Alice's pick
"Courtney is an artist I have admired for a long time and has gone from strength to strength since she graduated with a masters from Wimbledon in 2015. Courtney paints ambiguous and compelling scenes, drawing from her upbringing in Southern California and its infatuation with glamour. Her paintings - set against plain or block-coloured backgrounds - never fail to draw you in and leave you questioning the narrative behind the works, demonstrating the artist’s fascination with the familiar and the unknown."
Dario's pick
"Is that a Hockney; a Doig?… no it’s an Alexandra Buckle. (Great name by the way.) If you think of linocuts as raw, one or two colour works where the process sometimes justifies the results, think again. By this I mean that in these beautiful linocuts, the process sits (almost hidden) behind the resulting image. Alexandra's mastery of the technique and understanding of composition, colour and light are so brilliantly evident in all of her splendid works. And on top of this, there is something else that is so piercingly evident, and that my art loving bunnies, is love. Actually, make that love and joy (okay, two things). These are celebratory works brimming with joy and love, returning us to moments that most of us will have experienced. Sun-splashed reflections, dappled light shadows through leaves and beautiful works that somehow leave you refreshed and lighter.
Talking of trees, I need to now get up off the sofa and go get the Christmas tree as my girlfriend is getting slightly impatient. So mes amis, I would like to wish you all a tres Merry Christmas and a happy New Year from myself, my now irritated girlfriend and Perry, my three-year-old pet dwarf llama. (I wish I was joking.)"
Aindrea's pick
"Punchy impasto canvasses fuse together humour with dense materiality. What looks like an artist's mixing board on closer inspection is revealed to be little piglets. Joyous, colourful and almost good enough to eat."
Julia's pick
"Leigh's limited edition digital prints are full of style and a contemporary statement. Large graphic forms with overlaid colours create a sense of rhythm and pattern, revealing shadows of past, present and future in architecture, pattern making and colour. These pieces have a timeless feel and Leigh's large abstract works would look stunning setting off a home with 50s and 60s interior features."
Alex's pick
"Claire is an award-winning graphic designer. Her fluid, colourful paintings are at their best reminiscent of Howard Hodgkin or Emil Nolde. Check them out!"
Dr. Matthew Eve's pick
"I have admired and adored award-winning Elya Yalonetski’s mini ceramic masterpieces ever since Artfinder first asked me to join their curatorial team. Not only is her delicate craftsmanship second to none, but her style is unique, quirky and utterly charming. In her collection you’ll find sexy, hip, circus and burlesque performers rubbing shoulders with Renaissance and Baroque courtesans; colourful anthropomorphic hat-wearing animals; harlequins, jokers, mer-men/women and other hybrids; and characters from ‘Alice and Wonderland’ and ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’. Each is beautifully made, strikingly painted and utterly beguiling. And, what’s more, Elya is one of Artfinder’s great successes with enviable sales and countless glowing reviews from customers around the world. So do snap-up her work while it’s still affordable and have a lovely Christmas!"
Juliana and Debra's pick
"Though abstract, we love the interaction of these simple, playful pieces as a group. Whether as part of a ‘duo' or a ‘company', they stand together like abstract figures in space, with the varying tactile surfaces encouraging us to touch. Stone is a constant source of inspiration to Fiecke, who experiments with different kinds, some highly polished, some more textured and raw. She really seems to understand the material and her final organic sculptures are all stunning in their simplicity of form."
Richard's pick
Kirsten Thys van den Audenaerd
"Kirsten’s work is a reminder of how intimate and momentarily fleeting the capturing of a photographic image can be. Using a Polaroid camera (and without the option to review or delete), the pictures taken are by their very nature spontaneous and have an ethereal feeling of impermanency, almost in acknowledgment of the slow chemical burn of their development. Made famous (or infamous) by the likes of Andy Warhol and Nobuyoshi Araki, Polaroid cameras changed the face of contemporary photography, both for everyday users and for artists. Beginning in the late 1940s, Polaroid’s instant cameras were originally marketed to families and amateur photographers, but they also successfully engaged fine artists via their Artist Support Programme which offered creatives like Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol free film and studio time, and led to highly successful collaborations using the developing technology. Polaroids harkened back to early photographic processes before film — like daguerreotypes or tintypes — that created unique objects. As photography became an infinitely reproducible medium and moved farther away from ‘fine art', many artists embraced the Polaroid as they liked the idea of creating a singular, non-reproducible object. The subject matter of Kirsten’s images, the American West (and nudes within it), have a fading nostalgic beauty, again in keeping with the quality of imagery produced through using a Polaroid camera. Individual images look sometimes bleached, like they have been left out in the sun too long or over-saturated as if the chemicals have not quite fixed properly during development. But, more than any other aspect of their undoubted appeal, is the fact that these images are totally unique, one-off little pieces from the magical process that is photography."
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Cover image via Courtney Heather
