6 paintings we completely fell in love with this week

At Arts to Hearts Project, we spend our days surrounded by art. Through our global community of artists and art lovers, we come across hundreds of artworks every single day. Some are beautiful, some are technically impressive, and some simply stop us in our tracks.

Those are the ones we’re always looking for.

Not because they’re the loudest or the most talked about, but because they feel honest. You can tell when an artist has poured something real into their work. Whether it’s a painting, a sculpture, a photograph, or a mixed-media piece, the best art has a way of making you pause and spend a little more time with it.

Every week, we pick a handful of artworks that stayed with us long after we first saw them. There’s no formula behind the selection just work that moved us, surprised us, or made us look twice.

This week, we’ve chosen six artworks by six artists whose work we think deserves a closer look. We hope you enjoy discovering them as much as we enjoyed finding them.

Here’s is our heart list for this week

01. A Moment of Thanks by Ross Buckland @ross_buckland_art

First on our heartlist this week is A Moment of Thanks by Ross Buckland and this one has a story behind it that makes it even better. A lone rider on horseback pauses against a dramatic desert sky, towering cumulus clouds blazing in pink and gold above the saguaro cacti, the whole scene suspended in that specific breathless moment when nature stops you in your tracks.

Ross was born in Calgary in 1958, taught himself to paint with no formal training beyond high school art classes, studying the masters through books and museum visits, and has since become one of the most respected landscape and aviation painters working in the American West. He has earned multiple awards including the Gold Founders Award from the American Society of Aviation Artists.

Give him a follow and see everything he has been working on, his feed is consistently extraordinary.

02. Torres del Paine by Phillipa Hudson @pheehudson

Our second pick this week is this breathtaking mountain painting by Phillipa Hudson — bold, expressive, and completely impossible to scroll past. The famous granite towers of Torres del Paine rise from the canvas in deep burnt orange and rust, snow-dusted ridges catching the light, a dramatic sky of pinks and blues sweeping above the whole scene. The palette is bold and completely intentional this is not a polite landscape, it is an expressive one, using colour to convey the raw, overwhelming experience of standing in the presence of mountains this extraordinary.

Phillipa known as Phee was born in Rhodesia, studied art at the University of Cape Town, and has lived on Vancouver Island since 1981, where her studio is a boathouse overhanging the sea. An active mountaineer, backcountry skier and sea kayaker, she paints the landscapes she actually inhabits the Canadian Rockies, the Coast Mountains, the fiords of B, with the authority of someone who has been inside these places and knows what they feel like as much as what they look like.

Give her a follow and explore her full body of work every mountain she paints feels like somewhere you need to go.

03. The Weight of Mountains by Bob Stuth-Wade @bobstuthwadeart

The Weight of Mountains by Bob Stuth-Wade lands at number three on our heartlist this week and it carries every bit of that weight. A solitary mesa rises from the desert floor at Big Bend National Park, white and pale against a dramatic clouded sky, the foreground desert scrub catching warm golden light, the whole scene holding that specific stillness that only the American Southwest produces. At 48 by 36 inches of acrylic on canvas, this is a painting that does not shout it simply stands there, as immovable and patient as the landscape it depicts.

Bob was born in Norfolk, Virginia in 1953 and has spent most of his life in Texas, building a practice over fifty years entirely devoted to capturing the emotional and spiritual essence of the Texas landscape. He works almost entirely en plein air, beginning each day in the field with small sketches that often grow into larger studio works. His paintings have been described as landscapes that operate more as portraits each one possessing a psychological depth that goes well beyond the obvious subject.

Give him a follow and explore everything he has been making fifty years of painting and still every piece feels alive.

04. The Mother and Child Endeavoring Ascension Detach from Earth by Evan Forrest Mann @evanforrestmann

Number four on our heart list this week is The Mother and Child Endeavoring Ascension Detach from Earth by Evan Forrest Mann a landscape that is also a portrait, and a portrait that is also a devotion. Two mountains rise side by side, painted in deep blues and blacks and white, their forms so organic and rounded that they read less like geological formations and more like two figures leaning into each other which is entirely the point.

Once you read the title, you cannot unsee it. The tenderness in the composition, the way the smaller form nestles against the larger one, the shared weight and shared light all of it becomes something far more personal than a mountain painting has any right to be.

Evan was born in 1985 in Colorado Springs, earned his BFA from Colorado State University and his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. He is a multidisciplinary artist and Emmy Award winning filmmaker whose work is held in the collections of the RISD Museum and the Holter Museum of Art, has exhibited at Art Basel, the Denver Art Museum, MCA Denver and the Hammer Museum, and has been featured in New American Paintings.

Give him a follow and spend time with his full body of work it rewards every second you give it.

05. Valley Trail by Andrew Sutherland @andrew___sutherland

Valley Trail by Andrew Sutherland lands at number five on our heartlist this week lush, immersive, and completely impossible to scroll past. A densely painted forest path winds through Natures Valley in South Africa, the canopy so thick with greens and golds and blues that the light barely makes it through and where it does, it glows. The whole painting has this immersive, almost tunnel-like quality, like stepping into somewhere the outside world cannot follow.

Andrew is a Cape Town based South African painter who studied Fine Art at The Ruth Prowse School of Art before working as an illustrator and later as assistant to a local abstract painter. His practice is rooted in landscape, memory, travel and the natural world creating paintings that sit somewhere between observation and recollection, the places he has been and the way they live on inside him. This piece was painted from photographs taken on a hiking trip to Natures Valley a place he keeps returning to for its natural beauty and enchanting atmosphere.

Give him a follow and see everything he has been working on his whole body of work is worth spending time with.

06. Far Off Into by Sean William Randall @seanwilliamrandall

And rounding out our heartlist this week is Far Off Into by Sean William Randall a painting that does exactly what the title says. Dark, silhouetted trees frame a winding path that disappears into that flat, luminous amber horizon, the grass rich and textural, everything pressing forward and inward all at once. The sky is gone replaced entirely by that glowing orange and the landscape itself becomes the whole drama. It is moody and still and carries that same psychological undercurrent that runs through all of Sean’s work landscapes that feel like states of mind rather than places on a map.

Sean is a Canadian-born visual artist based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, who left a career in architecture in 1992 to devote himself entirely to painting. His work toys with subtle surrealism, using aesthetic interruptions to play with illusion and depth, and leaves just enough space for the viewer to get completely lost inside it.

His page is full of work this good give him a follow and see everything he has been making.

That is our heartlist for this week. Six artists, six paintings, and a reminder that great art is being made everywhere you just have to know where to look. Go show these artists some love. Follow them, share their work, tell them their painting found someone.

One more thing and it is worth paying attention to. The deadline for Arts to Hearts Magazine Issue 14: The Summer We Remember has been extended you now have six more days. Six. This is your chance to be part of an internationally distributed publication read by collectors, curators and galleries worldwide. The theme is open and personal a summer memory, an emotion, a moment that stayed with you. All mediums, all backgrounds, all artists welcome. Six more days. Go apply now.