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.
Robert S. Connett's highly detailed and Natural Science-inspired illustrations have acquired a few labels, from strange, fantastical, alienesque, to unsettling. Even his website is "
Filipino surrealist Jon Jaylo creates brilliantly colored and riddled oil paintings inspired by poetry and stories. His paintings have earned him the moniker "The Enigma" for his puzzling depictions of a parallel universe where animals wear clothes, children take on adult personas and gravity ceases to exist. Jaylo has said that he is never completely satisfied with his style, which varies from piece to piece, influenced by a range of artists like Rene Magritte, Paul Delvaux, Gustav Klimt, Frida Kahlo, Salvador Dalí, and William Bougereau. Opening September 12th, Jaylo will make his US debut with his solo exhibition "As the Moon Draws Water" at Distinction Gallery in California.
New Zealander