At first glance, Nathaniel Mary Quinn‘s works may appear as collages. But the Chicago-raised artist’s stirring portraits are rendered in charcoal, oil-paint, paint-stick, gouache and oil pastel by his own hands, an alchemistic process that is both meticulous and intuitive. Much of his work pulls from his own experiences, composite memories that mix bright pop cultural references and the bleakness found in his subjects.
He’s been quoted as saying this about his work: ““I hope to convey a sense of how our experiences, both good and bad, operate to construct our identities. I also want to portray a mutual relationship between the acceptable and the unacceptable, the grotesque and what is aesthetically pleasing.”
The artist’s work has been shown across the world, and pieces are included in the Whitney Museum of American Art, Art Institute of Chicago, and Sheldon Museum of Art. He currently lives and works in New York. See more of his recent work below.
Cesar Piette’s analogue paintings carry the texture and sheen of digitally created Pixar characters. The artist uses a blend of paint techniques, between traditional layering and airbrush approaches. Before that, the artist has first designed these characters via sketching, digital modeling and adjustment, and then goes to work on the final painting.
The vibrant work of 
New Mexico painter 
Orion Martin applies a startling ability to play with textures, shifting planes, and focus to an unexpected assortment of objects and characters. His shifting between mediums adds to the guessing game of looking at a particular piece and attempting to dissect each element’s nature. He's often been linked to the representational artists under the Chicago Imagists moniker.