5 Paintings on Our Heart list This Week
At Arts to Hearts Project, nobody sits down and decides what the heart list will be. It isn’t a plan, and it definitely isn’t an algorithm. It’s just the handful of pieces that cut through everything else we saw this week the ones that made us stop scrolling, the ones we sent to each other with no caption because none was needed, the ones we quietly came back to a second and third time. By the end of the week, they’d chosen themselves.
This week, five of them did exactly that. They come from different countries and wildly different imaginations, and they don’t line up around a subject or a style or a mood we didn’t set a theme, and we didn’t go looking for one afterward.
What these five share isn’t a style, a subject, or a place of origin. Some are loud and some are quiet; some took shape in a studio halfway across the world from the next and none of that is what earned them a place here. What they share is simpler, and far harder to plan for: each one stopped us where we stood and held us there a moment longer than we expected. For a heart list, that has always been reason enough. We hope they do the same for you. This is our heart list for this week.
01. Mars by Tim Kent @timkentstudio
The first painting on our heart list this week is Mars by Tim Kent and it feels like history and myth caught in a single half-lit room. A rider in a military coat and plumed helmet sits astride a russet horse with a flowing pale mane, the two of them caught in a dim, stony chamber that could be a ruin, a stable or a dream.
Everything is soaked in that single furnace tone, so the whole painting feels lit from somewhere just out of frame old-masterly and cinematic at once, with myth hanging thick in the air. Tim is known for exactly this kind of charged, architectural space, he is often called the master of the enfilade, those endless receding rooms where history and the present blur.
Born in Vancouver in 1975 and based in Brooklyn, he came up the unlikely way playing bass in a rock band before turning to paint and now shows with JD Malat Gallery. This piece belongs to his recent run of equestrian work.
Follow him he paints history like a half-lit dream you can walk straight into.
02. Late Lunch by Riikka Sormunen @riikkasormunen
Late Lunch by Riikka Sormunen is our second pick this week and it is pure glamour caught mid-slurp. A woman with a cloud of curly blonde hair and a flame-red dress sits alone at a table, drawing a single strand of spaghetti into her mouth, fork raised, a green goblet and a jug of red roses beside her, pink slippers and a stray lemon on the patterned floor.
Everything is saturated and beautifully staged turquoise, red, yellow, black but her face has that slightly exhausted, caught-in-the-act look that keeps it from being merely pretty. That is exactly Riikka’s territory performative femininity, escapist pleasure and the quiet, funny mess underneath it all.
She is a Finnish artist based in Helsinki who came to painting from illustration and fashion, and she builds these surreal, decorative scenes in oil, where every figure and object seems to be posing just for you.
Go give her a follow her use of colour and staging is completely and delightfully her own.
3. Creeper by Emil Ussing @emil.ussing
The third painting on our heart list this week is Creeper by Emil Ussing and it is equal parts internet in-joke and genuine body-horror, and we cannot stop thinking about it. Rendered entirely in coloured pencil, it is a pitch-perfect
Minecraft library blocky shelves stacked with red, green and blue books, wooden beams, grey stone brick. But stretching through all those neat pixels are long, pale, distorted human limbs arms reaching, bare feet on the floor a real body warping its way into a world that was never built to hold one.
Emil calls it a warped self portrait, and that is the uncanny heart of it the digital and the physical folded together until neither looks quite right. It is playful and a little unsettling at once, and the coloured-pencil craft is seriously impressive up close.
Give him a follow, his whole page sits in this same uncanny space between the digital and the real.
4. Beautiful Losers by Isaac Lythgoe @isaaclythgoe
Our fourth pick this week is Beautiful Losers by Isaac Lythgoe, celebration curdling into something darker, painted with the confidence of someone who knows exactly what they are doing. Men in dark suits tangle and buckle into one another, half-brawl, half-collapse, while in the foreground sit pristine white tiered cakes smeared and dripping with something blood-red.
It is painted with loose, old-masterly bravado all confident brushwork and drama, so the chaos feels both grand and a little grotesque. That tension is the whole point of the show it comes from, pointedly titled Everyone’s a Bad Guy, where Isaac uses the wedding that supposed real-life fairytale as a stage for performance, aspiration and quietly bad behaviour.
He works across painting and sculpture, building entire narrative worlds that poke at power, romance, morality and the stories we tell ourselves. This series showed at Kutlesa in New York.
Follow him he paints the fairytale and the mess underneath it in the same breath.
5. Wildfire by Miruna Radovici @miruna.radovici
And closing out our heart list this week is Wildfire by Miruna Radovici and it flickers between figure and pure abstraction the way fire itself refuses to hold a shape. Out of a soft green field rises what she calls a cat-fire-human figure a face half-formed inside streaming shapes of orange and gold, with blue and red paint trickling down like rain, and vegetation sprouting from its belly.
It is loose and gestural, built up in oil and dry pastel, so it shifts between figure and pure abstraction with every look you give it. She describes it as ready to burst, to hunt, to carry both the violence and the gentleness of nature at once and you feel exactly that tension in the paint.
Miruna is a Romanian artist, born in Bucharest in 1995, who moves freely between painting, drawing, ceramics and textiles, building dreamlike, biospheric worlds about intimacy, emotion and the tangle between the human and everything wilder.
Give her a follow, her biospheric worlds are unlike anything else out there right now.
That’s the week, five artists who each turned a private obsession into something the rest of us get to stand in front of. None of them knew, when they started, whether anyone would care. That’s the quiet bravery in all of this, and it’s exactly why the next part matters: don’t let good work vanish into the scroll. Open their pages. Follow them. Say something real in the comments. It costs you thirty seconds, and it can mean the world to the person on the other end.
And a thought for anyone reading who makes things too maybe this is your sign to stop waiting. The Artist of the Year Award 2026, guest-curated by Jennifer Rizzo, is open right now, and for once there’s no brief to decode: the theme is simply OPEN.
Send the work that feels most like you. The hundred artists selected go into a collectible book, and one of them walks away with a $500 cash prize, a trophy, and a four-page feature of their own. Any medium, any stage, anywhere in the world you’ve got until November 15th.
Three weeks left. Go apply.
