Archives: Artists

Stas Namin is a legendary figure in Eastern European music and art who has spent decades pushing creative boundaries. Since the 1960s, he has experimented with nearly every artistic medium, earning critical and popular acclaim unmatched by his contemporaries. In 1969, Stas founded the iconic rock band The Flowers, which has sold more than 60 million records in Europe and continues performing today. Often called “the Bob Dylan of Russia,” he used his cultural influence to champion freedom of speech and press while helping establish his country’s first pop and rock festivals, including the 1989 Peace Festival, along with private record labels, radio stations, and the nation’s first non-state-sponsored symphony orchestra.

Beyond music, Stas has become a highly accomplished visual artist whose evocative acrylic paintings and graphic works have been exhibited in galleries and museums throughout Russia and internationally. In 2014, he received honorary membership in the Russian Academy of the Arts. His work was featured in the 2018 exhibition “Red Gates/Against the Flow” alongside more than 350 nationally recognized artists. In 2021, Russia’s oldest art museum hosted his solo exhibition “Inside Out,” while the Moscow Museum of Modern Art presented “Confrontation,” a retrospective spanning two decades of his paintings, graphic works, sculpture, photographs, video art, and installations. Represented by Park West Gallery, Stas creates art exploring the unity of opposites, capturing cultural icons and universal themes in rich, vibrant hues.

Hunt Slonem is renowned for his distinct neo-expressionist style, drawing inspiration from nature and his 60 pet birds. Born in 1951 in Kittery, Maine, Slonem moved frequently during childhood due to his father’s Navy career, living in Hawaii, California, and Connecticut. He later studied abroad in Nicaragua and Mexico, experiences that imbued him with an appreciation for tropical landscapes that would profoundly influence his unique artistic vision. After graduating from Tulane University in New Orleans with a degree in painting and art history, he immersed himself in Manhattan’s explosive contemporary arts scene during the 1970s.

Slonem is best known for his series of bunnies, butterflies, and tropical birds, as well as his large-scale sculptures. His works appear in the permanent collections of 250 museums worldwide, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the New Orleans Museum of Art. Since his first solo exhibition at the Fischbach Gallery in 1977, his work has been showcased internationally hundreds of times, including at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art and the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg.

Beyond painting, Slonem has undertaken ambitious restorations of historic buildings, including Cordt’s Mansion in Kingston, New York, and the Lakeside and Albania mansions of Louisiana. He is represented by Park West Gallery, where collectors can explore his vibrant neo-expressionist creations.

Chris Sebo, based on Oahu, is regarded as one of Hawaii’s finest street painters and gained national recognition in 2021 when he won the grand prize in Park West Gallery’s inaugural Made in Hawaii artist competition. His vibrant, textured landscapes capture the islands’ beauty through an innovative spray paint technique that sets his work apart. The artist, who is represented by Park West Gallery, draws constant inspiration from the Hawaiian scenery surrounding him.

Sebo learned graffiti painting at thirteen and spent years developing his distinctive style. At sixteen, he began experimenting with different surfaces and incorporating richer color palettes into his work. His artistic drive centers on creating increasingly realistic art using the spray paint tools he mastered as a graffiti artist. Without any formal art training, he continues developing new techniques and imaginative forms of expression.

His unique process involves layering spray paint on canvas, then rubbing, scraping, and blending it to achieve his creative vision. He also creates puddles of spray paint directly from the can onto a palette, then applies it with brushes like traditional oil or acrylic paint to capture finer details. He incorporates various materials including newspapers, boards, and plastic wrap to achieve unusual effects. With more than 20 years’ experience painting before live audiences in Hawaii, Las Vegas, and across the western United States and Guam, his realistic and surrealistic works depict fantasy scenes, outer space, landscapes, seascapes, and wildlife.

Michael DeWulf is an exceptional contemporary painter known for his hyper-surrealist creations that brilliantly blend realism and fantasy. His paintings evoke feelings of sensuality, love, unity, hope, and eternity, with Fine Art Connoisseur Magazine calling his art “a medley of emotional visual narratives and poetry in physical form.”

Living on the beautiful Gulf Coast of Florida, DeWulf paints every single day, typically working on multiple pieces at once to keep his creative process fresh. In 2021 alone, he painted well over 100 originals. As a single father of three, including twin daughters who often watch him work and offer their honest opinions, he finds inspiration in his daily life and his girlfriend Mindy. DeWulf believes versatility is his strongest attribute—he paints, sculpts, draws, designs, and even spent five years as a tattoo artist.

DeWulf describes his approach as creating hyper-realistic pieces that demonstrate his skill with color and light while relaying deeper emotions. He suggests ideas and lets viewers fill in the blanks, intending each work to provoke thought or feeling beyond what appears on the surface. The artist is represented by Park West Gallery, where collectors can experience his unique blend of technical mastery and emotional storytelling.

Born in Paris in 1959, Dominique de Serres trained at the National School of Decorative Arts in Aubusson, France, graduating in 1981. Aubusson, located in central France, has been renowned for its carpets and tapestries since the 14th Century and attracted 20th Century masters like Picasso, Calder, and Dufy who had their imagery interpreted into fiber. De Serres continues this distinguished tradition through her extraordinary handmade tapestries.

After practicing restoration tapestry near Maison Chevalier in Courbevoie, she established her own studio in Tregor, France in Brittany. For more than two decades, she has collaborated with renowned contemporary artists including Roger Druet, Charles Stratos, Tregaste, and her husband Bernard Louedin, translating their imagery into tapestries that have been exhibited worldwide to great acclaim. Creating such richly detailed works by hand is a painstaking process, with each two square meter tapestry taking approximately four to six months to complete.

As her husband Bernard Louedin explains, the fiber artist must recreate a painted image through a different technique, making it not an exact reproduction but a translation that strives to create deep harmony with the painter and produce a new singular work. De Serres is represented by Park West Gallery.

Bernard Louedin is a French painter, sculptor, illustrator and printmaker born in 1938 in Rennes, in northwestern France. He began his artistic studies at a very early age with noted painter Pierre Gilles Xavier de Langlais and later studied with Roger Chapelain-Midy. By 1963, he began exhibiting extensively in France, Belgium and Germany, continuing to show his work throughout Europe, Japan and North America. By 2002, his works had been mounted in 75 worldwide exhibitions.

His works have been featured in more than a dozen books about art and artists, with nine monographs published on his work alone. Two films have been created featuring his art and life, and numerous articles have been written about his imagery and techniques. Louedin is represented by Park West Gallery.

His dream-like, poetic imagery draws from influences as diverse as classical Greco-Roman art, Flemish and Northern Renaissance, and 20th century artists such as Yves Tanguy, Joseph Cornell and Giorgio Morandi. Excelling in painting, drawing and sculpture, Louedin is also considered a master engraver, having created more than 300 intaglio editions since 1972. His wife, Dominique de Serres, is a renowned fiber artist who interprets his works and imagery into highly sought-after limited edition tapestries.

Ilse Zúñiga was born in 1990 in Monterey, Nuevo León, Mexico, where she grew up in a loving family surrounded by art. Her creative spark ignited during childhood games with her father, particularly one involving drawing dots to reveal hidden pictures. Weekend visits to her grandparents’ home introduced her to prints of Diego Rivera’s paintings, while time at her aunt’s house, filled with collected artwork, felt like playing inside a museum. These early experiences planted the seeds of her artistic passion.

Though Zúñiga loved drawing and appreciated colors from a young age, she initially pursued a marketing degree and once feared painting. Everything changed when she took an art history class and discovered Monet’s work, which made her hands itch to paint. A trip to Italy, where she saw Botticelli’s Primavera, reaffirmed her calling to pursue oil painting and realism. Renowned Mexican painter Francisco Vazquez became her mentor, helping her overcome her fears and dream of an art career.

Today, Zúñiga paints exclusively with oils, creating realistic works infused with her own experiences, dreams, and desires. While influenced by Monet’s pastel colors and lilies, she draws her greatest inspiration from Guillermo Lorca’s expressionism. She recently participated in the Spectrum fair in Miami, nearly selling out, and regularly exhibits throughout Mexico. Zúñiga is represented by Park West Gallery.

Mary Grandpré spent three decades building a wildly successful illustration career before making a bold shift to abstract painting—a move that has captured the attention of the contemporary art world. Born in Aberdeen, South Dakota, and raised in Bloomington, Minnesota, Grandpré discovered art as a young introvert seeking self-expression. Daily mass at Catholic school became her oasis, where towering stained glass windows, rich colors, and radiant saints sparked a lifelong fascination with glowing shapes and visual storytelling that would later define her work.

After studying illustration and painting at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Grandpré developed a distinctive style she called “soft geometry” while working on editorial, magazine, and advertising campaigns. She went on to illustrate over twenty picture books and became world-renowned for her work on the Harry Potter series, in addition to contributing conceptual work for the animated films Antz and Ice Age.

Today, Grandpré’s abstract paintings emerge through an intuitive process—no sketches, no art directors, just loose layers of paint building into shapes and colors that create dreamlike spaces viewers can step into. Drawing inspiration from Salvador Dalí’s dreamscapes, Edward Hopper’s light, and Richard Diebenkorn’s interpretations, she continues to balance space and atmosphere in fresh, fascinating ways. Mary Grandpré is represented by Park West Gallery.

Laurence Short is a self-taught British artist born in 1964 in Wigan, Lancashire. He grew up in the coastal town of Folkestone, where childhood adventures exploring the White Cliffs of Dover and beachcombing sparked his lifelong love of the sea. Though naturally talented in art from an early age, Short pursued a different path at twenty, becoming a firefighter with the Kent Fire and Rescue Service, where he served for thirty years. During this time, he maintained his connection to nature through scuba diving in locations like the Maldives, Red Sea, Florida Keys, and Caribbean, as well as skiing in the Alps, Rockies, and Dolomites.

After retiring at fifty, Short spent five years kitesurfing in Türkiye before returning to England to join the Coast Guard. It was then that he fully embraced his artistic calling, developing a unique style he calls Triptik. This distinctive approach reveals different details at varying distances—vibrant colors from afar, geometric shapes up close, and intricate patterns filled with hidden creatures and inspirational quotes upon closest inspection. His work serves as both personal therapy and environmental metaphor, encouraging viewers to look closely at the beauty and fragility of our planet.

Short has exhibited in solo and group shows, including invitations to display in Rome, Florence, and the Netherlands. He is represented by Park West Gallery.

David Wight was born in Bellingham, Washington in 1971 and graduated from Washington State University in 1994 with degrees in Business and English. A transformative backpacking trip through the Caribbean followed, where he spent an entire day at Trevala Falls on the island of Dominica. Watching the patterns of water cascade down and feeling his stress melt away, Wight realized that the sound of water was healing his mind and body. This revelation was especially profound given that water had nearly taken his life at age 11 during a family river trip, an experience that first gave him reverence for water’s power and beauty.

Wight began working with glass, initially blowing it into water fountains, before discovering that glass was the only medium that could truly capture water’s fluid nature while holding a sculptural shape. As a self-taught artist, he developed his own unique style, learning to make water out of glass without formal instruction. At the Pilchuck Glass School, a mentor encouraged him to capture water’s essence through the form of a wave, something people instantly recognize and resonate with.

Today, Wight expertly creates glass sculptures that slice moments from breaking waves, capturing their power and healing qualities. His work has earned recognition as trophies for professional surfers and is featured in galleries across North America. He served as Princess Cruise Lines’ glass artist for five years and is Disney’s only glass artist. Wight is represented by Park West Gallery.