5 Paintings That Made to Our Heart list This Week

At Arts to Hearts Project, the heart list is never planned. We don’t pick a theme on Monday and go hunting for work to match it. We just keep our eyes open all week on submissions, on the community, on the slow scroll of Instagram late at night and notice what actually makes us stop.

The piece that gets screenshotted and sent round the team. The one we quietly go back to look at again. By the time Sunday comes, the list has usually made itself.

This week it made itself out of five paintings that, on paper, have no reason to sit side by side. They come from five different countries and five completely different imaginations some reverent, some unsettling, some tender, some dreamlike. We didn’t go looking for a thread, and we didn’t find one. What they share is simpler than that: not one of us could scroll past them.

So we won’t tell you what connects them, because honestly nothing does. We’ll just let each painting speak for itself. Take your time with them, follow the artists who catch you, and let each one hold you a moment longer than usual. This is our heartlist for this week.

1. Time and Order in Collapse by Gustavo Nazareno @gustavonazarenostudio

The first painting on our heart list this week is Time and Order in Collapse by Gustavo Nazareno absolute regal, otherworldly, and completely impossible to look away from. A single figure stands wrapped in an enormous black gown that pools and billows across the canvas like dark water, crowned with a tall plume of pale feathers, skin and fabric rising out of a warm, smoky brown ground.

It is regal and a little divine, somewhere between a Renaissance portrait and an apparition and that is exactly the territory Gustavo works in. His paintings grow out of the Orixás, the deities of the Afro-Brazilian religions Candomblé and Umbanda, and before he paints he writes his own fables and even makes the garments his figures wear, so each work arrives as a kind of offering.

Gustavo was born in 1994 in Três Pontas, Minas Gerais, and works in São Paulo largely self-taught, he found painting through his aunt’s faith and has since shown everywhere from the Museu Afro Brasil to Opera Gallery around the world.

Follow him as his work carries a reverence you can feel through the screen.

02. Beneficiaries by Tomas Harker @tomasharker

Beneficiaries by Tomas Harker is our second pick this week and it is lush and soft and just a little bit strange. At first it is pure indulgence a tangle of cream and gold, flowing manes, a few horses with their heads bowed and eyes closed, nuzzled together.

But the longer you look, the more it slips the heads repeat, the crop cuts them off, the hair dissolves into near-abstraction, and you stop being sure how many animals are even there. That slow unsettling is exactly Tomas’s game.

He works right at the line between realism and abstraction, pulling you in with a seductive, familiar surface and then quietly tugging the ground out from under it, often starting from found images like film stills. His paintings reward patience the more you give them, the stranger and richer they get and this one is currently showing at Frieze London with The Sunday Painter.

Give him a follow because once you start looking through his paintings you will not want to stop.

03. Echoes of Self and Shadow by Edem Dedi @edem_dedi

Our third pick this week is Echoes of Self and Shadow by Edem Dedi, a portrait about the seen and unseen sides of a person, held in one calm, dignified look. A young woman stands against a warm ochre wall in a vivid turquoise ruffled dress and a flowered headwrap, a small bunch of orange blooms in her hand, her own shadow stretching on the wall behind her.

She is painted with real care right down to the patterned patches across her skin, which Edem renders with exactly the same tenderness as the fabric and the flowers, so they read not as something to hide but as part of who she is. That is the heart of it, a portrait about self and shadow, the visible and invisible sides of a person, held together in one steady gaze.

Edem is a Ghanaian artist, born in the Volta Region in 1991 and based in Accra, who works in richly detailed acrylic and takes his cues from the fashion, faces and everyday life around him.

His page is full of work this warm and this carefully rendered, go spend some time there.

04. Światłoczułość by Gabriela Michalczuk @gabrielamichalczuk_

The fourth painting we fell for this week is Światłoczułość by Gabriela Michalczuk and it is the kind of quiet that makes you want to stay. A young woman lies on her side on rumpled white sheets, head resting, looking straight out at you in a bright floral top and jeans, while a round amber lamp glows warm on the bed in front of her.

The whole painting lives in that meeting of temperatures cool blue wall, warm orange light, the glow catching on her skin and the creases of the sheet. It is intimate and completely still, like being let into an ordinary afternoon someone decided to hold onto.

The title borrows a word from photography meaning light-sensitivity, and it fits her paintings have the feel of a photograph taken with a good lens, every detail sharp but softened by real warmth. Gabriela is a Polish painter working in oil, and she has become one of the names to watch among the country’s young realist painters.

Give her a follow as she turns the everyday into something that feels genuinely precious.

5. Walk in the Park by Catrin Welz-Stein @catrin_welzstein

Rounding out our heart list this week is Walk in the Park by Catrin Welz-Steinand and it feels like a page from a storybook you half-remember. A woman stands among tall blue allium globes and big soft leaves, dressed in a cream ruffled blouse and a striped skirt, her face tucked away beneath the brim of a wide pale hat and beside her, calm and regal, waits a slender white hound.

Everything sits in a muted, dusky palette of sage, cream and faded blue, so the whole scene feels timeless, like it could be now or a hundred years ago. Hiding the face is something Catrin does often it turns the woman from a specific person into a mood, a half-told story you finish yourself.

She is a German artist who became known for her surreal digital collages, stitching vintage illustrations into dreamlike worlds, and more recently she has been bringing that same imagination onto canvas by hand in acrylic.

Give her a follow as every painting she makes feels like a story waiting to be finished.

Behind every painting here is a person who started with a blank canvas and the nerve to keep going until it said what they meant and then chose to share it, not knowing if anyone would stop. That’s never a small thing. These five made something honest this week, and we’re so glad they keep doing it.

So go find them. Follow these artists, spend real time on their pages, leave a comment that actually says something. They showed up and made something worth stopping for, and the least we can do is show up back.

And if this week’s list left you itching to make something of your own Arts to Hearts Magazine Issue 15: Where I Am is open, and it closes October 5th. That is tomorrow. Home, belonging, migration, solitude, identity open to artists worldwide at every stage. A collaboration between Arts to Hearts Project and StudioToGallery. Do not leave it too late.