5 Paintings We Fell in Love With This Week
At Arts to Hearts Project, we spend a good part of every week just looking at art. It comes at us from everywhere submissions, our community, the quiet corners of the internet where artists post the thing they only just finished and honestly, it’s our favourite part of what we do. Most weeks, a few pieces stop us mid-scroll and we’re sending them to each other before we’ve even finished looking. Those are the ones that stay.
This week we didn’t set out with a theme. We just kept a running list of the work we couldn’t stop thinking about, and when we looked back at what we’d saved, these were the pieces still on our mind’s days later. Funnily enough, they turned out to share a certain something a lot of them are sculptural, built from unexpected materials, and quietly fixed on the human form and everything it carries. But there’s no rule holding them together. They’re simply the work we loved most, and that felt like reason enough.
So, there’s no grand thread to follow here just a handful of artists making something honest and a little impossible to forget. Take your time, follow the ones that speak to you, and let yourself sit with each piece a moment longer than you usually would. This is our heart list for this week.
01. What Light Guides by Adham Badawy @adham.badawyy
We’re opening this week’s heart list with what Light Guides by Adham Badaw, a painting you fall into rather than simply look at. A small white paper boat drifts across a dark, restless sea at night, and inside it two figures reach upward: a woman whose long hair streams into the sky like a ribbon, and a man in white lifting his hand toward the moon as if catching the light itself.
At the front of the boat stands a little winged creature, part lamb, part guardian, and behind them a pale city rises out of nowhere like something half-remembered from a dream. It’s all deep blues and silvery greys, with just enough warmth to keep hope somewhere in the picture.
The whole thing reads like a story about being carried through the dark by the one thing you can still see. Adham is an Egyptian painter, born in Sohag and trained in Luxor, now represented by Tam Gallery and his work has this way of turning big feelings into images you don’t want to look away from.
Follow him his every piece feels like a page from a story you’d want to read.
02. Suyun Hafızasındaki Turnalar by Pervin Karslı @pervin_karsl_art
Suyun Hafızasındaki Turnalar by Pervin Karslı is our second pick this week and the title tells you everything before you have even looked properly. Two white cranes rise out of a swirling ground of black, gold and amber, their long necks curving toward and away from each other, red crowns bright against all that dark.
The clever part is their bodies instead of solid feathers, they are drawn in fine, lacy, cut-paper patterns, all loops and little circles, so the birds feel almost woven rather than painted. Behind them the background pools and marbles like water caught mid-movement or memory doing the same.
Cranes carry a lot of meaning in Turkish culture, from longing to news from far away to the pull of home, and you can feel some of that weight here without needing the backstory. It is acrylic, but it holds your eye far longer than its size. Pervin is a Turkish artist working in this rich, fluid style, pairing loose poured colour with these incredibly precise white subjects.
Give her a follow. This is work made for people who actually stop and look.
03. Velvet Elvis by Bella Wattles @bellawattles
Velvet Elvis by Bella Wattles lands at number three on our heartlist this week and it is joyful, nostalgic, and completely impossible not to love. On a red floral tablecloth, a toy yellow convertible black racing stripes and all sits loaded with a pile of silver disco balls, parked right beside a pink vase spilling white roses. The vase itself looks like it is melting, streaked with drips of blue, yellow and pink, as if the whole scene is caught somewhere between a dinner table and a daydream.
Another disco ball rests on an embroidered napkin nearby, catching light it has no business having, while a candy-pink sky and rust-orange trees turn an ordinary tabletop into a little stage set. It is playful and nostalgic and just a bit wistful all at once.
Bella is a self-taught oil painter based in Philadelphia who treats her still lifes like scenes in a play, casting toy cars, flowers and disco balls as the characters she is represented by Art & Light Gallery, and even borrowed the title of this one from a Kacey Musgraves song.
Follow her as her paintings are the most fun you will have on your feed all week.
04. Storm Warning by Anastasia Borodina @_anastasia.borodina
Fourth on our heartlist this week is Storm Warning by Anastasia Borodina the kind of painting that looks one way at first and then shifts completely. There is a red-haired child floating underwater, and it takes a second to notice what is drifting around her. What looks at first like flowing fabric, or maybe jellyfish, turns out to be sheets of clear plastic bags and wrapping, billowing through the blue-green water like something alive.
The girl herself is calm, eyes open, hair fanning out in the current, painted with the kind of soft realism that makes her feel completely present. And that is exactly what makes it land something this tender should not be surrounded by all this waste. The title says the rest. A quiet warning folded inside a genuinely beautiful painting.
Anastasia grew up in the North Caucasus and trained at the Ilya Repin Academy in Saint Petersburg before settling in Manchester, and she brings all that classical training to work that keeps one eye firmly on the present.
Give her a follow, she is doing something really important with paint right now.
05. Other Engagements by Laura Watters @laurawatters
And rounding out our heart list this week is Other Engagements by Laura Watters one of those paintings you cannot quite take in all at once. Two faces press together one young woman looking straight out at you, calm and clear-eyed, while a second face seems to peel away above her, strips of skin lifting like paint or old paper to reveal pale blue underneath. A hand reaches in to pull at it, and something coral-like drifts from an open mouth.
It should be grotesque, and somehow, it is not every inch is painted with such soft, photorealistic control that the strangeness feels tender rather than shocking. It reads like a picture about the faces we hold up and the ones underneath, about coming apart and staying whole at the same time.
Laura is an American painter based in Los Angeles who studied at George Washington University and Otis, and this piece is currently in the show TRAD at Free Parking Space.
Go find her page and start from the beginning every painting rewards a slow look.
Every artist on this list is making something worth stopping for and the nicest thing you can do right now is go and tell them so. Don’t just admire it and scroll on. Open their pages, leave a comment, save the piece that stuck with you, send it to the one friend who’ll get it. A single honest word from a stranger can land bigger than you’d think, and these nine have more than earned it this week. So go find them and say hello.
And if looking through all of this has stirred something in you, if you’re an artist sitting on work you haven’t shown anyone yet take this as your nudge. Our current open call is The Big Book of Mixed Media Artists 2026, a hardcover publication bringing together 100 artists from around the world whose work moves across materials and methods.
It’s open to anyone combining two or more mediums or processes collage, assemblage, sculpture, textiles, photography, found objects, painting, printmaking, digital, and everything in between at any stage of your career. Every selected artist gets a dedicated two-page spread in the book, a certificate of recognition, and promotion across the Arts to Hearts community, with the finished edition sold through Amazon, Barnes & Noble and our own shop.
Submissions close on September 21, 2026, so there’s still time to gather your best work and send it in. You can read everything and apply right here: The Big Book of Mixed Media Artists 2026. We can’t wait to see what you make.
