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.

Mario Wagner

I always pay attention to the shows that Spoke Art and their sister gallery, Hashimoto Contemporary in San Francisco, put on. And one recent show at the latter gallery was "A Glow That Transfers Creativity", a solo show by artist and illustrator, Mario Wagner. The exhibition contained technicolour paintings and installations including collage work and TVs.

German born and based in Berkeley, California, Wagner's work effortlessly combines minimalism, sci-fi, hope, despair and nostalgia.

Beautiful decay: the work of artist and designer, Evan Hecox.

It was a few years ago when I first heard of Evan Hecox.  I can't remember exactly how I came to find his work but it instantly grabbed my attention. The simplified, design-like style hit the same chord that illustration does with me. The paintings are almost cinematic in their composition. And it's this mix of recording the factual, physical decay of a city street while simultaneously reducing it to it's essential visible components, and turning it into a beautiful image, that I love so much.

He begins with careful observations of a setting and then progresses into concentrated, detailed drawings worked over a prepared, aesthetically textured ground. As a result the drawing floats on top of the surface, which remains visible through the drawing, creating a space between them that is at once tied to, and distanced from the image.

His more recent work has started to move towards abstraction with design coming to the fore. Presenting work with bold abstracted lettering combined with the urban landscapes of his previous work, often drawn over newspaper.

Evan Hecox lives and works in Colarado, USA.

Contemporary abstract art by Eric Blum

Born in Fresno, California in 1956, Eric Blum studied at UCLA and St Martin's in London.

Working with the difficult medium of encaustic he creates multiple layers of resin, watercolour and silk, applied gradually, often at one layer a day. The result is a distorted image: ambiguous forms with an almost infinite depth giving a sense of a fleeting, unfocused, light or movement hitting your peripheral view.

He currently lives and works in New York City.