5 Paintings That Made Our Heart list This Week

At Arts to Hearts Project, the art usually finds us before we go looking for it. A painting stops us in the middle of something else, we send it to each other, and within minutes we’re deep in an artist’s page forgetting whatever we were supposed to be doing. That happens more often than you’d expect, and it’s honestly our favourite kind of interruption.

This week gave us a handful of those. Five works from five very different corners of the world a son painting his mother’s sunflowers, a woman disappearing into leaves, a crowd in cat masks staring back, a falling body meeting a rising bird, and a face assembled entirely from colour.

There’s no theme tying them together and we didn’t plan one. Some are tender, some unsettling, some pure joy but every one of them made us stop and stay a while.

That’s really all a heartlist is: the work we couldn’t put down, gathered in one place so you can find it too. Scroll slowly, follow the ones that pull at you, and give each piece a little more time than usual. This is our heartlist for this week.

1.Her Favorite Flowers by Riley Holloway @hollowayfineart

We are opening our heartlist this week with Her Favourite Flowers by Riley Holloway a painting made with so much love you can feel it before you know the story. A young man sits in a dark ribbed sweater, head bowed a little, eyes lowered, lost in his own thoughts and behind him a whole wall of sunflowers blazes in thick, worked-up golds and oranges against a warm red ground.

The figure is a man named Jerry Leeds, painted from an old family photograph, and those sunflowers are his mother’s favourite. Riley made the piece for her, dedicating it to her after the loss of his father a gentle way of honouring her and wishing her well.

Once you know that, the whole thing glows a little differently. Riley is a Dallas-based figurative painter, born in Los Angeles, who first learned to paint from his mother herself an artist and later studied at the Florence Academy of Art. He builds his portraits with rich, tactile brushwork and real tenderness for the people in them.

Follow him as his paintings turn family and memory into something you can stand in front of and feel.

2. Artwork by Serkan Akyol @serkanakyol

The second drawing on our heartlist this week is by Serkan Akyol, and we did not know the name but this one was too good to be missed. A woman with long navy hair lies back among a thicket of leaves and flowers, one hand lifted to her face fingers spread wide, elongated and ringed, her eyes peering out through the gaps between them.

She is half-hidden and half-watching, caught in a moment that feels tired and tender at once, like someone pausing between one feeling and the next. Serkan works in clean pen linework and flat, saturated colour, and his people and plants always seem to grow into one another bold navy, rust orange and gold, every leaf and finger drawn with a calm, deliberate hand.

He paired this with a quiet line about always skipping past the threshold that mattered, part of a recurring idea in his work about crossing over into who you really are. Serkan was born in 1982 in a small village in Turkey’s Aegean region and trained in stage and costume design before a master’s in textiles that theatre background shows in how his drawings tell stories and he now works out of his own studio, Atelier Mono, in Kadıköy, Istanbul.

Give him a follow, his drawings feel like they are always in the middle of saying something important.

3.The Spectators by María Berrío @mariaberriostudio

The Spectators by María Berrío is our third pick this week and you do not so much look at it as get pulled into the middle of it. A huge, crowded scene a huddle of women and children pressed close together, some in soft costume, some in stiffer uniform, with men in dark suits hovering at the back.

At the centre sits a figure in a bright red coat and fur collar wearing a large cat mask, and she is not alone cats, pale blank masks and bare deadpan faces all turn outward, until it is genuinely unclear who is watching whom. That is the unease of it you feel less like an audience and more like you have been caught standing inside the crowd.

The whole thing is built by hand from torn Japanese papers and watercolour, thousands of patterned scraps layered into skin, cloth and shadow, so up close it is tender and tactile and from across the room completely alive. María was born in Bogotá in 1982 and works in Brooklyn, drawing on Colombian folklore and magical realism to build these big, dreamlike scenes and this one comes from her show The End of Ritual, about what slips away when shared ceremony disappears.

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

4. Dialética: A Queda by Matheus Abu @abuktt

Fourth on our heart list this week is Dialética: A Queda by Matheus Abu and the contrast at the heart of it is impossible to look away from. A man caught mid-plunge, upside down, head pointing at the ground, arms flung out, tumbling through a warm empty brown space with nothing to break the fall.

Rising up to meet him is a white egret, wings thrown open across the whole lower half of the canvas, elegant and impossibly calm next to his panic. One body falling, one rising human weight against feathered grace, all staged in a bare golden void like a scene from a myth.

The title nods at that tension, a fall that is also a kind of argument between two forces and Matheus paints it with real control, the figure and the bird modelled with a soft, classical touch against all that open ground. He is a young Brazilian painter, born in Rio de Janeiro in 1997 and represented by Galeria Karla Osorio.

Follow him and see everything he has been making, it is all worth your time.

5. Visitante II / Susurros by Rocío Montoya @rocio_montoya

The last painting on our heartlist this week is Visitante II (Visitors) by Rocío Montoya and it feels like warm September light broken gently into colour. An abstract portrait built from flat, faceted blocks of teal, orange, yellow and red, a face and a pale hand surfacing out of the geometry, with an orange bird perched close and a small white dove up top.

The whole thing has the hush its title promises soft, intimate, like a quiet word offered to someone who needs it. Rocío paired it with exactly that kind of message, about letting go of fear and lending someone your wings for a moment, and the dove makes perfect sense once you read it.

She is a Spanish artist, born in Madrid in 1983, who moves easily between collage, photography and painting, and her work tends to fold the human together with birds, plants and pure colour to reach inner, half-spoken feelings. Here she leans on her cubist-tinged love of flat colour shapes to build a figure that feels more felt than seen.

Follow her, her use of colour alone is the kind of thing that lifts your whole mood.

That is our heartlist for this week. Five painters who made us stop, feel something, and want to share it immediately. Every artist on this list is making something worth stopping for and the kindest thing you can do right now is go and tell them so.

Not just a like. Open their pages, leave a comment, send the piece that stayed with you to the one person who will get it. A kind word from a stranger means more to an artist than you would think. These five have more than earned it this week.

And if looking through all of this has stirred something in you Arts to Hearts Magazine Issue 15: Where I Am is open for submissions right now. It is a wide-open prompt home, belonging, migration, solitude, identity, or simply the feeling of being exactly where you are and it is yours to take wherever your work wants to go.

This edition is a collaboration between Arts to Hearts Project and StudioToGallery, open to artists worldwide at every stage. You do not need a long CV. Just work that means something to you. Submissions close October 5th, 2026.