5 Paintings That Landed on Our Heart list This Week

At Arts to Hearts Project, we spend every day surrounded by art from artists all over the world. It is one of the greatest privileges of what we do and it means we see a lot. A genuinely extraordinary amount. Most of it moves through our world the way good music does in a busy room. You hear it, you feel it, you keep moving.

But every now and then something stops you completely. Not because it is the most popular or the most polished but because something about it just gets you. Completely and without warning.

This week that happened five times. Five paintings that we did not just admire we fell for them. Completely. No theme connecting them, no agenda behind the list, no algorithm deciding what made the cut.

Just five paintings and the very human experience of seeing something and feeling something you were not expecting to feel. Here is what has been on our heart list this week.

01. Union by Kei Azuma @kei_azuma

The first painting on our heartlist this week is Union by Kei Azuma and it is the kind of work that feels like something remembered rather than seen. Against a black background, a handful of white figures seem to be dancing robes and limbs blurring into smoke, tiny heads tipped with little flecks of gold, the whole group caught mid-turn as if you had tried to photograph a dance in low light.

They are barely solid, more gesture than body, and yet you can feel them leaning toward one another, reaching. Down at the floor everything dissolves into deep reddish-brown, as though the dancers are rising straight out of the dark. It is haunting and tender at once a painting about people finding each other across distance, which fits an artist whose own life has crossed a few oceans.

Kei is a Japanese painter, born in Osaka and trained at Chelsea College of Arts in London. He paints almost entirely from feeling, building his figures out of loose, smoky brushwork so they hover somewhere between arriving and vanishing nothing is ever sharply drawn, everything is caught mid-motion, and that softness is exactly what gives the work its ache.

Go find him and take your time, his work rewards every second you give it.

02. Abrigo by Juliana Ludgero @julianaludgero

Abrigo by Juliana Ludgero is our second pick this week and it glows before it even gets to you. A young woman with long braided hair tilts her face up to a warm, rose-and-gold sky, an open birdcage held loosely against her chest, while doves in white, grey and soft lavender lift into the air all around her. She is not chasing them or holding on she has just let them go, and there is something so open in her expression that you feel the whole painting at once. The title means shelter, and that is the quiet twist she has released the birds, and they have stayed close anyway.

Juliana is a Brazilian painter based in Espírito Santo, and she works in a warm, luminous realism soft directional light, glowing skies, tender skin tones, every surface handled so gently that even an empty cage feels full of feeling.

It is the kind of glow that turns a simple moment into something that matters, and here she points it at love, letting go, and how freedom given freely can become its own kind of home.

Follow her, there is something really special happening in her practice right now.

03. Nam Trung Bắc by Tuan Vu @tuan.vu.art

We gave the third spot this week to Nam Trung Bắc by Tuan Vu and the colour alone is worth stopping for. A tall palm bursts open in oranges and pinks over a dense tropical tangle of hot magenta, teal and green, while down in the foreground a group of women in flowing áo dài gather by a stream, calm and unhurried in the middle of all that riot.

The title names Vietnam’s three regions South, Central and North so the whole scene works like a country remembered rather than mapped, half real place and half daydream.

Tuan was born in Saigon and came to Canada by boat as a child refugee, and he has been painting Vietnam from that distance ever since, now based in Quebec. He is largely self-taught, laying colour straight onto the surface with oil and oil sticks and drawing on Gauguin, the Nabis and Japanese woodblock prints chasing feeling over accuracy and letting the happy accidents stay.

Follow him as his page is one long colour-soaked love letter to home.

04. Distant Within the Box by Amel Bashier @amel.bashier

Fourth on our heartlist this week is Distant Within the Box by Amel Bashier is done entirely in black ink and absolutely extraordinary for it. Two women’s faces sit inside a drawn cube, their long, calm features and wide almond eyes framed by hair that curls into spirals and coils, with a run of checkerboard down one side and sunflowers opening along the bottom.

The whole surface is built from countless fine dots and lines, so it reads as soft and dense at the same time and the box around them does something quietly sad, holding the two women close together yet somehow apart, present but contained. Amel works almost entirely this way pointillism, thousands of tiny pen marks layered into these dignified figures, drawing on Nubian, Assyrian and Indian traditions to give women the presence of ancient queens.

Her own path runs across borders born in Jeddah, raised between there and Port Sudan, with a father from Nubian Dongola and an Indian grandfather, now based in France and that mix of roots and quiet resilience runs right through the work.

Give her a follow beacause once you start looking through her drawings you will not stop.

05. First at the Meetup by Ariel Posh @arielposh

And the last painting on our heart list this week is First at the Meetup by Ariel Posh is a portrait of total ease that we absolutely could not scroll past. She is kicked back on a stool in a fitted orange romper and grey sneakers, tattoos running down her arms and legs, a drink in one hand and a little Yorkie curled contentedly in her lap.

Scattered around her feet are dollar bills, a bottle, a can and a couple of shot glasses, and behind her the bar fades into shadow with a few stray figures but she is the first one here, alone and completely unbothered by it. That is the whole charm of it a portrait of a woman taking up her space without apology, totally at home in her own company.

Ariel is an American painter based in Philadelphia and trained at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and she made this during a residency at the Vermont Studio Center. Her work has a warm, cinematic realism rich brown and amber light wrapped around figures who feel like people you already know.

Follow her she paints ordinary nights out like they are worth remembering.

That is what has been on our heartlist this week. Five painters who reminded us exactly why we do this why we sit down every week, look properly, and share the work that genuinely stopped us. Art deserves more than a passing glance and we mean that. These five gave us five reasons to slow down and feel something real this week. We hope they do the same for you.

Go show them some love. Follow them, share their work, leave a comment that actually says something it means more to an artist than you would think.

And if you’re an artist yourself, here’s your nudge: submissions are open for Arts to Hearts Magazine, Issue 15, built around the theme Where I Am. It’s a wide-open prompt home, belonging, migration, solitude, identity, or simply the feeling of being exactly where you are and it’s yours to take wherever your work wants to go.

This edition is a collaboration between Arts to Hearts Project and StudioToGallery, and it’s open to artists worldwide at every stage, from those just finding their footing to long-established names. You don’t need a long CV just work that means something to you. Submissions close on October 5, 2026.