Stuart Snoddy, a painter based in the Midwest, creates “fantasies and fictions about imaginary people.” His oil works on paper and on canvas move between the wistful and the contemplative. And while Snoddy plays with form and hues, each of the artist’s pieces are distinctly human.
The artist says that not every character in his works has a specific origin. “I paint people that surface from a yearning imagination,” Snoddy says, in a statement. “Some are illuminated by the refulgence of past encounters like a glowing filament in a freshly turned off light bulb. And some come from…who knows, or wherever. I guess I just miss my friends. Nostalgia is real sticky stuff. But this fantasy nurtures the narratives of our lives as cohesive intellectual and emotional beings. I indulge it.”
A majority of the work here is oil on canvas, panel, or paper, yet Snoddy’s styles takes a different turn with his gouache works. These smaller pieces comes across more as snapshots than moments, bursts of activity and candid renderings. Lately, the artist has been working even smaller with mini-oil paintings, on panels that are 8 inches in diameter. (Or as the artist asks, “How does one pull oneself into something that is only about as wide as the distance between pupils?”)
Spanish artist Ivana Flores crafts pop-surrealist oil paintings with both a childlike sense of whimsy and ominous undertones. At grand sizes, the works carry an absorbing quality that pulls you into her worlds. Her work has been described as “reality, dream, everyday life and imagination merge at a turning point of boundless consciousness of self-image and world.”
The expressive oil paintings of Russian born and Philadelphia based artist 