I check out Santiago Salvador’s Flickr all the time. I love the flair and playfulness of and the simplicity of the design. Salvador is able to combine a folk aesthetic with a modern style and his use of color is excellent.

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Stephanie Tichenor’s works in fiber and paint are delightful. In the difficult, often frightening world we live in, it’s a treat to see art concerned with whimsy, light and a genuine love for the everyday. Pay close close attention to Tichenor’s embroideries: they are lovely and blur the line between fine art and craft.

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I tend to not like most folksy, craftsy, text-and-graphics-based art, but British artist William Edmonds does it really well. His images and ideas are actually compelling and often weird, way better than just a bird silk-screened on a piece of drift wood.

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Ricky Needham’s bizarre, fantastical, visionary folk art freaks us out and makes us feel funny inside. Really cool stuff.

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I love the folky, wood-block print look of illustrator Netali Ron-Raz’s work. Her images have a knowing innocence about them that I find compelling.

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Sandrine Pelletier combines traditional and conceptual techniques to bring folk and pop concepts and narratives — backyard wrestling, black metal, folk mythologies, kitsch — into intellectual consideration and experience.

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Adam Hancher is an illustrator from Bristol, UK. His work is usually focused around some sort of narrative; being influenced in particular by woodland tales, mythology, and design work from the early 1900s.

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I love that people like Tessa Hulls are still creating fantastical fairy tale worlds full of benevolent animals and ancient future tribes.

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Knitting, puppets and weird folksy themes run through the strange and surreal paintings of Canadian artist, Andrea Wan.

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Artist Bill McRight just designed an awesome Dragon Wizard Weed t-shirt for Philly-based Print Liberation. Check out McRight’s other work as well. They’re like folk art from a mountain tribe of mutants.

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Brooklyn-based illustrator Aya Kakeda has used a wide range of materials for her Yoshitomo Nara-esque images, but there’s something particularly compelling about her embroidered work. The constraints and distortions inherent in the medium suggests a struggle and a roughness not apparent in her other work and fits nicely with some of her folky subject matter and child-like narratives.

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I’ve been intrigued with Henry Darger’s work since seeing the excellent documentary, In the Realms of the Unreal, a few years ago. Darger epitomizes the “outsider artist” due to the fact that he worked as a janitor up until his retirement and his paintings were not found until after his death. Maybe that’s why this new book, Henry Darger by Klaus Biesenbach, and his paintings in general feel like a lost treasure.

The innocence of his characters (mostly young girls engaged in battles) help contribute to the feeling you are looking at something magical. This large-format coffee table book is beautifully done, with 304 pages and double page and gatefold spreads. The book is available through Prestel and Darger’s work can also be seen at The American Folk Art Museum in New York through September 13, 2010.

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As a long time fan of the folksy paintings of artist Keith Shore, I was really happy to hear from him that he’s just updated his site with some amazing new paintings. I can never get enough of the loose, dreamy way that he treats his subject matter, as well as the medium in general. In fact, several of these paintings will be dressing the set of the upcoming movie, The Beaver, starring Mel Gibson and Jodie Foster. I’ve never been a huge Mel Gibson fan, but I might have to check this one out.

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Kathleen Lolley takes a narrative approach to her folky paintings, using fairy-tale, fantastical, and mythological imagery to weave cryptic stories both imaginary and referential to her personal life.

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There’s something folk arty about JJ Cromer’s work, and it would certainly translate well onto textiles. If Joan Miro had spent time in Africa and set up shop in rural New Jersey, his work might look something like Cromer’s.

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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’.

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Described as being ‘familiar, yet horribly unique and fresh’, San Francisco-based artist Matthew Palladino creates portraits of American life that are inspired by current media events. The often raw and violent subject matter is diffused by a flat drawing style that draws upon folk references and early mission school artists.

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This mini-museum is right next to that shining fortress of New York’s MOMA and always has interesting shows, is never crowded, and the works are sure to inspire you. The Folk Art Museum is best known for putting now-popular outsider artist Henry Darger under a huge spotlight. And they’re showing some of his masterpieces yet again. Don’t miss it!

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I’ve been enthralled for quite a while now with the work of San Francisco artist Maxwell Loren Holyoke Hirsch. His illustrations embody a sense of spontaneity and raw feeling, much like a skilled jazz musician feeling out a bouncing rhythm, riffing this way and that. Holyoke Hirsch has illustrated for numerous publications, including The New York Times and Fantagraphics, as well as just recently having had his first solo show, A Season in Hell, at Anno Domini Gallery in San Jose. We caught up with him recently.

Where did you go to school?
‘I haven’t been to school yet. I have always wanted to become a doctor so I might try that when I turn thirty’.

How would you describe the “arc” of your artistic journey thus far? 
‘I’d like to think of my career as being on more of a steady incline rather than some bow-shaped arc. A constant gradual incline upwards, to the end. My journey so far hasn’t been that long. It’s been about three years since I first taught myself how to put my work online and that’s when it all began for me. I would update quite feverishly and email random people to get responses. I didn’t really care about anything except showing people my work and I didn’t expect much. People just started asking me to do illustrations and I was sort of forced into it’.

You have a very distinctive, spontaneous sketchbook feel to your work. How would you say it has evolved since you began?
‘I know a lot more about color, balance and texture now. My work is maturing and getting more fun and serious at the same time. Some days I am less spontaneous than others. I have sort of evolved to a point where I don’t mess up things up as much as I used to’.

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When looking at the beautiful paintings of Mamma Anderson, I almost get the impression that the art world is being forced to look back upon itself. The body of her work seems to present itself like a textured snapshot of galleries, coffeshops and well-designed interiors. The rough, folksy execution of these paintings stands in pretty stark contrast to the particularly slick world she chooses to depict. Refreshing, to say the least.

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