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.
Jesse Jacobi's expansive, seemingly ancient worlds reflect on the cycles of life and nature in a new show at Arch Enemy Arts. "From The Eternal Green Mouth" collects new acrylic paintings from the Michigan artist, who was last featured on HiFructose.com 
In Oliver Vernon's new abstract works at an upcoming KIRK Gallery show, the artist abandons collage entirely and pushes his work forward only using acrylics. "Brushing Away the Veil," starting on Nov. 2, represents a new body of work and direction for the Brooklynite. There’s another new component to the works, as well, as Vernon says “is the excavation of buried paint layers through sanding. Since many of these pieces have had numerous stages of accumulation, they were like gold mines of hidden color.”
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Iranian painter Ali Esmaeillou reveals haunting parallel universes beneath the pleasant facades of everyday life. In each series of paintings, Esmaeillou explores the psyche of specific archetypes, such as warriors, or digs into the personalities of the characters that compose a particular story, like the great 10th century Persian epic, the Shahnameh.