While collecting stones along the east coast of his hometown in Maine, it dawned on artist Alan Magee how the beauty of an object draws in its own attention. His hyperrealistic acrylic and oil paintings look unbelievably like photographs, capturing the quiet intensity of those stones, pebbles and rocks that demanded his contemplation. Each is arranged in softly lit, zen like compositions, where Magee has stacked them like cairns or on top of other objects, while in other pieces, they appear scattered like a starry Milky Way galaxy, bleached white by the sun and sand with their own stories to tell. “Attention and beauty are so closely linked,” he says. “So many of the problems that we seem to be bumping our heads against constantly, that we are struggling with interpersonally and internationally, are related to a failure of appreciation. If it’s true that with heightened attention places, objects, and people reveal themselves as singularly beautiful, then surely the inverse of this must govern our dismissals and our hatred of the unfamiliar. It is not such a reach if you come to these conclusions if you draw and paint.”
Hi-Fructose co-founder Annie Owens has a new giclée print available in our store. The 13" x 20" "Piggies" prints are limited to 40, with 20 of those sold in the Hi-Fructose store. All are signed and numbered. Order it 
In Mecro's recent body of work, displayed in a show at Arch Enemy Arts, he uses letters as the building blocks of natural forms. "Verdigris" collected aerosol and oil work that recalls his work within graffiti culture. See several of those works from that body of work below.
Justin Fitzpatrick’s oil paintings blend influences from Art Nouveau, illuminated manuscripts from the Middle Ages, anatomical drawings, and elsewhere. The actual subjects in the works likewise move through time, from using the construction workers as visual motif to creatures of the natural world rendered with Victorian flavor.
In "Exit Reality," oil painter