5 Paintings on Our Heart list This Week

At Arts to Hearts Project, we look at a lot of art. Honestly, more than we could ever share, it comes in through submissions, through the community, through the endless late-night scroll, and most of it we admire and move on from. But every week a few pieces do something different. They make us stop mid-scroll, screenshot, send to each other, go back for another look. Those are the ones we can’t shake, and those are the ones that end up here.

This week, five of them refused to be ignored. They come from different places and completely different imaginations, and they don’t share a subject, a style, or a mood — we didn’t set out with a theme, and we didn’t find one hiding in there afterward either. What ties them together is just that: each one stopped us cold.

So we won’t pretend there’s a neat thread running through them, because there isn’t. These are simply the five that got us this week, gathered in one place. This is our heartlist for this week.

01. There must be a reason why the leaves decay? by Charles Bentley @charlesbentley

We are opening our heart list this week with There must be a reason why the leaves decay? by Charles Bentley and it sits right between glamour and decay in a way that is impossible to look away from. A woman in a flowing golden dress and black boots arches through the frame, and a bare golden tree spreads out of her branch and fabric made of the same bright colour, little gold birds scattering into the dark around her.

That dark is the other half of the story thick, scorched, almost three-dimensional, built up with real organic material pressed into the canvas. The whole thing sits right between polish and rot, which is exactly the tension he is after.

Charles is a Brooklyn-based multimedia artist whose background is in design for fashion brands, and here he pushes a glossy image into something textured and raw, leaning openly on Kiefer for the surface and Pollock for the abstraction.

Follow him he is turning throwaway digital beauty into something you can almost touch.

02. Rising Form by Yiğit Dündar @yigitdundar

Rising Form by Yiğit Dündar lands at number two on our heartlist this week, baroque in its drama, hyperrealist in its execution, and completely impossible to scroll past. Sheets of white, cream and soft rose cloth twist and billow upward as if caught in a sudden gust, wrapping and half-revealing a figure that seems to be rising out of itself.

It is painted so precisely you can feel the weight and translucency of every fold, all of it glowing against a deep black background. There is something almost baroque about it the drama, the movement, the sense of a body dissolving into pure motion and that is no accident, since Yiğit takes his cues from the Renaissance and Baroque masters.

He is a Turkish hyperrealist painter, born in 1987 and based in Istanbul, who builds these sensual, storm-like figures entirely in oil. This was his first canvas of the year.

Go find and follow him as he makes cloth and skin move like nothing you have seen.

03. Bluebeard by Kally Ann @kallyannart

Third on our heart list this week is Bluebeard by Kally Ann and the horror of it arrives wrapped in real decorative beauty. There he is, the villain himself, blue beard and all, scowling in a crimson-and-gold doublet with a ring of keys in his hand and a fairytale castle rising behind him. And then you look down a cluster of pales, closed-eyed faces wrapped in blue, red ribbons at their brows the wives who came before, the secret behind the forbidden door.

It is painted like an illuminated page, all jewel-blue, deep red and gold, dense with pattern and detail, so the darkness of the story arrives wrapped in something genuinely beautiful.

Kally Ann is a painter devoted to storytelling and folktales, building these rich, illustrative oil paintings that feel like pages pulled from some old, slightly sinister book of tales.

Her page is full of work this rich and this carefully built, go spend some time there.

04. Whispers in the Empty Room by Hamid Yaraghchi @hamidyaraghchi

Our fourth pick this week is Whispers in the Empty Room by Hamid Yaraghchi pale faces surfacing out of a storm of blue and grey, and a feeling that stays with you long after you have looked away. Half-formed, half-dissolving, like people remembered rather than seen and below them a figure lies stretched out, vulnerable and incomplete, part body and part pure paint.

Nothing is fully resolved the whole thing hovers between a figure and a smear, a memory and a ghost, which is exactly the uneasy place Hamid likes to work. He builds these dreamlike scenes in oil from ordinary photographs, then takes them apart until what is left is more feeling than fact, often circling the body, mortality and the strange beauty in things falling apart.

Born in Tehran in 1984 and based in Berlin, he trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden and shows internationally, including with Beers London.

Go give him a follow, his handling of paint and feeling is completely his own.

05. August by Tania Kandracienka @taniakandracienka

The last painting on our heart list this week is August by Tania Kandracienka and it is the kind of painting that makes you want to sit down and stay a while. A woman sits on a chair on a red-railed porch, built out of bold blocks of blue, green, yellow and white, her face left loose and open while warm reds and a pool of yellow sun fill the space around her.

Nothing is spelled out, yet you completely feel it the heat, the stillness, the slow weight of an August afternoon. It is loose and confident and gorgeously coloured, the kind of painting that trusts a few decisive strokes to do the work of a hundred.

Tania is a Belarusian artist, born in Minsk in 1980 and now based in Warsaw, who trained in the rigorous classical tradition and once taught drawing at the Minsk Art Academy before loosening all of that into these rich, painterly scenes of ordinary private life.

Follow her as she turns everyday moments into pure colour and light.

Five artists. Five completely different worlds. One thing in common: each of them sat down with a blank surface and kept going until it meant something, then put it out there without knowing if it would land. It landed with us. So, here’s the ask doesn’t just scroll past. Go to their pages, follow them, and leave a comment that actually says something. Showing up for each other is the whole point.

Now! if any of this lit something in you, drop what you’re doing, because the clock is very real. 101 Art Book: Texture Edition was closing, and it just got extended to October 22nd. That’s it. A few days. The door you thought had shut is cracked back open, and this time there’s no “I’ll do it later.”

It’s the 15th book in our 101 Art Book series, guest-curated by Rachel Burke, all about texture in every sense surfaces, layers, marks, materials, folds, worn edges, everything you can almost feel with your eyes. Open to artists anywhere, at any stage, in nearly any medium. Every artist selected gets a two-page spread in the printed hardcover book. No gallery, no CV, no excuses.

This is your second chance, and you don’t get a third. Deadline: October 22, 2026.