German artist and programmer Florian Kuhlmann designs spectacular, symmetrical collages that overflow with innumerable objects, intricate details and vivid gradients. Sometimes it can take Kuhlmann several months to make one single collage.

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Linn Olofsdotter’s illustration work is so complex, so colourful, so damn alluring, you just want to slink inside of it and explore the myriad of shapes and textures.

Amazing oil paintings by Parisian artist Francoise Nielly, who uses a palette knife to achieve the dramatic textures and bold line work that punctuates her portraits.

Illustrator Jesse Auersalo divides his time between Brooklyn and Helsinki. His distinctive, character-driven work is marked by an aesthetic he describes as ‘polished and clean, as well as sticky and dirty.’ In his first-ever New York presentation, at Bumble and bumble on March 3, Auersalo will discuss his design background, its relationship to his personal life, and how they all affect what he is doing now.

Taking inspiration from Lewis Carroll, Dr Seuss, and Salvador Dali, Rose Skinner creates vibrant installation art from candy, plastic, and toys. Of her work, she says: ‘my intricate compositions of eclectic materials play tantalizing games on your senses; you are bombarded with colors and textures sounds and smells, metaphors and iconography that are used often in ironic ways’.

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The artwork of Los Angeles-based Sarajo Frieden literally explodes out of the canvas, this challenging, confronting, colourful burst of shapes and textures, at once disjointed yet somehow perfectly in place. She says of her work: ‘The cacophony of hand-painted signs in a variety of languages serves as both inspiration and daily reminder that the ordinary is often extraordinary and nothing is what it seems. A host of disparate vocabularies from the worlds of fine, folk and decorative art, including Persian miniatures, Shaker trance drawings, Japanese ukiyo-e, and my Hungarian great aunt’s embroidery, can be found wandering through my images. I try to give form to the human experience as I see it’.

Laurie Hogin takes a classical approach to painting mutant critters that snarl and menace through their cute, day-glo fur. If Victorian artists got in a time machine to the ’80s, watched Gremlins, bought some Hypercolor jam shorts, and went back to their home era, they might have generated images like these.

Pasadena, California artist, Jason Redwood, creates luminous, thickly textured artwork and illustrations that practically leap off the page with their bright colours and three dimensional layering.

There’s such a sense of wonderment and metaphysical exploration about the soft, colourful, and at times mournful, artwork of Arizona-based artist, Joe Sorren. When asked where he draws his inspiration from, he responds with a simple explanation: ‘If you lead with your hands, the mind will follow. That is a piece of advice my Mother-in-Law gave me once. I usually just begin and see what happen’.

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Funnily enough, my introduction to the work of artist and illustrator J. Otto Seibold was through a Norstrom holiday display many years back. The entire store was bedecked in Olive the Other Reindeer regalia. It took me forever to part with my Olive the Reindeer shopping bags, so when I later discovered that Olive was, in fact, a recurring story book character (not simply some character fabricated solely for the holiday display), I was pretty psyched and have been a fan of all the ragtag J. Otto Seibold characters and books ever since.

Oh boy! This artwork by Bellta Shotlersuk is like staring at the deepest, darkest reaches of your inner-soul and having the damn thing scream right back at you.

If ever there was an artist more deserving of critical acclaim, it’s Toronto-based, Jon Todd. I first came across his work a number of years ago at an underground art exhibit at the famed Niagara Bar in New York City: it was a painted skateboard deck. Who would have thought four years later that he would be staging his first solo show in the hotbed of Pop Surrealism.

I met up with him at Art Basel this past weekend at various and sundry after-parties and events. We had a chance to chat a little bit about his upcoming solo exhibit at Thinkspace Gallery, slated for Friday, December 12th. ‘This is very personal work for me,’ Todd said shyly. ‘It’s largely about the themes of struggle, love, and our need to break free’.

Throw in some old school Russian prison tattoo imagery, burly Mexican wrestlers meets Antonio Gaudi-type influence in patterning, and you will find the beautiful works of Jon Todd. I even own his work myself.

Janay Everett attended the School of Visual Arts in New York before moving to Atlanta where she earned a bachelors degree in fine arts from the Atlanta College of Art. Her artwork is influenced by abstract expressionism. As she notes, she likes to ‘focus more on the process rather than on the finished product’.

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There is a lot to enjoy about the work of artist Shen Plum. It’s a lot like looking through the kaleidoscope into a lovely nuanced wonderland, the one through the rabbit hole. Marks feels as if they are scattered to the wind, disjointed characters pop in and out of the narrative as they please, and nothing is ever taken for granted.

Polina Zioga’s piece Under the Surface interrupted my Wednesday afternoon doldrums, consisting of mind-numbing admin duties that creep up on you after weeks of neglect, and swept me off to a land where I became a Mermaid. A Mermaid Princess, if you will. In this beautiful underwater world that I created in my mind, I have all the state of the art materials to show off my new cloister. The pink seaweed marsh that I welcome my honorary fishy friends to swim through when entering the grounds is made of a fine material that comes from the Indian Ocean region, where the coral reefs are considered gold. Eco friendly, of course. The purple and yellow ground-globs are actually a new form of sea sculpture: a jelly fish by the name of Sarge and a good friend of Poseidon. I want to thank the artist and art in general for relieving me from an afternoon of tedious repute and reminding me that inspiration, aesthetics, and imagination are necessary. André Malraux explained it perfectly when he said, ‘The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random among the profusion of the earth and the galaxies, but that in this prison we can fashion images sufficiently powerful to deny our nothingness’. Or, in my case, allow me to procrastinate just a little longer.

The work of Estonian artist Liisa Kruusmägi blows my mind. It hits me like the first blast of sunshine after a long and chilly winter.

California-based artist Andrew Brandou draws from the children’s books, as well as the tripped-out, cult obsessed, disillusioned zeitgeist of the 70s when his early consciousness took shape. The storybook-ish quality of his works creates a sort of narrative of the tectonic shifts that have taken place in the psyche of an entire generation — anthropomorphic animals frolic in subtly Japanese-lacquer-inspired landscapes as gas-mask-wearing cops creep, grinning skulls loom, elevated freeways overwhelm the rising sun, and bloody murder scenes remain hidden just beyond the view of the paintings’ innocent subjects.

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The work of Washington DC-artist Michael Dotson goes a ways to satisfying my insatiable colour sweet tooth. His work makes my eyes light up. Colour aside, Dotson’s cleanly simplified, geometric renderings of various spaces are a treat. Often abstract to the extent that it’s difficult to truly interpret the space, it ultimately leaves the imagination with something to chew on.

Though his colourful murals, installations, and drawings look playful and whimsical, at the heart of Fawad Khan’s work is a dark and complex political struggle with violence and identity that takes place through, on, and in, public vehicles. The New York-based artist was raised in Pakistan and speaks of being ridiculed when he was a child as he boarded a bus in Karachi for being born in Libya. The vehicles Khan renders and replicates are not only symbols of place and authority (the New York City cab and the US mail truck) and gathering places (public buses), but also have become weapons, as the constant news of car bombs reminds us every day.

Working out of Latvia, Riga, artist Ilgvars Zalans creates lush, vibrant pieces that are at once unsettling for their mashed up textures as they are eerily and awkwardly beautiful. Of his art, he says: ‘I focus on images and motifs that are fundamental, archetypal, and universal in human experience, as opposed to those that are socially determined’.