Uploaded August 2024 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
Inspired by the magic of folklore and characterised by a warm, muted palette and aged plasterwork layering, reminiscent of fresco painting, narrative threads are woven around the interactions between Paul’s anthromorphised figures, in a world free from the boundaries of time and culture.
Paul lives and works in the north of Scotland.
[from: paul-barnes.com/about]
Music: Alio Die " Watermark Of A Turquoise Morning"
Inspired by the magic of folklore and characterised by a warm, muted palette and aged plasterwork layering, reminiscent of fresco painting, narrative threads are woven around the interactions between Paul’s anthromorphised figures, in a world free from the boundaries of time and culture.
Paul lives and works in the north of Scotland.
[from: paul-barnes.com/about]
Music: Alio Die " Watermark Of A Turquoise Morning"
![Christian Schloe
Christian Schloe is a talented digital artist from Austria, whose work combines painting, illustration, and photography. Anything can happen in the world of Christian Schloe. Surreal art is the best way to define the work of his digital paintings, which transport us to a world of romance and extravagant beauties. The breathtaking use of color, light, shades and forms creates a unique and charismatic world which can be close only to our dreams. The art of Christian Schloe represents a happy marriage between reality and imagination.
[from: https://thewomangallery.com/christian-schloe-contemporary-artist/]
Music: Harold Budd Juno Christian Schloe](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/w2jaOzxZbQM/mqdefault.jpg)
![Michael Sowa
Michael Sowa (born 1945) is a German artist known mainly for his paintings, which are variously whimsical, surreal, or stunning. His paintings often feature animals and are titled in English and German. Sowa studied at the Berlin State School of Fine Arts for seven years and worked briefly as an art teacher before focusing entirely on his career as a painter and illustrator.
A book of 50 paintings titled Sowas Ark : An Enchanted Bestiary was published in 1996. He also illustrated Esterhazy, The Rabbit Prince by Irene Dische and Hans M. Enzensberger. He is the illustrator of The Little King December and A Bear Called Sunday, both authored by Axel Hacke.
He was the cover artist for several albums, including Mad Season by Matchbox Twenty and two covers for The Beautiful Souths Miaow and for their single Everybodys Talkin.
He gained new followers for his work on the 2001 film Amélie where his art on the walls comes to life. Sowa contributes illustrations to the satirical German magazine, Titanic, and he also did the art work for magazine covers of several well-known periodicals, most notably the December 2, 2002 issue of The New Yorker.
His art is widely available as posters, notecards, postcards, and calendars.
[from Wikipedia]
Music: Alio Die & Festina Lente LOblio Nella Culla Dorata Michael Sowa](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/wRKxPQ2cwo8/mqdefault.jpg)
![Louis Icart
Louis Icart was born in Toulouse, France. He began drawing at an early age. He was particularly interested in fashion, and became famous for his sketches almost immediately. He worked for major design studios at a time when fashion was undergoing a radical change-from the fussiness of the late nineteenth century to the simple, clingy lines of the early twentieth century. He was first son of Jean and Elisabeth Icart and was officially named Louis Justin Laurent Icart. The use of his initials L.I. would be sufficient in this household. Therefore, from the moment of his birth he was dubbed Helli. The Icart family lived modestly in a small brick home on rue Traversière-de-la-balance, in the culturally rich Southern French city of Toulouse, which was the home of many prominent writers and artists, the most famous being Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.
In Icarts drawings, one sees the Impressionists Degas and Monet and, in his rare watercolors, the Symbolists Odilon Redon and Gustave Moreau. In fact, Icart lived outside the fashionable artistic movements of the time and was not completely sympathetic to contemporary art. Nonetheless, his Parisian scenes are a documentation of the life he saw around him and they are nearly as popular today as when they were first produced.
[more at:http://rogallery.com/Icart_Louis/icart-biography.htm]
Music: Harold Budd Madrigals Of The Rose Angel (Rossetti Noise /The Garden And A Coda) Louis Icart](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/wVpWxsXp0ao/mqdefault.jpg)
![Edvard Munch
Edvard Munch (Norwegian pronunciation: [ˈmuŋk], 12 December 1863 23 January 1944) was a Norwegian Symbolist painter, printmaker and an important forerunner of expressionist art. His best-known composition, The Scream, is part of a series The Frieze of Life, in which Munch explored the themes of love, fear, death, melancholia, and anxiety.
Edvard Munch was born in a rustic farmhouse in the village of Ådalsbruk in Løten, Norway to Christian Munch, the son of a priest. Christian was a doctor and medical officer who married Laura Catherine Bjølstad, a woman half his age, in 1861. Edvard had an older sister, Johanne Sophie (born 1862), and three younger siblings: Peter Andreas (born 1865), Laura Catherine (born 1867), and Inger Marie (born 1868). Both Sophie and Edvard appear to have inherited their artistic talent from their mother. Edvard Munch was related to painter Jacob Munch (1776 1839) and historian Peter Andreas Munch (1810 1863).
After numerous experiments, Munch concluded that the Impressionist idiom did not allow sufficient expression. He found it superficial and too akin to scientific experimentation. He felt a need to go deeper and explore situations brimming with emotional content and expressive energy. Under Jaegers commandment that Munch should write his life, meaning that Munch should explore his own emotional and psychological state, Munch began a period of reflection and self-examination, recording his thoughts in his souls diary.This deeper perspective helped move him to a new view of his art. He wrote that his painting The Sick Child (1886), based on his sisters death, was his first soul painting, his first break from Impressionism. The painting received a negative response from critics and from his family, and caused another violent outburst of moral indignation from the community.
Munch continued to employ a variety of brushstroke technique and color palettes throughout the 1880s and early 1890s as he struggled to define his style.His idiom continued to veer between naturalistic, as seen in Portrait of Hans Jæger, and impressionistic, as in Rue Lafayette. His Inger On the Beach (1889), which caused another storm of confusion and controversy, hints at the simplified forms, heavy outlines, sharp contrasts, and emotional content of his mature style to come.He began to carefully calculate his compositions to create tension and emotion. While stylistically influenced by the Post-Impressionists, what evolved was a subject matter which was symbolist in content, depicting a state of mind rather than an external reality. In 1889, Munch presented his first one-man show of nearly all his works to date. The recognition it received led to a two-year state scholarship to study in Paris under French painter Léon Bonnat.
When Munch died, he bequeathed his remaining works to the city of Oslo, which built the Munch Museum at Tøyen (it opened in 1963). The museum hosts a collection of approximately 1,100 paintings, 4,500 drawings, and 18,000 prints, the broadest collection of his works in the world.The Munch Museum currently serves at Munchs official Estate and has been active in responding to copyright infringements, as well as clearing copyright for the work, such as the appearance of Munchs The Scream in a 2006 M&M advertisement campaign.The U.S. copyright representative for the Munch Museum and the Estate of Edvard Munch is the Artists Rights Society.
[from Wikipedia]
Music by Robert Rich & Steve Roach. Edvard Munch](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/wchxigX-1Ck/mqdefault.jpg)

![Henri Le Sidaner
Henri Eugène Augustin Le Sidaner (7 August 1862 – July 1939) was an intimist painter.
Sidaner was born to a French family in Port Louis, Mauritius. In 1870 he and his family settled in Dunkirk. Le Sidaner received most of his tutelage from the École des Beaux-Arts under the instruction of Alexandre Cabanel but later broke away due to artistic differences.
Between 1885 and 1894 Le Sidaner lived the year round at the Etaples art colony and was joined there by his childhood friend Eugène Chigot (1860–1923), who shared his interest in atmospheric light. Later Le Sidaner traveled extensively throughout France. He also visited many cities around the globe, as well as villages throughout Europe. He exhibited at the Salon, the Galeries Georges Petit in Paris and the Goupil Gallery in London, and settled in Gerberoy.
Marcel Prousts mention of Le Sidaners work in his novel In Search of Lost Time confirms its later reputation. In Sodom and Gomorrah, the narrator mentions that an eminent barrister from Paris had devoted his income to collecting the paintings of the highly distinguished but not great Le Sidaner.
[from Wikipedia]
Music: The Edge from Texhnolyze Henri Le Sidaner](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/yJGEpc5BpVM/mqdefault.jpg)
![Theodor Kittelsen
Theodor Severin Kittelsen (April 27, 1857 January 21, 1914) was a Norwegian artist. He is one of the most popular artists in Norway. Kittelsen became famous for his nature paintings, as well as for his illustrations of fairy tales and legends, especially of trolls.
Kittelsen was born in the coastal town of Kragerø in Telemark county, Norway. His father died at an early age, leaving a wife and 8 children in straightened circumstances. Theodor was only 11 years old when he was apprenticed to a watchmaker. When at the age of 17 his talent was discovered by Diderich Maria Aall, he became a pupil at Wilhelm von Hannos drawing school in Christiania (now Oslo). Because of generous financial support by Aall he later studied in Munich. However, in 1879 Diderich Aall could no longer manage to support him, so Kittelsen had to earn his money as a draftsman for German newspapers and magazines.
In 1882 Kittelsen was granted a state scholarship to study in Paris. In 1887 he returned back to Norway for good. When back in Norway, he found nature to be a great inspiration. He spent the next two years in Lofoten where he lived with his sister and brother-in-law at Skomvær Lighthouse. Kittelsen also started to write texts to his drawings here.
Theodor Kittelsen and his family settled in a home and artist studio which he called Lauvlia near Prestfoss during 1899. Kittelsen spent his best artistic years here. During this period, Kittelsen was hired to illustrate Norwegian Folktales (Norwegian: Norske Folkeeventyr) by the Norwegian folklore collector Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe. In 1908 he was made Knight of the The Royal Norwegian Order of St. Olav. However, he was forced to sell and leave Lauvlia in 1910 as his health began to fail. He was granted an artists stipend in 1911 but died a broken man in 1914.
Kittelsens style could be classified between Neo-Romantic and naive painting. As a national artist he is highly respected and well known in Norway, but doesnt receive much international attention, which is the reason that his name is often not included in registers of internationally recognized painters and artists.
Lauvlia, his former home, is located north of Prestfoss along Route 287, with scenic view of Lake Soneren. The surrounding area, in particular Mount Andersnatten which overlooks the lake a few kilometres north, inspired some of Kittelsens most famous landscapes. Today Lauvlia is a private museum featuring an exhibition of Kittelsens original work. Lauvlia is decorated with Kittelsens own woodcarvings and murals. A new exhibition of original Kittelsen works is opened each year with painting and drawing activities arranged for children. The paintings exhibited are rotated each year.
[from Wikipedia]
Music: Steve Roach Your Own Eyes Theodor Kittelsen](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/yhU2wJ-a_pM/mqdefault.jpg)
![Akira Kusaka
Akira Kusaka is an illustrator / graphic designer who lives in Osaka, Japan. He creates for advertisements, book covers, children’s picture book, web design, and more.
His all works are all created digitally yet with a rustic textures. Other than the role of an illustrator, he is a trombone player in two man band called ”repair” focusing on art project of poetry, picture and music. Hence you may notice the artworks are always surrounded by music theme and poetic vibes.
[from: https://phavourite.co/collections/akira-kusaka/]
Music: Alio Die & Lingua Fungi Lento Akira Kusaka](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/yyQ6ASfLr9A/mqdefault.jpg)
![Brian Cheung
Brian Cheung is a visual artist, illustrator, graphic designer and sometimes photographer based in Melbourne, Australia.
Brians practice encompasses illustration, drawing, painting, lettering, graphic design and photography; most often relying on simple analogue mediums with an emphasis towards process and technique. Themes of place, space and surroundings are repeatedly explored, fuelled by curiosity, itchy feet and a fear of complacency.
[from:http://www.briancheung.net/about]
Music: Vidna Obmana A Scenic Fall Brian Cheung](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/yzqJS3YYLrI/mqdefault.jpg)

![Jake Baddeley
There are Two lights. One that lights the room, and the one in your head. I paint the latter one. My paintings are lit by the light of imagination, the real light.
The places I visit in my work are a product of my dreams, that are also bathed in this light. It is an emotional light, that can convey a feeling, a mood or an idea. It is the light of nostalgia, of a distant
memory, the light of the magical garden of childhood.
An image may come to me completed, can I hold it in my head, finish the painting before it fades? I don’t like to ask too many questions, to edit or filter. If I do, I am always left with just dust in my hands, or a less interesting painting.
I listen to the still voice within, the intuition, for guidance. The thinking I leave to the viewer. Meaning, might sometimes be wanting, or reason obscure, but there is often a power, a luminosity in a successful work that resists all clarification. I would never exchange that for the most carefully composed idea.
Jake was born in Nottingham, England, in 1964, and has been drawing since his early childhood. After finishing his education as an illustrator at the University of London in 1988 he decides to travel around Europe, which leads him to the Netherlands for the first time. During these travels he meets his wife Vanessa and in 1990 he decides to live in The Hague and to work as an illustrator. Inspired by the Dutch Masters he starts working with oil paint in 1992.
In 1996 he has his first solo exhibition. This exhibition is, much to his own surprise, such a success that it offers him the opportunity to paint on a full time base. Ever since he has had successful solo and group exhibitions both nationally and internationally and his work has found it’s way into many private and corporate collections.
Jake draws his inspirations from many sources: the Ancient Greeks, the Italian Renaissance Masters, the Dutch Masters, iconography, mythology, psychology and philosophy. But most of all he relies on his own subconscious and intuition which has proven many times to have a logic and curious independence of its own.
[from:https://www.jakebaddeley.com/about-jake/]
Music: Alio Die Il Portale Dellinvisibile Jake Baddeley](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/zvkn1asIWsU/mqdefault.jpg)