Loles Romero is the 3rd Prize Winner of the iCanvas Digital Art Award 2023, she is an illustrator and concept artist from the island of Ibiza. She usually works with digital media combining pictorial techniques with textures to create an organic aspect similar to traditional media. After graduating from ‘Escola d’Art d’Eivissa’ in 2004, she continued her education with various courses in illustration and concept art.
Kristine and Colin Poole are the 2nd Prize Winners of the Yasha Young Projects Sculpture Award 2023, the couple are classically inspired contemporary realist sculptures have been widely recognized and collected. Their collaborations bridge many genres, featuring prominently in international publications including Beautiful Bizarre Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, 500 Figures in Clay, Ceramics Monthly, Ceramics Ireland, Masters of Contemporary Fine Art and The ARC International Salon.
Sarah Lee is the 1st Prize Winner of the Beautiful Bizarre Magazine Founders' Emerging Artist Award 2023, she creates sculptures of animals that reveal fragility, vulnerability, insecurity, human emotions, awkwardness, odd self-inflicting behaviors, adaptation and survival. Eggshells are fragile empty houses that are abandoned after birth; they become lifeless and no longer serve a purpose.
Hannah Tjia is the 3rd Prize Winner of the Beautiful Bizarre Magazine Founders' Emerging Artist Award 2023; she is a painter and draftswoman who combines figurative studio painting with illustration and decorative design inspired by her love of folklore and fairytales. Her work explores otherworldly creatures and motifs representative of her imagination and perception of reality.
Anna Karvounari is a Greek born photographer, based in Athens. She creates conceptual self-portraits and she uses the solitary female figure in her images, trying to touch on some affairs of female nature, but also to give voice on some personal feelings.
Nick Pedersen received his MFA in Digital Arts from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY in 2011. Pedersen’s work combines his own photography, digital collage, and printmaking techniques to create elaborate, photorealistic images focusing on environmental issues. A main theme in his work is “beautiful decay,” creating large-scale pieces that reveal a satirically, post-apocalyptic vision of the not-too-distant future.
Forest Rogers is the 1st prize winner Yasha Young Projects Sculpture Award 2023, she has painted nine-foot angels in a cathedral dome, and sculpted creatures that may dwell in your childhood toy box. She has collaborated with paleontologists on dinosaur prototypes, and with aquariums on sea life and poison dart frogs. In recent years she has focused entirely on her own art, exploring mythology, fairy and folktale, and the surreal.
Entei Ryu is the 3rd Prize Winner of the Yasha Young Projects Sculpture Award 2023, she is a concept artist based in Tokyo. Her artistic creations are full of fantasy and surreal elements, particularly in her sculptures, which are based on classical realism and skillfully blend Eastern and Western cultures, modern digital media, and traditional Japanese art techniques. Her works cover many different fields, including film, games, illustration, and fashion.
Karin Hauck is the 2nd Prize Winner of the Beautiful Bizarre Magazine Founders' Emerging Artist Award 2023, the focus of her interest was always the human being and his consciousness, in thinking, feeling, acting and being. The desire arose to express their knowledge and experiences through paintings. She started to realize this with realistic oil painting in 2015.
Nanci France-Vaz is a modern renaissance artist that uses allegorical symbolism to create visual stories on canvas. She draws inspiration from the Pre-Raphaelite and Naturalist periods of art, poetry, and classic literature, and film. She combines her strong foundation in life painting with imaginative backgrounds fusing classical with contemporary realism.
Shane Stover have been an artist his entire life. He started off drawing and painting as many others do. He has grown up with ever expanding digital, and technology driven artistic materials, and much of his work today reflects his artistic journey with the transition from traditional to the digital. Shane's work can be surreal, ironic, and often times dark. As a designer for the film industry, he has experienced the shift from traditional to digital mediums and have embraced both.
Chenoa Warner explores oil paints' transparent and textural applications and their ability to convey emotion. The use of paint, repeated layers, and strong textural palette knife application convey the strength and struggle of her lived experiences. Chenoa is most drawn to the psychology of the human experience. She finds our choices and relationships to be an endless source of inspiration for her art and tries to explore these themes in current projects.