Combining oils, charcoal, and paper mounted on panel, Paul Cristina crafts riveting and disconcerting figurative portraits. Though he uses drawing as his foundational practice, the process of creating these works is one of both deconstruction and reconstruction. The above work is currently featured in a group show at Booth Gallery.
“In this recent body of work, Cristina was influenced by the idea of how we are often indoctrinated in various ways throughout our childhood, adolescence and into our adult life,” Beresford Studios said last year, of the work featured in the video below. “Some methods of indoctrination are more obvious and have become normalized or trivialized within daily routine, while others remain rather harmful and discreet.”
Find more of Cristina’s recent work on his site.
Having indexed many of the monsters he’s created over the past several years, illustrator and fine artist Stan Manoukian continues to create riveting scenes with these creatures in their natural habitats. Though the artist has a talent in color, his narratives take on a particularly absorbing quality when rendered only in graphite or inks.
In the series “Marquees Tropica,” illustrator 
Fred Tomaselli's psychedelic painting/collage hybrids have mind-altering tendencies in more ways than one. Over his career, the artist has earned a reputation for blending psychotropic substances with cut-out photos of animals and human parts to create his surreal works of art. Newer pieces shift the focus to more conventional photo collage and acrylic, yet are no less mesmerizing. Colorful and imaginative, Tomaselli's works are like portals to an alternate universe, where his "inquiry into utopia/dystopia - framed by artifice but motivated by the desire for the real - has turned out to be the primary subject".