5 Paintings on Our Heart list This Week

At Arts to Hearts Project, looking at art is a big part of nearly every day and honestly, it’s the part we love most. So many passes through submissions, the community, the endless quiet scroll where artists post the thing they only just finished.

Most of it we take in and gently let go. But a few pieces each week do something different they lodge somewhere and won’t leave. They’re the ones we screenshot without thinking, send around the team with no caption, and come back to again just to spend another minute with. By the weekend, those are the ones still with us, and the list writes itself.

This week it came to five. They come from different countries and completely different minds, and they share no subject, style, or mood we didn’t set a theme, and we didn’t go looking for one afterward. What ties them together is quieter and harder to plan for: each one stopped us where we stood and held us a little 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.Viridi fine ludum by Michele Fletcher @michele_fletcher

The first painting on our heartlist this week is viridi fine ludum by Michele Fletcher, and you only slowly notice that some of those leaves have slipped into pale lavender and dusty pink. Big tropical fronds curl and overlap and spiral across the whole canvas, lush and alive, with those impossible colours threaded quietly through all that green.

The paint moves in long, ribboning, gestural strokes, so the whole thing feels like it is still growing, still unfurling in front of you. The playful Latin title, roughly “green endgame,” hints at the joke underneath: she is quietly confounding the neat botanical categories we try to pin on the living world.

Michele is a Canadian-born painter from Leamington, Ontario, now based in London. She works in oil on linen, often wet-on-wet and in a single sitting, building these gestural, garden-fed abstractions from memory rather than life. She is chasing the feel of growth, colour and light instead of any particular plant.

Follow her. She paints the vegetal world like it is dreaming in colour.

2. The Sitting 1 by Stacey Gillian Abe @stacey_gillian_abe

Our second pick this week is The Sitting 1 by Stacey Gillian Abe, and it is power and tenderness in the same breath. A woman reclines in a pool of vivid teal satin, her skin a deep, luminous indigo, her gaze level and completely self-possessed.

There is a reclining-portrait tradition hovering behind the pose, but she reclaims it entirely. It feels like a Black woman utterly at ease taking up space. The indigo is the key to everything Stacey does. It is a colour heavy with history around the Black body, and she turns it into something regal and free, redefining how her subjects are seen. Look closely and you can even catch the fine silk thread she stitches straight into the canvas.

Stacey is a Ugandan artist, born in the West Nile region and based in Kampala. She paints her indigo-skinned figures in acrylic and oil, then hand-embroiders them with silk thread, a craft passed down from her mother and grandmother, weaving memory, lineage and womanhood directly into the surface.

Go give her a follow. Her use of indigo is one of the most powerful things on your feed right now.

3. Light From The Stars by Sthenjwa Luthuli @sthenjwa_luthuli

Light From The Stars by Sthenjwa Luthuli is our third pick this week, and it is not painted so much as carved into being. Faceless figures in red-and-white striped bodies float and reach through a surface of swirling, hand-cut lines, scattered all over with tiny multicoloured dots, like a sky full of stars or a field of beadwork.

Every one of those marks is gouged by hand into wood, which is why the whole thing shimmers and moves the way it does. His headless, drifting figures always seem to hover in what he calls “unknown space,” somewhere between the physical world and the spiritual one, reaching toward their ancestors. It is intricate, patient, deeply rooted work, carrying his Zulu heritage in every line.

Sthenjwa is a self-taught South African artist, born in Botha’s Hill in KwaZulu-Natal and based in Durban. He carves his images by hand into MDF woodblocks with a chisel and mallet, then paints them. A single piece can take months, each one part sculpture, part painting, part ritual.

His page is full of work this intricate and this deeply rooted, so go spend some time there.

4. Like Breath On Glass by Tahnee Lonsdale @tahneelonsdale

Fourth on our heartlist this week is Like Breath On Glass by Tahnee Lonsdale, and it is a whole gathering of ghosts glowing softly in the dark. A crowd of tall, faceless figures press close together, their pale blue-and-gold bodies translucent and luminous, hovering somewhere between people and pure light against a deep indigo ground.

They feel like spirits mid-congregation, totemic and tender at once, as if you have caught a quiet ceremony you were not meant to see. The title borrows a line from Whistler about paint so thin it is “like breath on the surface of a pane of glass,” and that is exactly how these beings are made: barely there, glowing from within. It is spectral and strangely comforting all at once.

Tahnee is a British painter, born in Reading and based in Los Angeles. She works in oil, layering lucent and matte paint over a vivid base and letting her figures emerge loosely from the inside out, more conjured than drawn.

Follow her. She makes oil paint look as weightless as breath on glass.

5. Residue by Céline Ducrot @celine.i.d

The last painting on our heartlist this week is Residue by Céline Ducrot. It is cool, still, and just a little bit off in the most beautiful way. Two young women crouch low in a field of dry grass, heads bent close together, hands almost meeting. One wears a cap and slides, the other a soft mauve top and flip-flops, and pale white rabbits sit scattered in the grass around them.

Everything is drained to cool greys, smooth and matte and strangely still, so the scene hovers between real intimacy and something dreamlike you cannot quite name. That blur of closeness and alienation is exactly what she is after. The real surprise is how it is made. It is not brushed at all, but airbrushed.

Céline sprays fine mists of acrylic ink onto wood, cutting masking tape for those crisp edges and building the image slowly, one section at a time, in a process she thinks of as closer to drawing. She is a Swiss artist, born in Fribourg and based in Biel/Bienne.

Give her a follow. Her airbrushed scenes are some of the quietest and strangest things on your feed.

Five pieces, five completely different ways of making them sprayed, stitched, carved, breathed on so lightly it barely looks like paint. What they have in common is simple: each one stopped us this week. And everyone started as a private hunch in someone’s head, that they chased down and then actually shared with the rest of us.

So meet them halfway: open their pages, follow them, and leave a comment that says more than “nice.” It takes a moment, and it lands harder than you’d think on the person who made the work.

And if you’re a woman making art, this one’s for you. The Woman Artist Award – 7th Edition is open now, and it exists for exactly this: to find, celebrate and lift women artists working anywhere in the world, in any medium at all.

Winners take home a cash prize and an exclusive feature in the next edition of Women Artists on the Rise, the premium hardcover book sold through Amazon and Barnes & Noble along with the kind of exposure and community that keeps a practice going. Emerging or mid-career, painter or sculptor or anything in between you’ve got until November 30th. Put yourself forward.