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.

Edward Hopper's summer paintings

Edward Hopper is well known for his urban scenes depicting isolated figures in diners and hotel rooms which came to encapsulate modern American life in the mid-twentieth century. He and his wife Jo would escape the city and summer in South Truro on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where they would take trips out to find new material to paint.

The paintings he produced in the New England region showed another side of his work. There really is fresh air in these paintings. And the sunlight is glorious.

"Maybe I am not very human. What I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house."

- Edward Hopper

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.

Françoise Gilot: Artist

Françoise Gilot (b.1921) is well known for being the lover and muse of Pablo Picasso from 1944 to 1953, and the mother of his children, Claude and Paloma. However, fewer people realise that she is also an artist in her own right.

The work below shows her development from cubism through to her own style of abstract painting, a visually cleaner and brighter collection of work when compared to Picasso. Currently living in New York City and Paris, she continues to exhibit her work internationally, having exhibited at the Gagosian Gallery as recently as May 2012.