There was never any doubt. His rebellious nature, refusal to listen to most people, convinced him that he was destined to “swim with turtles,” to glorify them in his paintings. Raised on Saint Lucia in the Caribbean, amid deep green…
Frida Kahlo Lives By Ceasar
One woman is wounded, roiled by pain, and limited by male-dominated traditions. Another is bursting free, hoping to live life like Frida Kahlo, and to pursue her art without boundaries. She wanders, the rebel “sending a lesson to women everywhere,…
Spheres of Influence
Before escaping to Barcelona, Istanbul’s Blue Mosque, and the Acropolis, the 13-year-old was bullied daily by rock-throwing schoolmates. She tried to find refuge in her art books, and fantasies. But as she recalls, life in the icy oil fields of…
The Poisonous Apple By Fungai Willard
Flourishing with golden apples, sweet pears, and a variety of other delicious fruits, The Tree of Good Hope ascended high in the African sky. So much promise was attached to this tree, it barely mattered menacing snakes coiled around its…
Castration
A knife is drawn. Emboldened, voluptuous women lie near their conquered oppressor, and man’s “possessive gaze on the female forms” brings bloody retribution. So begins Wynnie Mynerva’s still unfolding story in New York City, leaving Peru, and picturing sexual liberation,…
A Cry for Help
They are huddled together, their slumped bodies and extended hands passionately dramatizing desperation, their collective nightmare. These immigrants are the forgotten, souls lost in a tense, highly-pitched political battle. Some have wandered through the Sahara carrying their infants. Others have…
A Child of Freedom
Art stopped. Too afraid to question the party line, to risk imprisonment, many artists fled. They simply feared the soul-piercing pounding on the door, the shudder-inducing knock of the Securitate. Fear flourished under the brutal dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu in…
THE ILLUSIONIST by Edward Kiersh
A rebellious outsider, the illusionist decries the obtrusiveness and chaos of contemporary life, saying “It’s an avalanche of humbug impressions” from TV and the Internet. Such a globalized realm, she believes, creates a lack of suspense, an overwhelming sense of…
Life is a Cabaret By Edward Kiersh
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec lives. So does the bawdy, libertine spirit of the Moulin Rouge, its eroticism and joie de vivre. The boundless imagination, and caressing fingertips of Lautrec’s heir apparent, the voluptuous dancers and decadent spirit of the Cancan comes…
‘I turned the fact that I did not graduate from drawing schools into an asset’ – Aneta Chmielewska
My first drawings were created in primary school, more like sketches rather than finished paintings. Their main motive was people, more specifically women. 16 years have passed since I made my first drawing, and it is still in my portfolio…