Ballpoint pen art by Adewale Mayowa
Self-taught ballpoint pen artist and conceptual self portrait photographer Adewale Mayowa shares amazing talent and skills through the NFT journey
Pebble Artist Justin Bateman
Southeast Asia-based British environmental artist Justin Bateman creates outstanding artworks by using only pebbles found on beaches. Please read the full Forbes interview on how he went from classic British art education to finding his own inspiration on the faraway beaches
DRIFT's aerial sculptures and architecture
What would the Sagrada Familia look like if it was finished? Imagine a full circle Colosseum... Dutch artist duo DRIFT has been working to improve their drone software to create real-life, life-size renders to visualise the improbable.
DRIFT works together with a multi-disciplinary team of 64 on aerial sculptures, installations and performances. All individual artworks have the ability to transform spaces. The confined parameters of a museum or a gallery does not always do justice to a body of work, rather it often comes to its potential in the public sphere or through architecture.
In 2017 DRIFT made their first performative art installation named Franchise Freedom. This drone show premiered at Art Basel Miami 2017, followed by performances all over the world. Besides this performative art installation DRIFT produced many more, with which the world is well known.
In collaboration with the company Drone Stories and Nova Skystories, DRIFT has used their drone technology since 2020 to reimagine the future of architecture. It is the aim to assist architects to bring their future projects to reality in a mesmerising yet sustainable way, visualising what this life size would look like.
Art of He Jiaying
He Jiaying (b.1957) is a contemporary Chinese painter known for his distinctive figurative works. His unique ink-wash depictions of female nudes fuse traditional Chinese and Western techniques. The artist continues to live and work in Tianjin, China.
Maxim Zhestkov presents his first solo show WAVES at London’s W1 Curates
On August 18, 2022, the first solo exhibition of digital artist Maxim Zhestkov, titled Waves, will illuminate every surface of London’s W1 Curates exhibition space — inside and out. With new work displayed across the facade’s 3 floors of screens and on every wall of the interior, Maxim will make his London debut via an immersive digital art experience in the commercial heart of the city.
Waves meditates on its titular phenomena as the fundamental elements of change in digital and physical systems; waves merge, waves disrupt, and, if synchronized enough, they acquire system-shifting force. Cultural shifts, spiritual breakthroughs, and wi-fi connections can all be better understood as products of the interactions of waves. As physical and digital systems become less and less distinct, the ability to acknowledge similarities between the two can make our everyday thoughts more creative.
Maxim’s broader oeuvre is built on conceptual investigations of the building blocks of physical and digital worlds. Each work is an effort to transform a fundamental principle of creation into a rousing spectacle.
“It is fascinating how structures could be assembled by themselves,
following the basic underlying rules of our world. Any material, including living matter, forms using the
same set of rules, and I think that this is something that we take for granted, but it is truly astonishing
when you think about it.”
““[W1 Curates is] a public art platform dedicated to bridging the gap between digital art and the traditional art world. Maxim’s artwork lends itself so well to our space, and it’s an honour to share new work from a true pioneer of digital art who remains so passionate about
the potential of virtual worlds.”
Artist Statement
A wave— a disturbance of the established order — encompasses dynamics as an inherent part of our world. Waves bring the change, oscillations, and fluctuations, which spread across objects and connect them to entangled networks of all interrelated and continuous events. Inseparable from distortions, they are themselves messages that indicate transformations and shifts.
Waves are primary signals permeating the world and a universal language of nature that underlies both our biological and technological systems. By covering the world with webs of electromagnetic signals, we have expanded our neural systems and can now connect with others able to decipher the coded messages. Interfering and merging, waves change their nature and — when synchronized — grow and transform into a greater entity with the potential to generate a transformative flux.
Connecting particles into mighty flows, Waves is an examination of shifts of energy in complicated systems that lead to the inevitable transformation of those systems. Simulated by an algorithm, the world of this digital artwork is intentionally simplistic and therefore inextricably predictable. However, the rules and principles of this visual complexity are hidden from the viewer, much like the incomprehensible quantum phenomena that define the physical world.
The only thing certain about our world is that it is changing constantly. Nevertheless, eternal movement includes repetition, and transformation is cyclical. Between extremes of peaks, no path is linear, and every shift echoes across time.
About the Artist
Maxim Zhestkov (b. 1985) is a digital artist based in London. He merges his studies in architecture, sculpture, motion graphics, color, and sound, to dramatize the intersection of the digital and the physical as a critical site for imagining the aesthetic possibilities and psychological implications of a “phygital” reality. Working as an independent designer, Maxim has worked with clients like Adidas, IKEA, BMW, Google, Playstation and Adobe and has been awarded with many industry awards: a Red Dot Award, D&AD, iF Design Award and the ADC Award.
Maxim Zhestkov’s work has been presented internationally in shows at major institutions, including Decentral Art Pavilion Venice (2022), Unit London (2021), Contemporary Istanbul (2021), MIT (2019), Modern Art Museum, Shanghai (2019), and the Hermitage Museum (2019). Maxim’s work has also shown at contemporary art festivals, such as Cosmoscow (2021), ART021 (2020), ArtBasel Miami (2019), and Ars Electronica Festival (2018).
About W1 Curates
W1 Curates is a public art platform located at the heart of London’s iconic Oxford Street. W1 Curates showcases works from some of the world’s most innovative visual artists. Using state-of-the-art technology, the exterior of the Flannels London Flagship store has been transformed into an extraordinary public exhibition of art with digital prowess and exceptional innovation. The venue consists of a three-story facade of screens and, as of August 2022, an all-new exhibition space consisting of a 400 square-metre immersive gallery space lined with 360 degrees of bespoke LED screens.
W1 Curates has displayed work from the likes of Tracey Emin, Jeff Koons, Kaws, Shepard Fairey, Tyler Mitchell, David LaChapelle, Whisbe, Katherine Bernhardt, MrStarCity, David Bailey, Vhils, and many others. It has also collaborated with the likes of Gagosian, Sotheby’s, Saatchi Yates, Tate Modern, and Artsy. W1 Curates has also hosted Ravensbourne University London, NFT UK, Amplifier Art, and Graduate Fashion Week.
Jose Lopez Vergara Art
Jose Lopez Vergara was born in Mexico City in 1994 and raised in Madrid, Spain. In 2003 he had an accident that permanently impaired the movement of his right arm. During a long recovery period he was encouraged to cultivate his interest in drawing and develop his innate artistic abilities. Jose spent his teenage years painting murals with spray paint and creating hyper realistic drawings with coloured pencils. Having explored different creative paths, finally his interests led him to oil painting. He then went on to study classical drawing and painting from 2016 to 2021 in Florence and New York following a tradition that goes back to the Renaissance.
Vergara’s work centres on the search for an idealised representation of everyday life, current events and universal emotion. He’s influenced by art of many cultures of the past and present. Although his realist technique requires a strict methodology and rational thinking, his compositions rely on subconscious impulses and demand an abstract expression. His interest in the silhouette and minimal design plays a central role in his work and continues to open many paths for exploration.
The Truth About Reality by David Christiaan
The Idea for this artwork came to me in two stages. Whilst I was laying in bath, I saw in my mind three overlapping mirrors. This image ignited my curiosity but that alone didn’t feel complete. I don’t remember exactly how the second part of the idea came to me but I was laying in bath again. This time the thought of arrows with black and white feathers shot in overlapping gold frames with silver surfaces came to my mind. This idea was very exiting for me because I could see the symbolic, mythological and metaphorical references in it. When I was making the actual artwork and thinking about it I was feeling very inspired. “This work needs to exist”. For me, the whole process of receiving the idea, making it (in secret) and then finally exposing friends and family to it for the first time, was a very satisfying experience.
“I’ve noticed that when most people first encounter this artwork they need some time to process what they are looking at. Although the individual objects and materials are recognisable you don’t immediately realise what you are seeing or where in the work to focus your attention. The relative visual complexity of this piece is a metaphor for the complexity of reality and truth. Hence the title of the subject. Since everyone has an individual experience when they view the work, the subject matter, which is clearly about perception, and the experience of the viewer actually become one. In this way the viewers experience becomes part of the artwork itself. I have found that without actually informing people about what I think this artwork means, it inspires thought and conversation regarding what our experience of reality actually is.”
Art of Seanen Middleton
Seanen Middleton is a fine art and portrait photographer from the Lake District, England. Seanen's work has been published across the globe online and we cannot stay away from his depth of visual storytelling
Art of Scott Prior
Scott Prior is a painter who lives and works in Massachusetts. His paintings depict a world that is intimate, simple and personal, where objects are transfixed and transfigured by light.
Sasha Grebenyuk Art
Kyiv-based self-taught artist Sasha Grebenyuk shares beautiful art supported with the statement
“Art is the interweaving of events and a person experiencing them. And through these relationships, through the search for an answer to the question of who this Other is, life, connection, and beauty manifest. The most important thing is the space between me and the Other. Meeting with another is always an event, an opportunity to experience it together as equals.”
Hetaera Psappha - 10 Years of Blossoming Silence
Hetaera Psappha
Hetaera Psappha is a video artist born in Moscow in the waning years of the Soviet era. Working all around the world, Lisa Minaeva (the artist’s real name) creates her wordless portraits in various places. Having started her project in London in 2012, she gathered over 100 portraits of artists, poets, musicians, and other people of different professions and backgrounds. After ten years of filming portraits, she feels more interested in it than ever.
A French actress sitting topless in a bathtub in Moscow; a young Indonesian woman looking at the camera with eyes full of tears in a hot Belgrade apartment; a celebrated Russian rapper squinting in the sun on a famous Saint Petersburg rooftop after an acoustic gig; a British painter, frozen in his chair, looking as if he’s about to attack – the Blossom of Silence project counts endless faces and hours of quiet contemplation. Being able to stop and look into another person’s eyes is a rare gift in a time of rapid news and information, and the lo-fi image created with a MiniDV camera helps the artist clear it of the filters we got used to so easily thanks to fashion magazines and Instagram. At times, the picture shakes and interrupts, and zooms in and out: leaving the footage “rough” is the artist’s committed position.
Initial idea was to “create a collection of the most beautiful people’s portraits”, and, therefore, remake a famous Andy Warhol work. However, the goal changed fast as Hetaera Psappha realized “beautiful” does not always mean “interesting to silently communicate with”, and vice versa. According to the artist, the key to “interest” stays unclear after all these years: while some portraits are more loved by the audience than others, she never knows beforehand if a portrait is going to work out well or turn out to be boring and “soulless”. It depends on many factors, where the openness of the model often stays the most important one.
Among many famous and unknown faces, one stands out – Alina happens to be the only person Hetaera Psappha filmed more than once. From the very first shooting, she became the artist’s muse, whom she decided to film every year. The colourful and unexpected evolution of a teenage girl through the troubles and transformations of her adolescence years is a curious experience, “a project within a project”. And it is not the only one – in 2016 Lisa created a special collection Silent Poets, especially for Poetronica festival of contemporary poetry, sound art and video art.
As Hetaera Psappha says, filming portraits with no words doesn’t just help her rest after working with texts and words, which is the other big part of her life as a poet and scriptwriter. It helps her feel, build and share with her audience connections, which cannot be broken by borders, political systems, religions, classes and backgrounds. In such a way, when watching her portraits, everyone is free to build an imaginary connection with any of her models and try to read the mystery hidden in their eyes. After all, the eyes are the mirror of the soul, as long as one suggests it exists. And if it does, observing them is a useful and enriching practice.
Continuum on Times Sq by Krista Kim
Prominent artist Krista Kim is bringing Continuum art installation to cities worldwide to spread the movement of wellness, healing and humanity in the age of the Metaverse. Together with Times Square Alliance and YMU Arts they reinvented famous billboards to run Continuum through February each night starting 11:57PM.
“Krista Kim’s Continuum is a soothing visual meditation presented on a monumental scale. Synchronized across 90 electronic billboards, a slowly shifting gradient of color washes over Times Square, creating a moment of calm amidst one of the most visually kinetic places in the world.”
Robert Peterson art
International contemporary artist specialising in figurative painting with concentration on portraiture.
“Peterson came to painting in 2012, when he put paint to canvas professionally for the first time after receiving life-altering medical news. Eight months later, he exhibited his work in New York and has since become one of the country’s most celebrated new artists, exhibiting in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Miami. Peterson paints raw, honest, and empowering portraits with the express goal of uplifting people of color. Reconsidering and challenging the ways they have often been perceived, Peterson strives to establish “a dialogue between his works and the people viewing them… about how beautiful, resilient, powerful, and worthy we are and have always been."“
Grant Riven Yun art
Biochemistry researcher, freestyle dancer (candidate to Olympics US 2024, yuk!) and artist - Vitruvian man - Grant Riven Yun is a vocal supporter of NFT Art movement. As a digital artists Grant specialises in realistic, yet minimal landscapes, evoking the 20th century American Regionalism movement with a 21st century spin.
Fine Art Photography by Julie Blackmon
Photography artist Julie Blackmon’s works speak for themselves
The Dutch proverb “a Jan Steen household” originated in the 17th century and is used today to refer to a home in disarray, full of rowdy children and boisterous family gatherings. The paintings of Steen, along with those of other Dutch and Flemish genre painters, helped inspire this body of work. I am the oldest of nine children and now the mother of three. As Steen’s personal narratives of family life depicted nearly 400 yrs. ago, the conflation of art and life is an area I have explored in photographing the everyday life of my family and the lives of my sisters and their families at home. These images are both fictional and auto-biographical, and reflect not only our lives today and as children growing up in a large family, but also move beyond the documentary to explore the fantastic elements of our everyday lives, both imagined and real.
The stress, the chaos, and the need to simultaneously escape and connect are issue that I investigate in this body of work. We live in a culture where we are both “child centered” and “self-obsessed.” The struggle between living in the moment versus escaping to another reality is intense since these two opposites strive to dominate. Caught in the swirl of soccer practices, play dates, work, and trying to find our way in our “make-over” culture, we must still create the space to find ourselves. The expectations of family life have never been more at odds with each other. These issues, as well as the relationship between the domestic landscape of the past and present, are issues I have explored in these photographs. I believe there are moments that can be found throughout any given day that bring sanctuary. It is in finding these moments amidst the stress of the everyday that my life as a mother parallels my work as an artist, and where the dynamics of family life throughout time seem remarkably unchanged. As an artist and as a mother, I believe life’s most poignant moments come from the ability to fuse fantasy and reality: to see the mythic amidst the chaos.
Instagram this is art
Art of Steven Dennant
London based digital artist Steven Dennant is focused on creating hyper-realistic drawings with a hint of surrealism. Everything you see is created by pencil no matter the medium
The Last Confirmation
Established in 2019 the last confirmation collab series featuring crypto art OGs (Official Greates) Norman Harman x Robness v2, one of the longest cryptoart collaborations in the world
About the artists
ROBNESS V2
LA's finest is a multi-faceted crypto artist who has taken part in almost every significant event this movement has made since it's earliest inception. Took part in the RarePepe trading collective which spawned the early proof of concept for the advent of what is now known as 'NFT.' Created the Controversial '64
Norman Harman
Harman is one of Scotland's leading digital artists specialising in painting - His work has been exhibited across the UK and Europe and he is a member of art collective Ltd Ink Corporation - Harman combines analogue, generative and digital painting processes, to achieve a Baconian grotesqueness in a POST-COVID, consumer driven world
Wavism by Diango Hernandez
Cuban artist founder of the self-proclaimed Wavism, Diango Hernandez lives and works in Düsseldorf. His work is the subject of many solo and group exhibitions happening around the world since 1995
Matteo Ingrao Sculpture
Matteo is a creator of hirsute and peculiar human-like sculptures that falls out of uncanny valley. He draws inspiration from man’s wild, natural, and primitive origins, how isolation affects form, and musings on alternate human evolution and deformation (hypertrichosis syndrome, for instance, is a recurring theme in his work). His organic and realistic sculptures act to capture specific points in time, encapsulating specific glimpses of the human form and so preserving them in time and space.
He provides new perspectives on the human body, aiming to challenge his audience, provoking discourse through the creation of contradictory feelings: his works induce an ambivalent desire to touch while simultaneously stirring discomfort and aversion.
Art of Daan Noppen
Daan Noppen is an artist that explores various media like drawing, painting, film, photography and sculpture. His work invokes the irrational and engages the viewer into experiencing numinous feelings. The context of his artwork creates an urgency for raison d’être. The artist explores elements of divinity, alchemy, mysticism and rituals.
