5 Paintings on Our Heart list This Week

At Arts to Hearts Project, the heart list is never something we plan. We don’t decide on a theme and go looking for work to fit it. We just keep our eyes open all week across submissions, the community, and the slow late-night scroll of Instagram and pay attention to what actually makes us stop. The piece that gets screenshotted and passed around the team. The one we quietly open again just to look. By the time the week winds down, the list has usually made itself.

This week it came together out of five paintings that, on paper, don’t belong anywhere near each other. They come from five different countries and five completely different imaginations some tender, some strange, some quiet, some charged with feeling. We didn’t go hunting for a thread between them, and we didn’t find one. What they share is simpler than that: not one of us could scroll past them.

So we won’t pretend there’s some clever idea holding them together, because there isn’t. These are simply the five paintings that stopped us this week, gathered in one place. This is our heartlist for this week.

01. Bir zamanlar by Hakan Gürbüzer @hakangurbuzer

The first painting on our heart list this week is Bir zamanlar by Hakan Gürbüzer and it does something to the way you think about memory. A grand wooden staircase tilts and fractures across the canvas, its checkerboard floor breaking into pieces, all of it set impossibly against snowy mountains and an open sky.

Scattered through the scene are the fragments of a childhood a kid with a backpack, a woman seated in traditional dress, a man at work, children’s drawings and coloured pencils spilled across the floor. Nothing holds still the whole thing fragments and folds the way the past does when you try to picture it years later.

Hakan works in a Neo-Cubist style all his own, breaking figures and rooms into shifting planes to reach what he calls cultural memory. He was born in 1990 in Denizli, Turkey, where he still lives and works a largely self-directed painter who even spent years as a tattoo artist before his own studio took over.

Go give him a follow, his Neo-Cubist take on cultural memory is unlike anything else out there.

02. Still Life With Pears by Amy Crehore @amycrehore

Our second pick this week is Still Life with Pears by Amy Crehore, a quiet room, an unlit cigarette, a cat on the mantel, and something you cannot quite put your finger on. A young woman with a 1930s finger-waved bob sits at a round green table in a red dress, cigarette in hand, a plate of pears and an ashtray in front of her, while a Siamese cat pads along the mantel behind her past a bowl of goldfish.

And then, in the doorway, there is a man in a tan suit standing with his back to the room, face to the corner, saying nothing a small detail that tips the whole quiet scene into something you cannot quite read. That is Amy’s gift ordinary rooms loaded with unspoken story, painted with a vintage warmth and a wink.

She is an American artist, born in Virginia and long based in Oregon, who came to painting after years as an award-winning illustrator, and her imaginary women, cats and plants owe a little to Balthus, Matisse and the old magic realists.

Follow her as her whole page is full of rooms with stories hiding in them.

03. Open Party by Eniwaye Oluwaseyi @eniwaye_seyi

Open Party by Eniwaye Oluwaseyi is our third pick this week and it drops you right into the easy moment a gathering comes together. Three friends stand near an open door a man in a white tee with a drink in hand, one woman in a fringed white skirt holding his hand, another leaning in from the balcony mid-smile, caught between outside and in.

Their skin is painted in deep, velvety black, set against a patterned tiled floor and a magenta door that opens onto a warm city evening. The whole thing hums with belonging, and that open door is pure Eniwaye he treats doorways and windows as thresholds into memory and other worlds.

Born in 1994 in Kwara, Nigeria, he came to painting from an engineering degree and now works in Amsterdam, building these scenes from family photos and Nigerian media. In 2025 he received the Netherlands’ Royal Award for Modern Painting.

Go find him and stay a while, his world is one worth spending real time in.

04. Złotook by Cyryl Polaczek @cyrylpolaczek

Fourth on our heart list this week is Złotook by Cyryl Polaczek and it gets so close it is almost uncomfortable, and you will not want to look away. The whole small canvas is a single human eye, painted in fine detail right down to the lashes, the faint hairs of the brow and a trembling bead of water and perched on it, impossibly delicate, is a green lacewing with its lacy wings and long antennae.

The title is a quiet joke złotook is the Polish word for the insect, and it literally means goldeneye. It is tender and strange at once, nature meeting the body at the most vulnerable spot there is.

Cyryl is a Polish painter, born in Zielona Góra in 1989 and based in Kraków, who at heart is a landscape painter he paints weather, meadows, grasses and small creatures, and lately he has been zooming all the way in until a single detail fills the entire frame. His work is in the collections of MOCAK in Kraków and the National Museum in Poznań among others.

His page is full of work this precise and this quietly surprising go spend some time there.

05. A Visitation by Gabrielle Dobrzelewski @gabrielled_art

And closing out our heartlist this week is A Visitation by Gabrielle Dobrzelewski and it has been sitting with us since the moment we first saw it. In a dim, moonlit bedroom, a woman in a vivid blue dress stands with the fabric pooling around her, reaching toward a glowing, translucent figure drawn entirely in light their hands almost touching, a warm golden glow licking at her feet.

It reads like an encounter with a spirit, or maybe another version of herself Gabrielle has said she lets a painting tell her what it is about rather than deciding in advance, and this one shimmers with that openness.

There is real feeling in it, the kind that comes from sitting with a piece over a long time she started this one more than a year ago. Gabrielle is a painter and art educator based in Philadelphia whose work leans into emotion, longing and the inner life, often in richly lit oil, and she shows with Arch Enemy Arts in the city.

Follow her and take your time, her work rewards every extra second you give it.

Behind every painting here is a person who started with a blank canvas and the nerve to keep going until it said what they meant and then chose to share it, not knowing if anyone would stop. That is never a small thing. These five made something honest this week and we are so glad they keep doing it.

So go find them. Follow these artists, spend real time on their pages, leave a comment that actually says something. They showed up and made something worth stopping for the least we can do is show up back.

And if this week’s list left you wanting to make something of your own 101 Art Book: Texture Edition is open right now and closes October 15th. Curated by Rachel Burke, it is the 15th book in our 101 Art Book series this one all about texture, in every sense.

Rough surfaces and delicate marks, layers of paint, stitches, folds, worn edges, handmade materials and the stories held in them. Open to artists everywhere, at every stage, in almost any medium, with no gallery or CV required. Four days left. Go show us what texture looks like through your eyes.