5 Paintings We’re Keeping on Our Heart list This Week

Every week at Arts to Hearts, we go through more art than most people see in a year. It is one of the most beautiful parts of building this community, your world becomes this constant, living, breathing stream of creativity from artists across the globe, and every single day something new arrives that makes you stop and feel something real.

Most days we appreciate it and carry on. But the pieces that stay with you the ones still sitting in the back of your mind three days later those are the ones this editorial is for. Because they deserve more than a like and a scroll. They deserve to be talked about properly.

This week we have five paintings that did exactly that to us. We are sharing them starting from our favourite number five, all the way through to our absolute number one. Five artworks. Five artists. All of them incredible.

Here is what has been on our heartlist this week.

Our Favourite No. 5 is Özgürlüğe Koşan Atlar by Emine Bayraktar @eminebayraktar_art

Our No. 5 on this week’s list is this extraordinary oil painting by Emine Bayraktar — two horses mid-stride, manes flying, moving together through a dramatic smoky darkness like they are running toward something only they can see. Emine is an Istanbul-born artist whose practice spans soft pastel, oil painting, charcoal and watercolor, a member of the Pastel Society of Turkey with years of rigorous training across multiple disciplines behind her. And this piece is everything great animal painting should be.

The energy in it is extraordinary. The way she has captured the relationship between the two horses, that sense of mutual momentum and trust, the light catching their coats against that deep shadowed background it is technically stunning and deeply emotional all at once. Her guiding principle is that everything starts with a dream and is achieved with belief and you feel that conviction in every single brushstroke of this piece. This is the kind of painting that makes you want to stand in front of it and just breathe.

Go visit her page and see everything she has been working on, it is absolutely worth your time.

Our Favourite No. 4 is Birdirbir Oynayanlar by Zeliha Saçlıbazoğlu @zelihasaclibazoglu_art

So, our No. 4 is Birdirbir Oynayanlar a wonderfully alive mixed-media painting of a girl mid-leap, laughing, completely lost in the joy of play by Turkish artist Zeliha Saçlıbazoğlu. And honestly, this one made the whole team smile the second we saw it. Zeliha is born in Adana, graduated with honours from İnönü University’s Fine Arts department, and her work does something really special it bridges tradition and the contemporary in a way that feels completely natural.

Anatolian stories, folk craft references, portraits that feel deeply human and immediately familiar. Her work sits in the permanent collection of Güray Museum in Cappadocia, and she has represented Turkey at Art Capital Grand Palais in Paris. This piece from her Hüzün Çiçekleri series captures something rare pure, uncomplicated joy and she does it without a single false note.

Visit her page and see everything she has been working on it is absolutely worth your time.

Our Favourite No. 3 is Emotional Baggage by Grace Green @grace_green_space

This week’s on No. 3 is Emotional Baggage by Grace Green and from the title to the last detail, it got us completely. A small girl in a white dress, standing in a sunlit field, carrying a picnic basket full of heads. Unsettling, yes. But also oddly, deeply relatable and that is exactly what makes it so brilliant. Grace is an Italian surreal and concept artist whose work turns personal fragility into something visually extraordinary her own words are

“delle mie fragilità ne faccio bellezza” I make beauty from my fragilities. And that ethos is written all over this piece.

The juxtaposition of the innocent pastoral setting and the quietly disturbing subject matter is handled with such lightness that it makes you laugh and feel something heavy at exactly the same time. That is a very rare skill.

Find her work and give her a follow she is the kind of artist you discover once and never forget.

Our Favourite No. 2 is Sirens of Es Vedrá by Georgia Dymock @georgiadymockart

Climbing to No. 2 this week is this extraordinary oil on linen painting by Georgia Dymock — and what a piece it is. Created during her recent residency at Las Cicadas in Ibiza, this work was born from the island’s mythology specifically Tanit, the chief deity of Carthage, and Es Vedrá, a mystical landmark tied to Homer’s sirens from The Odyssey.

Georgia describes being drawn to the powerful contradiction sirens embody beauty and danger existing together, the seductive pull of things that can both enchant and destroy. And you feel every bit of that tension in this painting.

The bold saturated blues, the ambiguous figures caught between human and mythological, the sheer theatricality of it all it is visually stunning and conceptually rich in equal measure. Georgia is a London-based painter with an MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art, winner of the ACS Studio Prize, selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries, and shortlisted for the Ingram Prize. Her work has been shown in London, New York, Miami, Basel and Mexico City. She is, quite simply, one of the most exciting painters working right now.

See more of her work and give her a follow you will want to keep watching what she does next.

Our Favourite No. 1 is The Weight of Silence by Nyt Jeerasak @nyt.slashnine

And our absolute Favourite this week, the painting that has been sitting with us the longest, the one we keep coming back to is The Weight of Silence by Nyt Jeerasak. A girl in a blue dress, crouched beside a red plastic chair in a sparse room, face hidden, one hand reaching quietly toward a green apple on the floor. That is all. And somehow it says everything.

Nyt is a Thai artist whose oil on canvas work operates in that rare space where emotional truth and technical precision meet completely and this piece from his Shy Girl Collection is perhaps the most powerful example of that we have seen all year.

He describes his work as emerging from the things we hear about only once but feel constantly loneliness, longing, the quiet weight of emotions we carry but never show. And this painting is exactly that. You do not just look at it. You recognise it. It already sold and we completely understand why. This is the kind of painting that finds you at exactly the right moment and stays with you long after.

Find Nyt’s work and give him a follow this is an artist whose every next piece we will be watching for.

That is our heart list for this week five paintings, five artists, five moments that reminded us exactly why we do what we do here at Arts to Hearts. If any of these pieces moved you, go show these artists some love. Follow them, share their work, tell them their painting stopped you. Because behind every artwork is a real person who showed up and made something and that deserves to be acknowledged.

And now! if you are an artist reading this, we have something important to tell you.

The International Artist Award 2026 by Arts to Hearts Project is open for submissions right now and this one is something genuinely special. This is not just an open call. It is an editorially driven global initiative dedicated to recognizing exceptional emerging and mid-career artists whose work demonstrates excellence, originality, and a meaningful contribution to contemporary visual culture.

The 100 selected artists will be published in the second edition of The Great Book of Artmakers a beautifully produced hardcover publication that is steadily becoming a respected record of contemporary creative talent, designed for collectors, curators, galleries and institutions worldwide.

This is recognition, publication, and international visibility all in one distinguished platform. Applications are open until 10 June 2026.

If you have been waiting for a sign this is it.