Edinburg based artist Sarah Muirhead (covered here) portrays every day people in her mottled, figurative acrylic paintings. The watercolor-like quality of her art lends to her keen observations of the body and skin tones. Muirhead elaborates on her style choice in her artist statement: “The quality of flesh, its contrasting textures and tensions, the density and potential of muscle and the irregularity and dimples in fatty tissue are important in the way I want to describe any given subject. I want the bodies I paint to be a strange mixture of lurid, glistening attraction and true empathic realism avoiding elegant cliches.” She continues her unique exploration of the figure in “Bonded,” which opens today at Leyden Gallery in London. There is an added intensity to her representation of emotion and spirit in her new paintings, some of her largest to date. Her subjects are bound in different ways, whether physically in rope or hair, or emotionally, represented by colors and dark shadows. Muirhead’s simple compositions put an emphasis on their poses to tell a story – as they dance, bend and contort, she is able to communicate feelings such as pleasure and pain. Take a look at more images from “Bonded” by Sarah Muirhead below.
Acrobatic bodies, dismembered heads and elongated limbs stack, twist, and slide among one another to create complex human compositions. The new paintings by 
There’s a shapeshifting quality to the paintings Ricardo Estrada, whose subjects are physically inhabited by cultural iconography. The Los Angeles native specifically focuses on Chicano culture, whether in his murals or acrylic paintings. Each carries intricate brushwork that allows Estrada to transition between differing textures and planes of reality.
Rainbow waterfalls spill from the faces of Brian Donnelly's men and women. The Toronto-based painter describes himself as a portrait painter, yet he distorts and erodes his subjects to sometimes unrecognizable ends. Donnelly's paints from real life, selecting his subjects based on interesting features such as piercing eyes or characteristic facial hair. He then paints them on canvas before using a combination of turpentine and hand sanitizer to make the colors run.