Michael Aakhus is a contemporary artist whose practice spans painting, printmaking, and digital experimentation. Born in Minnesota near the Canadian border, Aakhus studied art and art history at Bemidji State University before earning his MFA in printmaking, painting, and drawing from Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. A recipient of a Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program grant in 1976–77, he spent a formative year creating work in New Mexico. After a long academic career, including serving as Professor of Art and Dean for the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Southern Indiana, Aakhus returned to Roswell, where he continues his studio practice. His work has been widely exhibited and is included in public and private collections across the United States and internationally.

Seoul-based contemporary painter Hyun Jung Ji creates evocative works that explore the invisible emotional threads shaping memory and human connection. Through braided forms, flowing hair, and recurring motifs such as cranes, serpents, and flowers, her Threadscape series weaves together inner landscapes that feel both dreamlike and deeply personal. Her paintings invite viewers to reflect on quiet emotional bonds and the delicate truths that exist beneath the surface of everyday life.

Shelly Thanner creates layered, atmospheric paintings that explore the thresholds between light and shadow, stillness and motion. Working primarily with acrylics and natural pigments, her meditative approach transforms forests, seasonal cycles, and inner emotional landscapes into visual portals, inviting viewers to pause, reflect, and reconnect with the quiet magic of life’s in-between moments.

Bay Area artist Jessica Snow draws inspiration from the moon, shifting tides, and the vast night sky. Her Tides and Starlight series reflects the rhythms of nature, exploring celestial light and mythology through atmospheric paintings influenced by her time along the San Francisco Bay and residencies on the Aegean Sea. Through works like Nyx, Snow connects ancient stories of the cosmos with contemporary observations of the natural world.

Inspired by life and layers, Cara Jane Murray creates vibrant, multidisciplinary works that explore joy, struggle, and human resilience. From her roots in Southeast Alaska to her current home in Montana, Cara’s art blends graphic design, contemporary folk influences, and expansive landscapes. Her expressive acrylics, oils, and watercolors invite viewers to reflect, heal, and connect with the beauty of the human experience.

Robin Crofut-Brittingham creates evocative, nature-inspired worlds that merge mythology, folklore, and personal history. Her multidisciplinary paintings explore the interplay of humans, animals, and the natural environment, often using the triptych format to reimagine historical and devotional art in a contemporary voice. From the ominous to the whimsical, her work invites viewers to reflect on transformation, boundaries, and the stories that connect us to the world around us.

Born and based in New Delhi, Trishna has been painting since 1998. Her work combines representational skill with touches of magic, drawing on nature, the cosmos, and her own dreams. Using oil paints as her primary medium, she creates luminous, positive compositions that invite viewers to pause, reflect, and connect with the beauty of the world around them.

Texas-based artist Dawn Howell creates luminous paintings that feel like a quiet moment of reflection. Inspired by nature, nostalgia, and emotional memory, her pastel-toned works weave together delicate textures, soft light, and symbolic motifs such as butterflies, moons, and wildflowers. After returning to painting following a life-changing spinal injury, Howell embraced an intuitive process guided by color, meditation, and spiritual connection. The result is a body of work that offers calm, hope, and a gentle reminder that beauty can still be found in life’s most tender moments.

Chad Lubertowicz, MFA, creates oil paintings that explore the quiet rituals of everyday life. Airports, subways, and train stations become stages for private reflection, rendered with vivid color and abstracted realism. Each piece invites viewers to pause and consider the beauty and isolation of human experience.

Raoul Korzuschek’s paintings blur the line between abstraction and the human form, capturing the impermanence of life through textured layers, overpainting, and subtle erasure. In his series Pentiment, he elevates hidden traces beneath the surface, creating “anti-monuments” that celebrate transience, reflection, and the depth of fleeting moments.

Emma Mclaughlin, a contemporary painter based in Miami, transforms her weekly walks into a vibrant exploration of emotion, memory, and introspection. Her Neon Nature Trail series uses square canvases and dynamic color shifts to create modular, reflective landscapes that invite viewers to trace their own inner journeys.

Cozy Soga, a multidisciplinary artist from Tokyo, turns two-dimensional canvases into immersive visual poems. Blending myth, technology, and human emotion, Soga’s concept-driven oil paintings challenge perceptions of identity while inviting viewers to explore rebirth, transformation, and poetic narratives through the lens of contemporary figurative art.

Yian Lee’s work invites viewers to pause and reflect on the idea of belonging. A self-taught painter from Taiwan, Lee blends abstract geometry, meditative processes, and layered forms to explore subconscious landscapes and inner states that resist fixed meaning. Her paintings act as a gentle meditation on self, memory, and the spaces where belonging emerges from within.

Sam Wilde, a British multidisciplinary artist, creates award-winning works that blur the line between fine art and surface design. Using illustration, oil painting, animation, sculpture, and large-scale installations, he builds immersive worlds influenced by his synesthesia and love for evolutionary biology. His work has been exhibited globally, from London to China and Japan, redefining how we experience color, pattern, and creativity.

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.

Bay Area artist Ali Hall paints landscapes that feel remembered rather than observed. Working in acrylic, her atmospheric compositions draw from California’s coastline to explore emotional healing, inner reflection, and the way place shapes memory. Through softened forms, intuitive mark-making, and gentle color transitions, Hall invites viewers into intimate moments of stillness and connection.

Kyle Goderwis transforms color and movement into vibrant abstract paintings that capture energy and emotion. His playful approach to form, especially in his abstract florals, invites viewers to pause, smile, and experience the joy of color and layered textures.

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.