5 paintings we fell in love with this week
People hear what we do at Arts to Hearts and assume it must be glamorous. And honestly, they are not entirely wrong. Every single day, paintings and drawings and photographs arrive in our world from artists on every continent, at every stage of figuring out who they are and what they want to say. It never gets old. We keep waiting for it to, and it simply does not.
Here is what does happen after a few years of this your relationship with art deepens in a way that is hard to explain. You start to feel things more specifically. More quietly. The painting that makes you exhale before you have even registered why. The one you screenshot and find yourself opening again at midnight. The one that is still rattling around your head on a Tuesday when you are supposed to be doing something else entirely. Those moments become the ones you live for.
And those are the ones that end up here. No algorithm decided this list, nobody paid for a spot, and there is absolutely no angle Just real art, real artists, and a team that genuinely could not stop talking about these pieces all week. Here is what made it onto our heart list.
1. Coup de poing by Victor Garel @victorgarel_
The first one on our list this week is Coup de poing by Victor Garel and you feel this painting before you understand it. A figure leans at the easel, palette in hand, while a giant disembodied hand descends from above brush pointed straight at the blank canvas, little flames burning on both sides, paint scattered across the grass below.
The title translates to punch, or knockout, and Garel earns it completely. That blank canvas is the whole point. This is not about making something it is about what making something does to you. The scale of that hand, the theatricality of the red curtain, the cheerful chaos of the whole scene none of it is random and somehow all of it just works.
Victor is an emerging French painter based in Paris, working in oil and ink, whose deeply personal work is rooted in autofiction exploring spirituality and identity through deconstructed, expressive figures that feel playful even at their most extreme.
Go follow him. This is the kind of work that pays you back the longer you look.
2. Alice by Vika Kovalenko @vicki_kov
So the second one on our list this week is Alice by Vika Kovalenko and the shadow is what gets you first. Not Alice herself, who stands small and still in the centre of the frame, hands folded, dress just so but the shadow she casts on that warm amber wall behind her, arms thrown wide open, already reaching for the roses above. That shadow is everything she has not yet become.
And the whole painting lives in the space between the two. The tiny red door, the key on a table just out of reach, a glass bottle to the left, a half-crushed cupcake on the right every Wonderland cue is there. But Vika is not illustrating a book.
She is borrowing its language to say something quieter and more tender about being a girl about the distance between who you are and who you feel like inside. Vika is a Ukrainian painter based in Odesa whose work sits somewhere between narrative painting and cinema filmic in its staging, its mood built entirely out of objects and light.
Give her a follow and see the world she has been building every painting on her page is worth your time.
3. Ogryzek by Aleksandra Drab @aleksandra__drab
This stunning painting Ogryzek by Aleksandra Drab takes the third spot on our list this week and it has not left our heads since we first saw it. A mouth, a hand, an apple core pressed against dark lips blue silk hanging on either side like a stage curtain around something that was never meant to be watched. We only get the bottom half of the face. The hand is painted with almost clinical precision, every vein and knuckle fully present.
There is something deeply uncomfortable about this painting and that discomfort is entirely the point it sits right at the intersection of beauty and unease, glamour and something rawer underneath it. You cannot look away and you are not entirely sure you should be looking at all.
Aleksandra is a Polish painter born in 2001, who graduated with distinction from the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków in 2025. She took First Prize at the Winter Salon of Young Artists in 2024, won the Rector’s Award at the Academy in 2025, and placed 18th out of 211 artists in Poland’s Compass of Young Art. She is one of the most exciting young painters in Europe right now. Full stop.
Follow her and see everything she is making this is an artist right at the very beginning of something significant.
4. Pensando en El Greco by Carmen Mansilla @mansillaartist
At number four on our list this week is Pensando en El Greco by Carmen Mansilla and this one does not just reference art history, it moves in and lives there. A long elongated figure sits barefoot in a bleached-out Spanish landscape, a greyhound curled at her feet, one hand resting on her chest, eyes a thousand miles away.
The clouds behind her roll with that same drama you would recognise from Toledo. The stretched proportions, the gesture, the whole atmosphere all of it deliberate, all of it in deep conversation with El Greco. But what lifts this beyond tribute is how completely alive it feels. The figure is contemporary, the feeling is contemporary, but the visual language is El Greco’s worn the way you would wear something that belonged to someone you loved.
Carmen is a Madrid-born artist who trained as an illustrator and storyboard artist before walking away from all of it to study classical portraiture at the Angel Academy of Art in Florence. She has since studied under Antonio López and Vicente Desiderio, her work is in the permanent collection at the MEAM in Barcelona, and she has received the First Drawing Prize at the Reial Acadèmia Catalana de Belles Arts de Sant Jordi.
Follow her and see everything she has been making her feed is something else entirely.
5. Forging the Fatherdress by Adrian Cox @adriancoxart
And the fifth one on our list this week is Forging the Fatherdress by Adrian Cox and this one stops you the way a good myth does, where something completely invented somehow feels truer than the facts. Under a full moon and a burning twilight sky, a headless figure draped in an extraordinary gown stands at the centre of it all guitar in hand, surrounded by cascading blossoms, open books, human hands emerging from flowers, paper lanterns glowing gold at her feet.
Every inch of this canvas is alive with something. The more you look the more you find a mirror, scattered lemons, fairy lights wound through bare branches, figures and forms tucked into every corner. It is overwhelming in the best possible way. In Adrian’s world, the Fatherdress is a real artifac, a uniquely powerful garment woven in the Borderlands, carrying its own mythology and purpose. He has been building this universe for over a decade with the patience and consistency of a novelist.
Adrian was born in 1988 and lives and works in Los Angeles, his practice rooted in a deeply personal mythology exploring queer identity, ecology and our relationship with the natural world through hybrid beings that are part human, part plant, part mineral. He has shown at Corey Helford Gallery and been featured in Hi-Fructose and Juxtapoz.
Follow him and spend some real time in his world, it rewards every minute you give it.
This is what we do at Arts to Hearts we show up for artists. Every week, without fail, we sit down and we look and we feel and we share the work that genuinely stopped us. Because we believe with everything, we have that art deserves more than a scroll and a double tap. These five painters this week gave us exactly that five reasons to slow down, look properly, and feel something real. We hope they did the same for you.
Now go show them some love. Follow them, share their work, leave a comment that actually means something. And if you are an artist yourself the 101 Art Book: Colors Edition by Arts to Hearts Project closes on June 5th. That is five days from today. Over 1,000 artists featured across twelve volumes, globally distributed, in the hands of collectors and curators worldwide. 101 spots. Open to everyone. Five days. Do not sit on this.
