We checked in with Arizona-based artist Nate Ronniger and asked him about the process behind his elaborate creations: ‘In many ways, I think of myself as a director. Situating a still life of mine is like putting on a miniature play. There are costumes, characters and props. I want the plot to be intriguing and clear while I aim to present both drama and comedy. I’m very intrigued with the element of paper. While fashioning paper for the pedestals, foregrounds, and backgrounds, I realized that any idea I have involving color, form, texture, and pattern, can be brought to fruition with this material alone. Torn, translucent, cut, or folded, it can take on any manipulation I come up with in any dimension’.

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Argentinian illustrator Gustavo Aimar’s version of the Deluge is full of light and peace in it’s inherent simplicity and wondrous naivety. Generally speaking, the innocence and playfulness of childhood is never far from the core symbolic theme in Aimar’s works.

Artist Mikey Welsh — who once pounded the bass for perennial chartsters Weezer — is exhibiting a range of new works, Paintings and Drawings, at Montanaro Gallery in Newport, Rhode Island. The show kicks off on Saturday, November 8th from 7-10pm. We caught up with him for an email chat: How different is the lifestyle between fulltime musician and fulltime artist in terms of the time you start and end your day, and the energy you bring to your activities? ‘My life is much healthier than it used to be. In my Weezer days, I would usually wake up massively hung over in various hotels and tour buses around the world. I would end my day at 5 or 6 in the morning, damaging myself somehow. Now I wake up at 5am and start painting right through the morning. I am in bed by ten every night’.

What is your enduring memory of the live paint demo at Burton? Was it as much fun as you thought it might be?
‘I remember changing into my painting clothes right before I was about to go out to do the painting. I was so nervous I felt I was about to throw up. But when I got out to the room where the canvas was set up (there were about 100 people there) I got right into the zone and the painting ended up coming out amazing. The whole experience was a blast. There was a DJ cranking music while I was working and when I was finished with the painting I turned around to the crowd and announced “all done”. There was a huge round of applause and dozens of people snapping photos’.

Any colours you find yourself gravitating towards at the moment?
‘Black and cadmium red’

What’s in store for visitors to your Montanaro Gallery exhibition in November?
‘We’re going to put in a ton of paintings. Quite a few of them were painted in the last several years, so people will get a chance to see the progression of my work. There will be a lot of brand new pieces as well and we will also have a series of limited edition t-shirts available’.

One time bassist for Weezer, now an artist in his own right, Mikey Welsh is showing a selection of his colourful new paintings in an exhibition called Paintings and Drawings which kicks off on Saturday, November 8th from 7-10pm at Montanaro Gallery in Newport, Rhode Island. The night is free and open to the public. All works will be for sale and available on the Montanaro website. Mikey will also be doing a live paint demo in New York on Wednesday, November 12th at Burton Snowboards Flagship store in Soho.

Claude Monet may have started going blind when he painted some of his most iconic pieces, but Turkish painter Esref Armagan has been totally blind since birth. He uses a Braille stylus to sketch out images, which he then paints using his hands.

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