Zaria Forman

Working from her Brooklyn studio, fellow pastel artist, Zaria Forman, captures the natural world in all its beauty and vulnerability. Having travelled the coast of Greenland, retracing the 1869 journey of American painter William Bradford, documenting the rapidly changing arctic landscape in 2012, she then moved on to document the Maldives, a country facing the very real threat of climate change and with it, rising sea-levels.

Serena Mitnik-Miller

There’s an incredible sense of harmony and balance in Serena Mitnik-Miller’s work. You can almost feel the Californian breeze flowing through each piece. The natural environment of the coast and surrounding community influences each curve, arc and line that drifts around the paper. Each piece is made by hand with watercolour pigment on paper.

Along with her husband, she also owns The General Store which opened in 2010, stocking carefully curated artisan produced goods, with locations in both San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Craww

Female figures, crows and skulls, often surrounded by wilting flowers and plant life, flow from Craww’s mind onto each sketchbook page or wood panel. They develop naturally and organically without too much forethought, the product of an imagination allowed to wander freely through the woods.

Based in Sheffield, UK, Craww’s background in graphic design shows in his compositions, displaying a great sense of balance, allowing a narrative to appear through the outwardly chaotic finished image.

Soul searching: Joel Daniel Phillips

It’s on the corner of 6^th and Mission in San Francisco that Joel Daniel Phillips meets with the poverty stricken subjects of his ongoing series of finely detailed drawings, 'No Regrets in Life'. These are the protagonists of hard lives whose stories emerge in his large-scale, charcoal and graphite drawings on paper. Every line and wrinkle on a face, or fold and crease of a jacket, tells the story of a life well-worn and the experiences gained along the way.

The one-to-one scale of his work allows every tiny detail to be viewed and explored in a way not usually possible in graphite drawings. This allows us a glimpse behind the first impression of the sitter and gives an indication as to what makes that person who they are.

 

Mark Demsteader

During the 1990s, with Brit Art on the rise, figurative draughtsman and painter, Mark Demsteader found himself surrounded by an art market dominated by conceptual art.

In the difficult years that followed however he finally found massive success, especially following his recent popular drawings of actress Emma Watson, and earning several notable awards including The Lyceum Prize and The Sidney Andrews Scholarship in the process.

His incredible work, a combination of original charcoals, pastels and oils, has undoubtedly renewed interest in traditional life drawing and classic figurative paintings. His drawings typically feature a beautifully balanced combination of the detailed, closely observed upper torso leading to equally striking expressive line work below.