Singapore-born, Los Angeles-based artist Jolene Lai creates narrative oil paintings and mixed-media works that blend cinematic and mythical notions. These surreal images can feel both pensive and intense, conjuring familiar images and the otherworldly. The artist, formerly a movie poster designer, often anchors her paintings in youthful contexts.
“Lai is inspired by everything from mythologies, Asian culture, and children’s stories, to fashion editorials, cityscapes, and illustration,” the gallery says. “She is always seeking new ‘sets’ and stages for her characters and their outlandish encounters. Aesthetically, her work combines the beautiful and the grotesque with the quiet and the excessive in fluid and unexpected ways, just as innocence in her imagery tends to be shadowed by the suggestion of something sinister or dark.”
Lai studied painting at Lasalle-SIA College of the Arts in Singapore before her tenure at UCLA as a graphic design students. After her stint with a film-advertisement design house, she decided to focus on her personal work full-time and has showcased across the world.
"A Student's Dream," the central oil painting in 
In Greek mythology, "the Kindly Ones", also known as Furies, are female deities or goddesses of vengeance from the underworld. They were tasked with pursuing people who have done evil and justifying their horrific crimes, making them equal sides of good and bad. Furies are the inspiration behind "The Kindly Ones" by artists 
Sarah Ball's oil paintings, subtle in their complexity, are intended for the viewer to encounter the portrait's subject intimately. The practice of physiognomy, or judging the character of a person just from their facial features or expressions, has long been a subject of fascination for the artist. In efforts like her current Anima Mundi show "Themself," she culls her subjects from historic photographic archives, social media, and beyond. "These source images become a starting point for a methodical process of understanding, assumption and translation, where the aesthetic ‘mask' and what lies beneath become the focus of engagement,” the gallery says.
Painter Peter Ferguson returns to Roq La Rue Gallery with "Skip Forward When Held," bringing his sensibility that blends notes of the Dutch Renaissance, Lovecraftian creatures, and more. The show, running through January 25 at the space, brings new oil paintings to the space. Ferguson was last featured on our site