and much more. Plastics consistently make up 80% of all marine debris studied. There may now be around 5.25 trillion macro and microplastic pieces floating in the open ocean. Weighing up to 269,000 tonnes. 100,000 marine mammals and turtles and 1 million sea birds are killed by marine plastic pollution annually. Yet still companies continue to produce plastic, and we continue to buy it.
London WILL flood in the future. The Series of paintings show a polar bear floating on a shipping container, desperately searching for sea ice, but there is none because of global warming. The oceans are warming, and globally species are having to adapt and even migrate; A London Bus has hit McDonald's golden arches. McDonald's are the world's largest user of beef. Methane emitted by cattle reared for the beef industry is a major contributor to the global warming crisis. Modern intensive agriculture is based on the heavy use of chemicals which are damaging to the environment. Mother nature is taking back the city, and the London bus is becoming a reef for fish and wildlife.
All very absurd? But not as absurd as knowingly destroying our own planet!
Scapa Joe have exhibited around the UK, including the Waterfont Gallery (Stromness, Orkney), The Art Cafe Contemporary Gallery (Whitby), Chantry House Gallery (Ripley, Yorkshire), Church Farm Gallery (Baslow, Derbyshire) Mayne Gallery (Kingsbridge, Devon), and Artsy.
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Andrew Backhouse - Digital Collage - North Yorkshire, UK
© Andrew Backhouse, All Rights Reserved
Top Left to Right: Fridge Scraps; Length Of Bombardment
Bottom Left to Right: Good Old Collage; Where "Though Shalt Not" Was Written On The Wall
Digital collages available as fine art prints in a limited run
Andrew Backhouse is a fine artist based in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, working with time-based media and digital collage. The underlying emphasis of his work is the wish to transmit the sense of wonder, naivety & enthusiasm upon discovering something of interest.
I want to make it a joy forever.
Primarily influenced by the Imaginist Poets, Duchamp, Henri Chopin, AGF and RuPaul, Andrew’s artistic enquiry documents “The new shiny thing” and tries to broadcast his enthusiasm for it whilst posing questions about authenticity and worth along the way.
Will the media, now divorced from the situation, hold as much appeal to the recipient as to the artist?
Andrew had to retire from a career in Environmental Conservation due to ill-health and draws on his experience in the field for his artwork. He makes digital collages using industry specific graphic software. This is because he has a tremor caused by Malaria – so using scissors, the final execution of a cut, is challenging. But, he embraces the digital opportunities available and is having a whale of a time making these prints!
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Leanna Moran - Painting - Essex, UK
© Leanna Moran, All Rights Reserved
Top Left to Right: Three Dimensions; Black Moon
Bottom Left to Right: Wormholes; Trichotomy
Watercolour, Pen & Gouache on Board, 71x51 cm
Leanna Moran’s (born in London) process explores childhood fears and anxieties, primarily focusing on themes of abandonment and the fragility of underlying human conditions. Initially the childhood bedroom was depicted as a recognisable structure throughout Moran’s practice. It has become simplified and modified; questioning space and its various geometrical restrictions. Focusing on basic symmetrical forms, circles and squares are painted using a limited colour palette
The circle, a prominent feature throughout Moran's work, is a powerful universal symbol of immeasurable meaning. It represents notions of eternal totality, wholeness and infinity but for her the meditative act of repeatedly painting the circle has become obsessive, yet therapeutic. The Power is in the repetition!
When in high anxiety situations the gesture of circle drawing was originally adopted as a coping mechanism which progressed to a cognitive ritualistic tool, fusing both surrealism and suprematism (the art movement founded by Kazimir Malevich) the term referring to abstract art based upon ‘the supremacy of pure artistic feeling’. Hundreds upon thousands of intricately painted circles create celestial expanses, a physical record of both time and thought process.
A simplistic colour palette allows me to focus organically on the act of painting itself, avoiding complicated aesthetical distraction. By doing this there is a sense of contentment, there is a reason a purpose and it becomes a powerfully introspective process.
Moran graduated from South East Essex University in 2011 with a Degree in Fine Art with Honours. She has exhibited since 2011 in numerous group exhibitions, notably at the Jealous Needs You 2015, 2016 and 2017 exhibitions. In 2019 Moran exhibited original bedroom collages at the Saatchi Gallery, who have also commissioned numerous print editions which have also inspired a music video. Her work is shown in the Saatchi Gallery print gallery, and purchased for private collections worldwide.
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Irina Kladova - Painting - Sammamish, Washington, USA
© Irina Kladova, All Rights Reserved
Top Left to Right: Pink Peonies; Red Peonies
Bottom Left to Right: Roses; Lupinus
Watercolour and Ink on paper, Watercolour Monotype
Irina Kladova is an artist from Siberia, Russia, based in Washington. She graduated from Tomsk State University, and chose watercolour and ink as her main medium. The focus of her paintings is the atmosphere and the mood of the moment. Watercolour brings unpredictability and transience to her works. She feels the fragileness of the moment through watercolour transparency. Her works are inspired by Russian and Chinese watercolour artists.
Nature inspires me to create. I spend hours upon hours observing colors and shapes around me. I'm trying to decry small details, shades of colors, and a variety of different patterns within them. It helps juxtapose and understand relationships between objects along with their characteristics.
I prefer to find the simplest form in complex things and then stitch them together like a colorful blanket. I recreate a story from multiple sketches and my impressions of things around me. I enjoy combining different sketches from different times and seeing what they create.
Irina has been exhibiting her works since 2015. Milestones are: 2015 - the exhibition of still lifes at Tomsk State University, Tomsk, Russia 2016 - the exhibition organized by the Union of Watercolor Artists of Russia 2017 - 4th place at the online exhibition-competition of Bauhaus Prairie Art Gallery 2018 - honorable mention in the online exhibition Bauhaus Prairie Art Gallery 2021- SCVWS 53rd Annual Member Show, California, SCVWS Member Fall Show “Every Leaf Speaks Bliss To Me”
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Apply NOW for an opportunity to get featured in August 2022
Increase your outreach, visibility, & raise your artist profile!