It was 2001 when Bisa Butler approached quilting for the first time. She took her first fiber art class during her master’s degree, and for her grandmother got sick at that time, Bisa felt she wanted to do something for her. So she quilted her first artwork based on their grandparents’ old photographs of their wedding day. It was the beginning of quilting, the creative process that will make her a recognized artist.

Bisa Butler currently lives and works in New Jersey (NY). Butler’s mother is from New Orleans, and her father was born in Ghana. She studied painting at Howard University and later earned an MFA in Art education at Montclair State University.

Combining portraiture and quilting is the central feature of her unique art style. She uses quilts to give dignity to the black subjects discovered in black and white photographs in old historical archives or inside her family albums.

This current year marked her first solo show in New York in July (“Bisa Butler: Portraits” at the Katonah Museum of Art in Katonahand), and she will soon be in the famed Art Institute in Chicago.

Black Identity for Bisa Butler

Bisa Butler makes art moved by the urge to deliver gone respect to her community. She explains: “My community has been marginalized for hundreds of years. While we have been right beside our white counterparts experiencing and creating history, our contributions and perspectives have been ignored, unrecorded, and lost.”

Her subjects are all everyday African Americans who may have sat for a formal family portrait or documented by a passing photographer. They stayed anonymous for years and still don’t have a name. Butler intends to elevate their status and divulge the understated quilting technique. She sees herself as part of the African American quilting tradition and hopes that she’s taking that tradition into the future. Her work is about black identity, which is a very relevant matter in this historical moment. We are experiencing a societal reckoning over racial inequity.

Her portraits confront the viewer directly, forcing him to look the person in the eye. She intends to stimulate confrontation, with an attempt to demolish prejudice to feel connected and equal. Her work proclaims that black people should be seen, regarded, and treated as equals, and have certainly increased in interest since the killing of Georg Floyd this year.

Technique and Inspiration

Butler starts by enlarging a black and white photograph to life-size. She will then sketch over it, isolating dark and light areas. Next, Bisa chooses the fabrics and layer them by stitching them together with a sewing machine. Lastly, she will layer the stitched portrait on top of soft batting and a backing fabric while applying a repetition of pattern stitches to the three layers to hold them together. The process may take hundreds of hours to get to the final result.

She also researches the period time and tries to find out everything she can about her subjects. But, in the end, she uses her imagination to fill in the details.

Butler is adding something brand new to the art and tradition of quilting. By quilting portraits to tell the story of contemporary black identity, she adopted something historically reserved for European aristocrats. By doing this, she became among a group of contemporary black artists (Kehinde Wiley, Amy Sherald, to name a couple) who have also embraced the portrait as their peculiarity. Artists as Wiley and Sherald, along with Faith Ringgold and Romare Bearden, are the ones that principally have been influencing her art so far.

View more of her works here or follow her.

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Elmo Hood (b.1989) is a British contemporary artist living in Brisbane, Australia. As a self-taught, his unconventional technique is a manifestation of his creative intuition and workflow. Elmo’s specialties are collages using play cards – something relatively new until 2013 when he became viral with a collage piece he created out of two play cards. That artwork opened his doors to various international exhibitions and a firm celebrity fan base.

ElmoHood’s Creative Technique

By cropping, shaping, and burning the cards, he aims to represent human feelings and often stretches the references to philosophy and the paranormal. His work is now best depicted as a fuse between pop art and mixed media as he uses a variety of materials and different techniques to achieve his compositions.

Figures and Color Palette

The chosen play cards always guide Elmo’s color palette, but he also uses darker tones to define outlines and other shades. Indeed, a figure will pop out of a juxtaposition of cards. Sometimes a King or a Queen, sometimes Batman or an octopus. Aside from the figurative subjects, Hood wants to attract the viewer through several routes, such as curiosity, surprise, engagement, and feelings.

Publications and Exhibitions

Publications to date include British GQ, Forbes, Glamour Magazine, Wall Street International, Oddity mag, Sloane Square Magazine, and many more.
Elmo has exhibited artwork in London, Paris, New York, Miami, Ibiza, Bahrain, and Munich throughout his career. His work was auctioned off at the Houses of Parliament.

Elmo Hood also creates NFTs. Go here to discover more >

Visit Elmo Hood’s website here, or follow him on Instagram! 

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Caroline Beelher, born in California, grew up in the South and is currently living in Franklin, Tennessee. After attending a classical Christian school, she finally got into art college at the O’More College of Design. Today she defines herself as a paper artist. She spent the rest of her twenties moving around to disparate places, including Shanghai, Italy, L.A., and Bloomington, Indian, because she worried she’d settle down and never see the world. Besides art, she likes learning about gardening, shoe design, woodworking, and writing. 

Hello Caroline, when or how have you understood you wanted to become an artist?

Probably around ninth grade, after drawing a portrait of a family friend’s daughter who died tragically at age 4. It touched the parents profoundly, and I realized the impact art could have.

Can you briefly say something about your technique and tell us what drives you to make art?

I call my technique paper painting. I create impressionistic works by gluing tiny pieces of hand-cut, brush-stroke-shaped magazine paper onto canvas. Up close, you see lots of great microcosms. I’ve always loved paper and wanted to see it pushed to the limits.

What main feature has changed in your works or practice throughout the years?

I’d say purpose. While I always hope to beautify and inspire a space, I think now my mission is more precise. These days I want to create works that document our times, like a journalist, or rally people to buy art that helps fund a cause, like, say, ending human trafficking.

Which artist primarily inspires your work? And is there something else, outside visual arts, that keeps you motivated?

Antoni Gaudi is always an inspiration. His critics complained that his work was baroque and overly imaginative. Amazing- such an insult would be, to me, a high compliment. His work and life touch me equally.

How would you like people to engage with your work?

I hope people who buy my originals enjoy getting lost in the sea of images. I spend hundreds of hours jamming together thousands and thousands of images, textures, words, and symbols on a canvas, sourced from pop culture, history, nature, fashion, and whatever else you find in print. My works engage you like a person you enjoy. They make you curious.

Go here to learn more about Caroline Beelher.

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Brazilian-born (1973) artist Luciano Cian approached art at the age of 18. He initially began with oil painting to then found in 2008 the Collective Fuso Cian + Kjà, an interaction between platforms with different artistic languages.

Currently living in Rio de Janeiro, his production covers painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, video, and urban intervention. Greatly inspired by colors, music, and people, Luciano looks for references in architecture and visual arts in general. His technique is a result of deep research between geometry and balance, as he seeks peaceful places to find the patience to exploit his visual language. He considers paper to be his most important tool. The powerful and colorful result sees Luciano’s current works focusing on drawing with giclée prints, linocut, and acrylic on canvas or wood. 

CARRER

So far, one can find Cian’s work in private collections around the World (Brazil, USA, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, China, Singapore, Switzerland, among others).

He worked in exhibitions in Brazil and abroad: MuBE Museu Brasileiro da Escultura – SP, CCJF Centro Cultural Justiça Federal – RJ, Parque Lage – RJ, Espace L – Geneva – Switzerland, Galeria Colecionador Contemporâneo – RJ, IED Istituto Europeu di Design – SP, Galeria Pretos Novos de Arte Contemporânea – RJ, Museu de Imagens do Inconsciente – RJ, Museu Nacional dos Correios – Brasília, among others.

Go here to see more work by Luciano Cian.

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“My work is inspired by the individuality of all physical things and energies found in the natural world. Regardless of their differences, everything has the ability to exist harmoniously; plants, animals, rock formations, stars, gases, and all there is.
When painting abstracts I attempt to mimic those inconsistent laws of perfection”, he says on his personal website.

His special technique is mainly used to texturize the skin of his subjects, using from 4 to 15 layers of acrilic paint, pigmented inks and spray paint to deepen the effect and reach the vivid final effect.

“Arthur Brouthers experimented for years with acrylic paint and other mediums before arriving at his current process, which produces wild textures that mimic celestial bodies and microscopic processes. In the artist’s figurative work, the human body takes on an otherworldly form when it consists of this material”, says about him Andy Smith of Hi-Fructose Magazine.

To view more of his work, check out also his Instagram profile.

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What led them to collaborate is an exciting journey that they told us through an exclusive interview. Goran is an award-winning writer, journalist, and filmmaker, while Marija does performance, experimental theatre, and photography. So first common thread identified, they are both in front, and behind a camera and their collaboration, it’s as for today an eighteen years long one.

They never lived together, and probably this urge to deepen boundaries is what to pushed them to restore family ties gradually. As they are both enthusiast explorers, this child-adult combination also defines, at best, their unique mutual approach to art. While Goran intends to turn chaos into harmony, Marija has indeed a wilder method given by her vibrant instinct.

ABOUT THEIR TECHNIQUE

Their creative method focuses on collage and mixed media, which they also like to define as “arte povera.”

All the elements that create their pieces are mostly found objects as newspapers and clips or photographs meshed with personal images of their family photo albums – to add a significant emotional contribution.

“We find old photographs especially endearing, no matter to whom they belong, as long as they have been declared unwanted,” they explain. To the duo, this process represents the core of a father and daughter relationship, as it encloses the relationship’s sense of finding oneself in the other.

–

Can you briefly describe what you do and say something about your technique? 

We mostly combine several techniques, mixing watercolors with pastels and pencils. The result’s probably not so pure but undoubtedly potent. We never use expensive materials in our work; we prefer leftovers and junk founded pies. Working with minimal resources to obtain a maximum effect is a skill we learned by living in Serbia. Our method is a potpourri of elements, and our favorite technique is collage.

What drives you to make art? 

People often describe our work as uplifting, positive, and cheerful. We feel that the world is in bad shape, and we are, for sure, not the first ones who want to make it a better place. Art, however, should not only beautify or decorate. What matters is a kind of imprint that an artwork carries in terms of energy. Thus the subject matter is irrelevant; for example, religious art can give negative energy as much as profane art can be healing.

What is the main feature that has changed in your works throughout the years? 

We considerably improved our technique and emotional result through consistent practice. Our starting point was children’s scribbles, a kind of spontaneous drawings typical of infants, just like it was for Klee and Dubuffet. In due course, just like it happened to them (well, perhaps not exactly like them), it became a more forceful approach throughout the years.

Which artists most affected your work? 

We get great inspiration from the surrealists, which often used the collage technique. There is a playfulness in their pieces, where everyday objects acquire dream-like features. That is endearing. We also look at the work of Kandinsky, whose abstract paintings have spiritual overtones. We spent hours meditating in front of them. Art must touch some life-long enigma or mystery. Otherwise, it is merely entertainment. Kandinsky represents the utmost value: the truth is that you cannot waste hours in front of something that is not clear, as one consumes most of the contemporary art energy in a split second.

How would you like people to engage with your work?

At first, we were reluctant to either sell our work or give it away. We felt it was a part of us, a testimony of our spiritual development. Our art is an organic creation; it works only live. At the opposite, when you see a photograph of, say, Jeff Koons, it might work even better than in a gallery or museum. That is why we decided at one point to show our stuff, to start a direct communication. It turned out that it wasn’t easy to build some response with the audience, because the visual offer out there is vast, aggressive, and overwhelming.

On the one hand, we feel that any response is better than an absence of reaction. On the other, fishing for advertising at all costs is tasteless, as one should learn to stay subtle and pure, at least because the scandal is so hopelessly widespread nowadays. Eventually, we decided to offer our art for sale. Nowadays we encourage people to buy it, we exhibit it and enjoy this daily.

Do you have anything exciting on the horizon? 

Everything excites us. We find living itself, not to mention creating new worlds, incredibly gripping. We scheduled a group exhibition in Belgrade for April, but due to the current coronavirus emergency, it seems it will going to happen later this year.

Where do you see yourself in the future?

We see ourselves on our yacht sailing the seven seas and getting better in the process of enjoying life as it comes.

–

Goran is finishing his third novel, and Marija is preparing her sixth performance.

Goran and Marija Gocic are currently part of stArt Amsterdam.

To know more about Goran and Marija Gocic, go here.

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Iacopo Maria Fiorani (b.1975) is an Italian artist currently living in Rome. He loves the sea, has a passion for fishing and lived a few years in Greece (Athens, 2003-2005), a country which he considers one of his life-time options, one day.

Iacopo comes from a family of psychologists and doctors, plus he has always been educated towards the arts since his childhood when he often found himself drawing monsters and caricature figures. He then chose a degree in Sociology with a thesis on Cultural Anthropology (2001), to enrich his rebellious inclination for humanistic studies. The combination of these life experiences led him to the urge of researching his language through an artistic path and started attending the school of the Tuscan sculptor and painter Leonetto Tintori. Here he developed the need of experimenting through several art techniques and, with time, built a personal artistic path he nowadays considers one of his primary goals in life. 

Iacopo can combine his intricate emotional knots with his desperate need of tidying up to discover furthermore meaningful purposes. To achieve this, he had to find out a peculiar technique, a tool to communicate his real roots, primordial emotions, and intimate messages. Iacopo accomplished this when he discovered the Scraping , initially, and then the Switching techniques. These two methods made him distinguished and recognized and are fundamental to the making of his fascinating art pieces. 

ABOUT HIS TECHNIQUES

Iacopo Fiorani’s starting point is not a vivid vision of what the final artwork will be, but a somewhat chaotic feeling made of vague emotions. Iacopo attempts to use the canvas as an experimental platform where to find himself as well as something more. The canvas and the artist are central in his work, as a reaction to the lack of concentrating on oneself in this hyper-technological society. For this, he founded the Scraping and the Switching methods. The Scraping is a process of adding and removing layers of paper and colors, the exact inverse way as the Switching process works. Switching is the one he recognizes himself mostly into, as he also defines it The reconciliation of instinct with form. Is made up of complex passages of gluing together paper pieces previously soaked into colors and then fixed onto the canvas. Both the making processes have in common the complexity of the intimate feelings Iacopo deals with, and are part of a sort of ritual he undertakes while creating the piece. It’s always about adding, removing, gluing or fixing pieces of his emotional layers, a metaphor that well applies to intimate research.

Iacopo Maria Fiorani never considered himself as a former painter until the art critic David Miliozzi defined him as one of the leading representatives of the brand new art movement called Hyperexpressionism, a fresh contemporary art concept founded in Italy in 2016. Iacopo was initially resistant to present his work to art galleries. He never trusted the artistic competition of the contemporary society, seen as a race for the most original art piece, as Iacopo instead focuses on the human being, to communicate his internal wounds through the canvas. Although, since 2016, he has been exhibiting his works in various events in Europe, among which Berlin, Rome, Prague, together with artists like Hsiao Chin, Mario Schifano, Franco Angeli, Mimmo Rotella.

Iacopo is currently part of st-Art Amsterdam.

To know more about him, go here.

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This said Mairi’s daily interest is to create engaging compositions pieced together with all the materials she collects, especially by juxtaposing a variety of media to best show the beauty of surface, space pattern, and color. Her style is narrative, she talks of places she finds interesting, unfamiliar surroundings and landscapes, quiet architectures and lifestyles of people they catch her eye.

Her approach may be defined as of a collage-painter, whilst still using pencils, scissors, glue sticks and photographs of her own. She is more of a mixed-media artist, although the art world, including Saatchi Art which she is represented by, places her in the painter’s section.

Mairi also sells most of her artworks, which can be found on her personal website. If interested you may find out more here.

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Born and raised in Tehran (b.1978), Nooshin Zokaie currently lives and works in Milan where she finally fulfilled her artistic career. As a matter of fact, Nooshin initially achieved a degree in Mathematics and Economics in Tehran, although she has been painting all her life. She suddenly understood how art could entirely interest her when she undertook some sculpture and ceramic courses during university, and there her love for handy crafts felt satisfied. The decision of quitting economics to explore the art world came out quite frankly.

Five years ago she then enrolled in a Ba Hons in Painting at the Brera Academy in Milan, which she brilliantly ended in 2018. Her final dissertation was, indeed, the body of work ‘The covered City’. During her studies in Milan, Nooshin has been strongly supported by his teachers to explore and push her artistic talent, and today, she is busy researching and studying new techniques to improve her art flow continuously. She already participated in several group shows in Milan, although she revealed her ambition to hold a solo show. Nooshin is also currently working on some ideas on flower design and jewelry, to improve her craft making and build an always more consistent artistic awareness.

PAST AND PRESENT

After the war, started in 1980, the city of Tehran changed as fast as a flash of lightning, and young Nooshin had to combine the thick past and that immediate present into some random gazes she then processed into more tangible images. 

The deep bond for her mother country brought her to choose some specific and characteristic hue to define the emotion of lost land. For this, her artworks, belonging to the series ‘The Covered City’, have colors ranging from blue to turquoise. Blue is a natural shade you will always bump into while in Iran: the color of the sea to start from, as for the old monumental villas and the mosaics. Nowadays, though, Nooshin teaches us that blue is also becoming a dividing symbol. Tehran, like many other big modern cities, uses huge turquoise cloths to cover old historical villas which are more and more all becoming construction sites for modern buildings or to divide beaches into areas suitable just for men or only for women. So it comes naturally out that the color blue has for Nooshin a deep and opposite meaning of nostalgia and anguish, an intimate feeling she developed through a painting technique that perfectly reveals all these emotions. 

In the series ‘The Covered City’, Nooshin depicts wintery landscapes, highlighting the desolation of a city that has been deprived of its passion. Despite this, a fascinating feeling arises from her canvas, one of melancholy and beauty, an attempt to show how the soul of a country still lives under its thick covers. 

Ma nell’attesa del tuo svelarti, un giorno d’inverno, quando la neve bianca si posa dolcemente sul grigiore del tuo corpo, io ritrovo l’incanto del quel blu. Comunque tu sei sempre bella, anche con questi teloni blu. Il colore blu ti sta benissimo, sempre! / And awaiting for you to reveal, on a cold winter day, when snow kindly lays onto your body, I finally notice that enchanting blue. You are always beautiful, although if coverd in these blue cloths. The color blue suits you perfectly, at all times!

(Nooshin Zokaie / The Covered City)

ABOUT NOOSHIN’S TECHNIQUE

Her technique is a mixed media, obtained through the use of collage, photos, and textiles directly stuck on the canvas. Nooshin will then paint on top of the collage, to reveal a final layered, geometrical and abstract painting.

To know more about Nooshin Zokaie, go here.

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Joanne Hummel has exhibited at the Sid Motion Gallery, with DEEP END ECHO, a joint solo with Stephen Smith, in July 2018. She has also shown in 2017 Integration II, at the Resident Artist Saatchi Art Lounge, Old Truman Brewery, during Frieze Week London. These are just a few events to mention when researching upon Jo Hummel’s works.

She studied at Kingston University London (2001-2004) and Royal College of Art London (2004-2006). Her work has been included in satellite exhibition Afternoon Tea at the 53rd Venice Biennale with WW Gallery London, Jerwood Drawing Prize London 2012 and RA Summer Exhibition London and London Art Fair 2019. Joanne was long-listed for the Beers London Contemporary Visions exhibition and John Moores Painting Prize 2018, and also in recent years received a number of Arts Council Grants for the Arts awards for temporary installations and research residencies.

Works by Joanne Hummel are included in both public and private collections and she has a growing international collector base. Her work was featured in the Observer newspaper in an article titled ‘’Next Generation turns its back on Emin and Hirst’s conceptual artworks’ (May 201), and ‘Picking up a Picasso is one click away’ in the Times August 2013.

HUMMEL’S PRACTICE

“I set out with a phenomenological approach to making works in an attempt to understand states of anxiety and serenity in the realms of spontaneous decision making and predetermined systems. I run experiments where the process often determines the outcome and provides a safe arena for improvisation, a place where rational procedures can co-exist alongside intuition”.

Her approach could be defined as mixed-media, a talent where collage, paintings, and installations meet.

“Repetition and pattern is something that has developed instinctively as a way of eliminating anxiety from my studio practice. Its nature is cyclic and oscillates between order and disorder, uncertainty overpowering certainty and vice versa”.

The vivid messages of her artworks are hidden behind a geometry of feelings that moves continuously between quiet and noise. To Joanne, that’s the nature of human habits, a mixture of gesture which combined create all kind of social behavior.

JO HUMMEL website

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