Celeste Chen is a Boston-born, Asian-American artist who currently lives and studies in Washington, D. C. at Georgetown University. As a studio art and neurobiology double major, Chen explores themes of transition and identity formation through non-traditional combinations of media, including oils, acrylics and spray paint.

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Carla Fache’s works reflects the universal, the primitiveness, the essential, and the endless language of color. Her command of shapes, shades and layers, and the invisible energy behind them, invites the viewer to build vibrational paradigms framed by the energy of color.

Brianna Harden is a Los Angeles-born, Brooklyn-based illustrator who uses gouache and water-media to create her drawings. She combines a variety of inspirations, from botany to textile patterns to the urban environment she lives in.

These minimalist sculptures, arrangements, and paintings roughly constructed from simple materials by Noam Rappaport are pretty intriguing.

Originally from Basque Country in Spain, Jose-Maria Cundin moved to New Orleans in 1964 where he has spent the past four decades painting his strange and colorful abstract paintings and whimsical sculptures.

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This is a cookbook with a difference: it’s filled with original artwork — fully realised paintings, not sketches, as well as delicious vegetarian recipes. The artwork aims to capture the essence of each dish, with piece being noticeably stylistically different.

It’s funny how after a lifetime of training and practice to draw and paint ‘better,’ many artists regret the loss of the sort looseness and crudeness they had in childhood. Able Brown has retained an unrefined hand, which lends his drawings and paintings a humorous and even subversive air.

Benjamin Duke depicts insane landscapes busy with catastrophic car crashes, birthing mothers, smarmy twenty-somethings, and heartfelt human interaction. His work speaks to the overload of information in our culture, right down to the choice of canvas size – some of his paintings are as tall as eight feet, dominating the gallery space – yet there is a beauty to his economic brush strokes and dazzling pallette that leaves a strong impression on the viewer.

Boston-based artist Corey Corcoran synthesizes neo-primitivist visions out of found materials, fabrics, and a rusty palette of paints and pigments.

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The paintings of French illustrator Emmanuelle Pioli are full of delicate clouds, princesses, flowers and birds, all glowing brightly from within. There is certainly a magical quality to her paintings which ought to appeal to any girl who has ever cherished a unicorn or dancing ballerina jewelry box.

Tokyo-born, Brooklyn-based artist Tadashi Moriyama makes stunningly detailed mixed-media paintings and drawings in which he renders organic textures and biological forms as well as architectural structures.

Dalek’s paintings were originally populated by Space Monkeys, creatures inspired by the artist’s childhood and teenage years in Japan. His most recent paintings have metamorphosed into incredibly complex abstract works, emphasizing his meticulous attention to detail and amazing sense of colour and composition. Dalek’s work has been widely exhibited internationally, and he recently spent a year as an assistant of Takashi Murakami, probably the most famous artist in the contemporary art scene. His latest exhibition Dalek and Delta, runs at the Elms Lesters Painting Rooms from August 28 to September 26. He’ll be contributing guest posts to Lost At E Minor over the next two weeks on the art and music that’s inspiring his own work right now.

I learned of the work of New York artist Katherine Mangiardi from the Merchant’s House Museum of all places. So appropriate. Mangiardi’s paintings of lace are unbelievably haunting, like the delicate, filmy fabric of a ghost, or like the painfully decaying lace of an antique dress. I also found her fabric installations at various historic museums around the East Coast rather beautiful. I find the idea of being able to set up an installation in a historic house pretty intriguing.

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While I am as impressed as anyone with an artist’s ability to render accurate and lifelike human figures, I’m more often compelled aesthetically by looser and more stylized images such as Camilla Engman’s. The wide-set eyes, bulbous bodies, and skewed proportions of the people and animals in Engman’s paintings lend them a certain expressiveness and melancholy.

Oh, wow. Look closely, this is a man’s head. A man’s bald head, covered in paint. Yes, James Kuhn likes to paint his shiny bald head in an assortment of styles using Kryolan Aqua Color, Snazaroo, and Paradise by Mehron. It’s kinda like the amazing hand art of Guido Daniele. Just a little messier.

Busy, colorful and expressive, I am head over heels for the paintings of Chicago artist Isak Applin. His work is so loose and busy that picking out particular elements can feel a bit like a game of ‘where’s Waldo’. But that’s what I love about his stuff.

God I love the work of artist Kelly Lynn Jones.  Jones creates a world of fantasy spaces, the kind of places you just want to crawl in and out of, relax in, explore.  These sparse, unpopulated settings call to mind a sort of Hopper-esque alternate universe. If I could spend even spend just a moment inside one of her paintings!  Her rough rendering on sparse white backgrounds do these settings full justice, properly lending themselves to the quiete, dreamlike feeling these habitats cultivate.  Having followed her work for some time now, I have watched Jones worlds become more involved, growing from individual spaces to entire communities.  I for one simply can’t wait to see what comes next.

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