Author: Iris

Sonja Kalb arrives at painting from a place most artists don’t start: engineering. Born in Stuttgart, Germany, she trained in textile and design engineering—work that depends on accuracy, systems thinking, and an intimate understanding of how materials behave. That early education doesn’t show up in her paintings as rigidity. It shows up as steadiness. She knows how to build a surface, how to hold a composition together, how to use restraint without draining the work of feeling. What keeps her practice alive is the way she treats that discipline as a launchpad, not a limit. Her abstractions live in the…

Haeley Kyong doesn’t make art that asks to be decoded. She makes art that asks to be noticed. A lot of contemporary work is built to be explained—its first move is intellectual. Kyong’s work takes a different route. It arrives through sensation first, then thought follows. You feel something shift—your breathing, your focus, your mood—before you can name what caused it. Her practice rests on a steady belief that art can reach us ahead of language, before we start labeling, organizing, and deciding what we’re supposed to think. Kyong was raised in South Korea and later spent key years in…

Sylvia Nagy makes work where touch and theory meet—where something built by hand can still speak to technology, process, and the way the world keeps shifting. Her training moves between industrial design and fine art, and that blend shows up in her materials: she respects structure, but she also leaves space for instinct. She studied at Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest, earning an MFA in Silicet Industrial Technology and Art, an experience that sharpened how she thinks about making—how a concept becomes a finished object through planning, fabrication, and material behavior. Over time, that foundation expanded, with…

Nicola Mastroserio isn’t working on the clock of popularity. The studio isn’t a place where he reacts to demand or adjusts his direction to fit what buyers might want. He moves at a different pace—drawn to questions that don’t age out. For him, art is a way of digging beneath appearances, a method for getting closer to what things are, not just what they look like. Again and again, he returns to essence: how reality takes shape, how it’s felt in the body and mind, and how it can be approached beyond the constant distraction of the everyday. That commitment…

Eliora Bousquet is a French-listed abstract painter and illustrator whose work lives in the space where emotion opens into something larger. Born in Angoulême, France, in 1970, she stepped fully into her artistic path in 2009. It’s the kind of beginning that doesn’t feel late—it feels deliberate, like she waited until the internal compass was clear. Her paintings move by intuition more than plan. They carry a sense of wonder that doesn’t need to announce itself, and a steady pull toward the night sky—its hush, its distance, its rhythm. In Bousquet’s world, nature and cosmos aren’t separate categories. They’re two…

Kathryn Trotter’s paintings come in full volume—rich color, palpable texture, and an obvious enjoyment of paint as a material. On a quick read, the work feels lush and spirited: animals set like portraits, surrounded by flowers, pattern, and thick passages of pigment that you can almost trace with your eyes. Stay with it a little longer, though, and the underlying order starts to show. The brightness isn’t random. It’s held up by design instincts that come from where she started. Trotter first trained in textiles and fashion design in Texas, a world where construction matters and every layer has a…

Oenone Hammersley moved to Palm Beach Gardens in 2024, and the shift has fed directly into her visual world. She arrives with a practice shaped by theatre design, decades of travel, and a steady devotion to the natural environment. Known internationally for mixed-media paintings built from saturated color, textured surfaces, and radiant light, she often returns to water—its shimmer, its motion, its vulnerability. Her paintings have been shown in Palm Beach, New York, London, Paris, Washington D.C., and Miami, and they sit in both private and public collections. Florida’s tropical gardens have become fresh material: thick foliage, repeating forms, heavy…

Paul “Gilby” Gilbertson has always worked from the inside out—starting with materials, paying attention to how they react, and learning how to steer them without squeezing the life out of them. Back in the early 1970s, he came across a watercolor method that would become closely associated with his paintings: sprinkling salt into wet washes to coax out organic, crystalline textures. It wasn’t something he set out to invent. It happened unexpectedly, the way many strong studio discoveries do. What matters is what came after. Gilbertson didn’t treat the result like a novelty; he kept testing it, adjusting timing and…

Pasquale J. Cuomo’s relationship with photography starts in a simple, relatable place: a teenager experiments with a camera and realizes it isn’t just a passing interest. Born in the United States, Cuomo has spent more than fifty years working through the medium’s shifts and reinventions. He learned photography in the era of film and darkrooms, then carried that discipline into the digital age without losing what those earlier years taught him. That long stretch of time shows up in the work. You can feel the accumulation of practice—trying different approaches, recalibrating, making mistakes, refining, and returning with better judgment. For…

L. Scooter Morris makes work that refuses to behave like background. Her pieces don’t simply hang on a wall—they take up space with the insistence of something alive. Morris calls herself a sensory illusionist, and it fits once you spend time in front of her art. The experience starts in that instant before you can explain what you’re seeing—when your eyes register color and form, but your body picks up depth, weight, and shift first. Her “Sculpted Paintings” don’t stay politely flat. They press outward, sink inward, and change depending on where you stand. A ridge catches light and the…