ART from HEART is excited to announce the Winners of the Artist of the Month -January 2022!
4 Artists, 3 Mediums, 2 Countries:
Daniel Freaker - Painting - UK
Adriana G Prat - Painting - USA
Anja Blau - Sculpture - UK
David Ian Bickley - Video Art - UK
The competition is open to multimedia artists worldwide and created to showcase, promote and raised the visibility of the work of emerging and mid-career artists. The winners are featured on our website and social media platforms and considered for any upcoming curatorial projects by ART from HEART. Artworks are selected based on creativity, originality, quality of work, and overall artistic ability.
Apply NOW to be featured in February 2022!
Daniel Freaker - Painting - Portsmouth, UK
©Daniel Freaker, All Rights Reserved.
Top Left to Right: Among Us, Beyond the Pines
Bottom Left to Right: There Were Three, Autumn Shadow
Artist Daniel Freaker's paintings with its cinematic compositions and subjects, is reminiscent of film scenes and fragments of a broader narrative, open to the viewer's interpretation.
Freaker’s paintings sit between abstract and figurative spaces where the way paint is applied is equally as important as the image itself. Some details are defined where others are more suggestive and evocative. These provide a rich tapestry of interwoven processes and a textural quality to the work. There are also more unusual processes such as lifting and removal of paint that expose sensual textures and generate a sense of nostalgia about moments that are both beautiful and painful.
The subjects in Freaker's paintings are often individuals, couples, or groups of people to provoke thoughts of our relationship with nature. The scenes remind us of personal experiences, where the techniques and colours bring feelings of sentiment and longing with a contemporary twist of warmth and radiance.
Distortions also exaggerate the emotional significance of the moment: connection, loss, vulnerability, or loneliness… This juxtaposition between vibrance and darkness, accident and intention, order, and chaos, is what makes the work memorable.
Daniel Freaker received his MFA from the Slade School of Art in London in 2000, where he explored the painterly qualities of print, video, film, and photography. Since studying, his work has evolved through lecturing in the U.K. and internationally including Chichester College, University of Bath, the British Museum in London, Dae Won University in Korea and The Meera Gallery in Pune, India.
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Adriana G Prat - Painting - Cambridge MA, USA
©Adriana G Prat, All Rights Reserved.
Top Left to Right: Topographies of the Exploitation of our Land I, Some Call It Evolution
Bottom Left to Right: Morphing and Adapting, Change is on its Way
Artist Adriana G. Prat is an academically trained scientist turned abstract artist. Her passion about the environment was encouraged by her father during her childhood days in Argentina, motivating her curiosity and life choices: becoming a scientist and a vegetarian.
Informed by her scientific background, Prat recalls imaginary topographies that evoke organisms’ cells or maps. The images can be considered either on a microscopic or a macroscopic level. Microscopically, the biomorphic forms she creates approximate cellular structures adapting to external demands. Macroscopically, these forms are reminiscent of maps, geographies, in its constant struggle to survive, morphing and mutating under the endless pressure of human-induced exploitation and environmental change.
I paint in a state akin to meditation on the calamity of the human-made climate crisis, envisioning a reality where we dare to engage in individual and societal transformation, to create a dialogue that endows awareness of the alarming environmental state of our planet.
Prat is on a quest to inspire awareness about the climate crisis and more sustainable choices, through her abstract paintings and, via curatorial activities, the work of others. She is always searching for sustainable art practices such as using corrugated cardboard and repurposed canvases to minimize her footprint on the environment.
Prat has exhibited at open studios, galleries, alternative spaces, and museums, in Argentina, and the US, mostly in the greater Boston area, and, more recently, in galleries in Reykjavík, Iceland, and London, UK. She works in Cambridge and has a shared space in the Boston SoWa District.
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ig @agprat.art
Anja Blau - Sculpture - Brighton, UK
© Anja Blau, Wall Sculptures 2021. All Rights Reserved.
Top Left to Right:
Second Life #2, processed scrap metal and golden costume chain
Second Life #3 hanging sculpture/chandelier, processed scrap metal and reclaimed costume pearl necklaces
Middle: Untitled wall hanging, scrap metal panels, gold leaf, reclaimed costume chains
Bottom Left to Right:
The Bar One, processed wall sculpture and reclaimed costume chains
Second Life #1, processed scrap metal bucket and pipes
Artist Anja Blau investigates in her work ‘Beauty In The Broken’ using physical processes that mirror corrosion and deterioration, in combination with bright colours, patination and gold, to reflect our own emotional complexity and journeys.
Patinas and Rust, symbols of age and deterioration often represent a life lived and at times, the end of an object. Blau is intrigued by the history of such decayed objects and encourage the viewer to take a closer look and question what story lies behind each of them, what journey have they been through and what meaning did they carry in the past. Such items can be actual found objects, pieces she has processed to mimic decay and age or a combination of both.
By turning decayed and broken objects into art, Blau aims to give pieces that were declared waste a new life and meaning and ask the viewer to see beyond rust just as a symbol of deterioration but as a hallmark of a lived life.
I am testing the norms of what we, as a society, label ‘beautiful’ and how we can re-shape those standards. I am inspired by the Japanese art of Wabi-Sabi, finding beauty within imperfections, celebrating cracks, damages and other marks that are created by time, weather, and history.
By pairing decayed objects with gold Blau creates the illusion of found archaeological treasures, combining age and decay with the everlasting shine of gold as well as vibrant colours of life and nature. Gold as the ‘eternal metal’ represents preciousness and purity and acts as a beautiful contrast with the rusted and damaged scrap metal. It creates a form of elegance.
Sometimes things need to be broken to expose the true beauty. Although Blau's work does not have a religious meaning, it does explore the concept of life and death, and the themes of an eternal life and rebirth.
Blau got a Foundation Degree in Creative Arts and Design Practice from Oxford Brookes University, in Oxford in May 2019, followed by a BA Honours in Fine Art Sculpture from the University of Brighton in June 2021.
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Ig @blauhaus__
David Ian Bickley - Video & Multimedia Art - Ireland, UK
© David Ian Bickley All Rights Reserved.
Top Left to Right: Moon Blue — With Catherine Orr; Falling Blue — with Catherine Orr
Bottom Left to Right: Cultivate; Salt — with Hina Kahn
David Ian Bickley is an award-winning media artist whose body of work spans the primitive technological of the 1970’s to the digital cutting edge of today. His media work has manifested as television, installation, electronic music, and video art.
My themes reside in mythic and folklore motif and often use landscape as a form to reflect and process these ideas.
Bickley's work has been shown in many major museums, galleries, and festivals around the world; including the CICA Museum, Korea; Science Gallery, Dublin; A & I GALLERY, LOS ANGELES; HAUN TIE ART MUSEUM, BEIJING; The Electric Picnic and the Glucksman, Cork. LUX London distribute his video art along with [S]edition online.
In the early 1980’s Bickley’s video work won 1st prize at the Sony UK Festival and after a move to Ireland in the early 90’s he was fundamental in the evolution of Irish electronic music, earning a Hotpress award in the process.
Besides producing video art, Bickley has also made important arts documentaries including The Man Who Shot Beckett and the Celtic Songlines.
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Apply NOW for an opportunity to be featured in February 2022!
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