Los Angeles-based artist Edith Waddell creates riveting illustrations that call upon nature, otherworldly imagery, and human conflict. These explorations present both absorbing narratives and straightforward studies. In a statement, the artist talks about the themes she commonly explores.
“My artwork is an exploration into the human psyche,” the artist says. “I use elements taken from flora, fauna and my own recurrent dreams to personify internal emotional conflicts on such subjects as phobia, genetic experimentation, maternity, narcissism, seduction and spirituality. Fragments from the exterior natural world, as well as our own internal emotional world, inspire the concepts in my work. This conceptual material offers me a wellspring of symbolic language that allows me to compose anthropomorphic floral arrangements and whimsical hybrid creatures.”
Waddell has a new show at La Luz de Jesus gallery, kicking off August 4.
In his depictions of the everyday, Arcmanoro Niles recalls traditional figurative painting while subverting in his choice of hues and glitter—and also introducing strange characters into the scenes dubbed "seekers." These characters offer new insight and disruption to the people he pulls from his own life.
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.