Nancy Kahlow-Curtis explores children and women figures’ mythological legacies in visually arresting compositions that accentuate light and texture. The Minnesota native frequently works with models, but her inspiration generally comes from within, after which she poses her scenes and sets to work. This process of painting from inner vision means certain artworks have taken Kahlow-Curtis decades to develop, but also imbues each one with a magical sense of space and staging. In works with rippling fabrics, thrown shadows and brilliant lights, she puts her palette of strong colors to emotive effect, creating moods and conveying atmosphere in a manner that evokes both Giorgio de Chirico’s architectural flair and Henri Rousseau’s stylized surfaces and forms.

Kahlow-Curtis’ paintings, however, are first and foremost about her human subjects, the legends they echo and the imaginative possibilities they inspire. Often, her empowering characters are extremely agile and strong, frequently staring outside the canvas as if contemplating the vast options available to them in the world.

Mazarine Memon's gentle paintings, executed with careful attention to each subject's integrity, emphasize the contradiction between progress and the still unchanging role of women throughout much of the world. Born in Mumbai, Memon has been shaped by India's cultural diversity and she uses soft strokes and colors that flow in and out of each other to warmly render that diversity. From a distance, the figures in Memon's paintings resemble red rivers that diffuse into earthier lakes of blues and browns. Moving closer reveals the intricate, introspective female figures that work diligently in the paintings' planes. This push and pull between abstraction and realism gives Memon's work a quiet indeterminacy. While the exact location and activity of figures is hazy, the rendering always captures their humanness and sincerity.

Mazarine Memon studied Applied Arts at Bombay's Sophia College before beginning her career as an art director. Never happy with the corporate world, Memon eventually left and pursued her own art. She has exhibited internationally and currently teaches at Dubai International Art Centre.

South African painter Jonel Scholtz creates domestic scenes in hues conveying intensely subjective and evocative interior spaces. Living with her husband and daughter on a farm in the North West region of South Africa where she was raised, Scholtz’s paintings transmit the region’s warm light. Her works – dominated by reds, browns and yellows – depict intimate rooms and worn furnishings that seem to emerge from some eternal dream of rural tranquility.

Scholtz’s warm interior scenes always include a frame of some sort, often doors and windows, occasionally picture frames. This recurring theme calls attention to rites of passage and socialization (many paintings include young children) and the gendered organization of space – the homes in Scholtz’s works are distinctly feminine, with women and young girls often gazing out windows and through doorways. These visual cues also draw our eye to light, as it passes across thresholds and over surfaces, casting an inviting glow. While clearly figurative, Scholtz’s paintings’ expressive qualities evoke the safety and comfort of the ideal home in our collective imagination.

With a flourish of the paintbrush, Natalija Cimbaljuk creates illustrious paintings.  Although each painting varies widely in its subject matter, they all exude poetry.  Celebrating nature, creativity and faith, Cimbaljuk’s paintings breathe beauty into everyday scenes. Currently working in Kassel, Germany, the Ukrainian-born artist tries to blend both cultures into her artwork.  Her methods stem from the east European traditions of nude painting and the form and symbolism of Ukrainian icon painting.  Therefore her paintings, whether figurative or abstract, have a traditional quality.

Javi Crespo's whimsical, vivacious works grab the viewer and transport him to a new world filled with joy, spontaneity and adventure. More than a multidisciplinary artist, Crespo is a maker of beautiful things with a unique vision and a fanciful perspective on the world. Crespo's paintings span the gamut from perceptive and discerning portraits to bizarre and spectacular cityscapes. His pieces always capture the essence of the subject, but manage to turn it on its head as he uses unique illustrative techniques to tease out the underlying color and witty quality of a scene. While his works originally focused on the sunlight and colors of his native Mediterranean, today his works all radiate with the luminous splash of the world traveler who is comfortable in every setting and can see the light in every city he puts on canvas.

Javi Crespo resides in Madrid.  A man of many skills, he owns the Madrid-based company "Start Design" where he works in architecture, interior design, furniture design, industrial design and graphic design as well as paintings.

The textural diversity of Marieke Russel’s oeuvre is a testament to her intuitive, insightful art-making approach. Russel allows her materials and her subjects to guide her, seeing herself as the skilled conduit through which a mythical visual world arises. Her colorful tapestries have a fluid, ephemeral quality, echoing the harmoniousness of Taoism and Zen Buddhism. On the other hand, the characters she sculpts in bronze and wood tend to be more intrepid and straightforward. Yet all of Russel’s work, regardless of its material, shares a theatrical quality, as if revealing just one poignant scene in a narrative that has neither a beginning nor an ending.

Initially influenced by the fantasies in English Pre-Raphaelite painting, Russel has developed her own spontaneous approach to theatrical narratives. After studying pedagogy at the Royal Conservatorium in Den Haag and running a ballet school, Russel devoted herself to visual art. She has exhibited extensively throughout the Netherlands.

Color dictates Graeme Swanson’s understated, atmospheric oil paintings. Soft expanses of reds, yellows or blues give his work an emotive, transfixing quality; his paintings immediately invite meditation. While influenced by places, architecture, nature and history, Swanson tends to record a mood more than he records an actuality. He is attuned to sunlight and to the nature of his surroundings but he abstracts the representational moments that initially inspire him, so that reality becomes more ephemeral and experiential. It is the physical spaces depicted in his paintings that primarily provide the underlying structure for Swanson’s exploration of how colors, painterly gestures and textures can harmoniously work together to create a memorable visual experience.

Swanson, who lives and works in Aberdeen, Scotland, graduated from Gray's School of Art in 1979 and received a Post Graduate Teaching Certificate from Northern College in Aberdeen. His work was recently on display at the ING Discerning Eye Exhibition at the Mall Galleries, Mall, London.