Devin Troy Strother knows how to throw a party on a canvas with his mixed media explosions of color and cut paper. He’s a California artist transplanted to Brooklyn, and he’s one to watch. When I look at his work, I hear loudness (in a good way).

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Kamrooz Aram is an Iranian-born artist that lives in Brooklyn. Pattern plays a big role in his work and he plays with iconography a lot. His series of paintings that have a greenish, night-vision goggle hue are pretty terrifying. Angels and hawks circle around Persian clouds and the point of view seems to be from an American soldier.

Born in Japan, but currently living in Brooklyn, artist Hisham Akira Bharoocha’s portfolio is full of amazing photographs, paintings, installations, and even music tracks. But my favorite out of all of his creations, are his collages.

They’re the perfect blend of mixed media, color, and imagery. Looking at them makes me feel like I’ve fallen into a Hipster’s Paradise; a place where neon colors and references to nature and politics coexist peacefully. Wide eyed kittens and pom poms are also present.

Sometimes it’s nice to see a more classic approach to painting, which is what makes Brooklyn artist Tom Bennett’s work so refreshing.

I’m a fan of the mixed media paintings by Brooklyn-based artist Carrie Moyer: they range from abstract composition to more topical and symbol driven pieces.

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Brooklyn-artist Summer Brennan’s new series of paintings, called Smultronstället, or Where Wild Strawberries Grow, is currently featured on Kickstarter as a highlighted art project. These light-infused, dreamy oil paintings are based on her time spent on a small island off the coast of Sweden and ‘explore ideas of place and belonging, innocence and memory, love and loss, longing and separation’.

I’m interested in the ways in which many textile artists these days, perhaps as a reaction to industry, focus on the process of creation rather than the utility of the resulting creations. Brooklyn-based Emily Barletta discharges emotional and physical pain through the meditative processes of crochet and embroidery. Though Barletta states that her pieces are unplanned and dictated by the properties of each new set of materials, her work consistently references biological forms — parasites, cellular structures, internal organs, amorphous and sea creatures.

Brooklyn-based artist Ben Phelan recently had a few pieces at Nudashank Gallery in Baltimore. One of them, the Dream Machine Device, consists of acrylic orbs fitted with strobing LED lights, making for a truly intense, visceral experience.

At the opening of the show during the Transmodern Festival, the piece induced seizures in a reveler who had been partying with various substances, and later in the evening, it caused a resident cat to vomit and convulse. Phelan was rumored to be appalled when he heard the news. He intends his strobe devices to be therapeutic.

Brooklyn-based Joel Holland works freelance for magazines and publishing houses, creating advertisement illustration for agencies and design companies. His portfolio showcases a brilliant use of colour, his designs never being overworked, while his hand lettered type makes him one of my favourite typographers around right now. [see also the illustrations of Brooklyn-based Autumn Whitehurst]

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Brooklyn-based artist David Kassan paints such lifelike portraits, they practically leap off the canvas: ‘As an expression of his own calculated observation and visual consumption of surrounding environment, introspective glimpses of reality imbue the art of David Kassan. By immersing himself into his subject matter, Kassan is able to infuse his paiinting with life and realism’.