5 Paintings on Our Heart list This Week
At Arts to Hearts Project, the heart list works a bit like memory. We can’t tell you on Monday what will end up on it we just move through the week looking at everything, and a few pieces quietly refuse to leave. They’re the ones we catch ourselves thinking about on the walk home, the ones we reopen just to check they’re as good as we remembered. They always are. By the weekend, they’ve sorted themselves out.
This week, five of them stayed. They come from different corners of the world and wildly different minds, and they line up around no single subject, style, or mood we set no theme, and we went looking for none afterward. What they share is quieter than any of that, and much harder to plan for: each one stopped us where we stood and held us a beat 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 heartlist for this week.
1.Peace Offering by Denis D’Alesio @denisdalesio
We are opening our heartlist this week with Peace Offering by Denis D’Alesio, and it feels like a fairytale no one has told you yet. A shepherd stands among tall grey-green reeds, bundled in layer upon layer of pale robes with a golden ruff at his neck and an odd, mask-like face, holding the cloth out as if to offer it.
Around his feet drift a little flock of glowing yellow sheep, soft and unreal, with a flicker of orange fire off to one side. Denis describes him simply as a man who just wants to herd his ethereal sheep under the stars in unknown lands, and that tender, slightly melancholy wandering is the whole mood of the piece.
It is painted loosely and confidently in oil, folkloric and dreamlike, the kind of scene that feels pulled from a story you almost remember. Denis is a painter working in this soft, surreal figurative register, building quiet mythologies one canvas at a time.
Follow him. His paintings feel like bedtime stories for grown-ups.
2. Learning by Ellen Akimoto @ellenakimoto
The second painting on our heart list this week is Learning by Ellen Akimoto, and it makes you question what you are actually looking at. A woman sits at a table, leaning in, fingers hovering at her lips mid-thought, in front of a soft geometric pattern of circles.
It looks ordinary for about a second, and then something quietly glitches. Her skin has a smooth, faintly greenish, almost 3D-rendered sheen, as if she is half real person, half digital model. That slippage is exactly Ellen’s thing.
She blends painterly gesture with digital collage to build figures and rooms that feel convincing and subtly wrong at the same time, hovering between reality and illusion, the lived and the ghostly. It is cool, precise and a little uncanny. Ellen is an American painter, born in California in 1988 and based in Leipzig, who shows with Galerie Judin, and this piece is heading to ART021 in Shanghai.
Give her a follow. Her whole page sits in this same quiet space between the real and the rendered.
3. Weave – Shared Gravity XIX by Giuseppe Scarangelli @giuseppe.scarangelli
Weave – Shared Gravity XIX by Giuseppe Scarangelli is our third pick this week, and it is two bodies dissolving into one another in a storm of pink and blue. A pair of figures lean and curl together in a tender, half-abstract embrace, their forms built from thick, gestural strokes of rose, red and flesh against a deep violet ground, so they seem to be weaving into each other as you watch.
He subtitles it “to rediscover each other,” and that is the whole feeling of it. Closeness, pull, the gravity between two people finding their way back. It is loose and passionate and alive, with paint handled with real physical force.
Giuseppe is an Italian artist who works in mixed media, layering acrylics, oils, chalk and glue, and building his entangled figures in thick, restless brushwork until bodies and background melt into the same motion.
Go find him and stay a while. His entangled figures are the kind you keep coming back to.
4. Nothing To Wear (The Chair) II by Austin Hayman @austinhayman
Fourth on our heartlist this week is Nothing To Wear (The Chair) II by Austin Hayman. A woman kneels in front of a mirror with an empty chair beside her, and nothing dramatic happens at all. She kneels on a black-and-white checkerboard floor in front of a tall mirror, her dark hair falling down her back, her face returned to us in the reflection.
Beside her sits an empty woven chair with a single pale garment draped over it. It is a small, familiar scene: getting ready, choosing what to wear, alone with yourself at night. But Austin paints it with such tonal hush and atmosphere that it tips gently into something more charged and dreamlike. Nothing dramatic happens, and that is the point. The ordinary, looked at this closely, starts to feel strange and tender.
Austin is a self-taught American painter, born in Santa Monica and raised in California wine country, now based in Los Angeles. He works in oil, painting people he knows in the real rooms they live in, chasing the quiet, overlooked moments that end up meaning the most.
His page is full of work this hushed and this carefully seen, so go spend some time there.
5. Windy Portrait by Karolina Jabłońska @karolina_jab
Rounding out our heartlist this week is Windy Portrait by Karolina Jabłońska. It turns being caught out in the wind into something raw, funny and strangely vulnerable. A woman presses her big pink hands against her cheeks, fingers splayed, her long brown hair whipping across her face so only a single wide brown eye peers through, all of it set against a heavy grey, cloud-churned sky. T
he hands and skin glow that unmistakable fleshy pink she is known for, which makes a small, ordinary moment feel completely exposed. At two and a half metres tall, it is impossible to look past. The tiny physical discomfort becomes huge, almost monumental.
Karolina is a Polish painter, born in Niedomice and based in Kraków, who trained at the city’s Academy of Fine Arts. She works in oil, painting large generalised self-portraits filtered through the old masters, and uses weather and bodily sensation to reach the emotions underneath.
Give her a follow. Every painting she makes is funny, tender and a little bit brave.
A whole week of looking, and these are the five that wouldn’t let us scroll on. Every one of them is the work of someone who sat alone with an idea and kept going until it was real and then had the nerve to share it, with no promise anyone would care.
We cared. So do the thing that actually matters to them: open their pages, follow them, and leave a comment that says more than “nice.” Thirty seconds from you can carry an artist through a whole week of doubt.
And if you’re the one making the work this time, this is your window and it’s closing. The Artist of the Year Award 2026 is open now, guest-juried by Jennifer Rizzo of Hashimoto Contemporary, with no theme to wrestle: just send the work that’s most honestly yours. The hundred artists chosen to go into a hardcover collectible book, and one of them is named Artist of the Year, with a $500 cash prize, a trophy, and a four-page feature. Any medium, any stage, anywhere in the world but only until November 15th. That’s two weeks. Stop thinking about it and send it.
