Gosia Karski paints surreal worlds where reality meets emotion, exploring the feelings we hide, disguise, and rarely admit. Using acrylics and oils, her work transforms everyday human experiences into symbolic landscapes, inviting viewers to reflect on emotions, fears, and the stories we carry within.

Working in oil paint, Emma Hapner creates figurative worlds saturated in vivid pinks, drawing on the visual language of classical antiquity while exploring the layered dualities of womanhood. Her paintings celebrate softness and strength as inseparable forces, offering an intimate reflection on identity, femininity, and selfhood through a contemporary perspective.

Alice Goidea, known as algo7, transforms flowers, vessels, and household objects into intimate, symbolic still lifes. Through classical oil techniques and delicate pastel tones, her work captures fleeting moments of brilliance, inviting viewers to pause, observe, and experience the quiet poetry of the everyday.

Cassidy Argo’s figurative oil paintings transform childhood memories into hauntingly beautiful scenes. Her work blends comfort and dread, girlhood and fear, inviting viewers into uncanny domestic spaces where figures linger in quiet anticipation, reimagining the haunted house as a symbol of both safety and unease.

Meghan Murray turns found family snapshots into evocative oil paintings, exploring mid-century American suburbia, memory, and cultural clichés. Featured in AQ Volume 7, her work examines the tension between personal storytelling and collective identity, transforming ephemeral photographs into enduring, thought-provoking art.

Trish Mitchell’s oil paintings transform overlooked moments in nature into meditative still lifes. Featured in AQ Volume 7, her work celebrates the hush of shadow, the curve of a petal, and the interplay of light and presence, offering viewers a space for reflection and soulful connection.

Barbara Drobot’s work transforms the human body into a vessel of emotion. Using layered oil textures, marks, and abrasions, her paintings capture subtle states of feeling and stillness, inviting viewers to pause, reflect, and reconnect with the present moment. Featured in AQ Volume 7, her art explores silence, movement, and the inner rhythm of human experience.

Working at the intersection of myth, personal narrative, and psychological space, Colleen Francis Smith creates richly hued oil paintings that challenge inherited ideas of femininity. Her dreamlike gardens and forests become sites of transformation, tension, and escape, where figures merge with plant life and reality bends. Featured in the Spirit Worldexhibition, Smith’s work invites viewers into liminal environments that reflect the spiritual, political, and emotional complexities embedded in the feminine psyche.

Jessica C Fisher, a New York City-based painter, channels her emotional experiences into oil paintings that explore memory, darkness, and the human spirit. Her Blasphemous Saints series confronts themes of violence, complicity, and vulnerability, creating intimate narratives that invite reflection. Featured in The Spirit World exhibition, her work bridges reality and imagination, revealing the unseen in hauntingly beautiful ways.

Chris Nelson’s paintings contemplate mortality, ritual, and the quiet resistance of working by hand in a digitally saturated world. Featured in Create! Magazine’s upcoming The Spirit World exhibition, his oil paintings blend classical techniques with surreal undertones, using skulls and symbolic objects to reflect on both literal death and the modern loss of human ritual. Nelson’s work invites viewers to slow down and consider what is lost when creative processes become automated.

Emily Ezell, born in Monroe, Louisiana, creates apocalyptic and surrealist paintings that blend neon, mutated creatures, and corpse-like nymphs with historical references to the Old Masters. Featured in the upcoming Spirit World exhibition, her work explores the uncanny, pop surrealism, and Southern Gothic themes, creating images that are simultaneously provocative, grotesque, and mesmerizing. As an educator and professional artist, Ezell continues to push the boundaries of narrative, technique, and the surreal, inviting viewers into worlds that challenge perceptions of beauty, desire, and decay.

Amelia Carley transforms found materials into vivid dioramas that become the foundation for her surreal landscapes. Her work examines ecological anxiety, memory, and the overlap of the natural and artificial, inviting viewers to consider humanity’s impact on the environment through imaginative, layered compositions

Kurt Stimmeder (b. 1972, Bad Leonfelden, Austria) creates oil paintings and lithographs that balance technical precision with emotional depth. Now based in Linz, his practice explores memory, immediacy, and the unspoken language of the human body. Exhibited internationally from New York to Tokyo, his work reflects on the human condition with layered narratives that are both profound and quietly suggestive.

Kateryna Reznichenko’s paintings invite viewers into a space between clarity and collapse, blending realism with expressive gestures. Featured in the Lightness of Being virtual exhibition, her work reflects themes of transformation, resistance, and the delicate interplay of intention and chance.

Irina Forrester is a Russian-born British artist whose work spans still lifes, landscapes, and portraits. Featured in AQ Volume VI, she brings together oils and mixed media techniques, capturing life with sincerity while exploring new artistic possibilities through color, texture, and form.

Saskia Thurner’s recent work shines a spotlight on bodies often overlooked, portraying older and fuller-bodied figures in swimwear with tenderness and dignity. Her paintings invite viewers to reconsider conventional beauty and embrace the quiet strength found in everyday moments. In AQ Volume VI, discover an artist whose journey through adversity fuels a deeply honest and intimate creative expression.

Meet Maddie Dunn, a California-based artist whose expressive oil paintings merge historical portraiture with contemporary reflections on identity and self-perception. In AQ Volume VI, Maddie discusses how her practice evolved through personal transformation and how her work invites viewers to question societal expectations and internal narratives.

Kirsten Geyer, known as KSTAN, creates oil paintings that blend precise realism with expressive abstraction, inspired by vintage photographs from the 1960s and 70s. Her work invites viewers to rediscover everyday beauty through color, atmosphere, and memory.

Greer Wilkins’ evocative Still Life Series reflects her journey from Nashville to Maine, using detailed realism and emotional tension to explore themes of home, memory, and belonging. Her work invites viewers into intimate, often uneasy conversations about identity and connection through richly layered compositions.

Chloe Saron’s ethereal oil paintings use abstraction and blurred forms to evoke nostalgia and quiet introspection. Drawing from memories and emotion rather than reference images, her work reflects a bold rebellion against realism and offers a peaceful antidote to the pace of modern life.