An everyday art supply becomes a new medium in the creative hands of Manuela Gonzalez. Before painting, the Lake Worth artist stretches and deconstructs a canvas—crocheting, knitting, even integrating found objects into it—to create a frayed and fringed surface that merges textiles with acrylics. “It’s a pairing of two different experiences I’m exploring through my work,” she says.

Make an effort this weekend to go out and support Lake Worth Beach-based professional artist Melissa DelPrete by visiting her newest exhibition at mtn space gallery, Little Gems. 

Maxine Spector is a self-taught multimedia artist based in Lake Worth Beach. Her practice, which spans from painting to ceramic clay, is entirely intuitive and created without prior planning or sketching. In 2019, she began a series entitled 1001 Heads, consisting of over 1000 clay portraits. 

In her latest book, the artist has brought together eight years worth of her terrifically relatable comics — 60 percent of which she made for herself, “to cope with life”, the other 40 percent there “just to lighten the mood."

Eager to start celebrating the “spooky” season? Make a plan this weekend to go out and support Palm Beach County-based professional artist R.J. Rodriguez by visiting his exhibition at mtn space gallery, On the Nightmare. In this show, Rodriguez presents a series of ink and collage work on the topic of humanity’s fear of and fascination with nightmarish figures.

The gallery will unveil exhibitions of works by Maxine Spector and R.J. Rodriguez that embody personal artistic exploration on September 21.

An exciting book with no words, a murder mystery, an author mocking their own pain and a poetic masterpiece highlight this month’s offerings.

Written in both Chinese and English, “Searching/Seeking” is Jia Sung’s translation of the Song Dynasty female poet Li Qingzhao’s poem, “Xun Xun Mi Mi.”

For artist Laura Tanner, whose exhibition “Dish” is on view through July 28 at 3S Artspace in Portsmouth, symbol, meaning, material, and social discourse are all in play in the building of her dense, sumptuous multimedia drawings.

mtn space in Lake Worth Beach will host a solo exhibition of works by Tampa-based artist Sebastian Ore Blas April 6 to May 25.

In creating Descent, Chatham-based painter Lily Morris, 36, was inspired by François Lemoyne's The Apotheosis of Hercules, a mural at Versailles that depicts the Greek hero being inducted into the ranks of the gods by his father Jupiter. "I love this painting as an aesthetic feast," Morris says. "It's a cosmic snow globe, and Versailles itself is the Barbie penthouse of 18th-century France. The completion of the mural earned the artist the title of First Painter to the King, yet the artist killed himself shortly thereafter. I find the contrast of fantasy power play and the stark reality of lived experiences fascinating with regard to this painting's history."

Gender fluidity, obsolete technology, religious fundamentalism, and a subversion of the male gaze are just a few of the themes rippling through the rich oeuvre of Ates (pronounced ah-tesh) Isildak, a West Palm Beach artist who has been on a roll since he won a South Florida Cultural Consortium grant in 2020. 

In his solo show at mtn space, "Ates Isildak: Pantransitions," Ates Isildak juxtaposes the hefty weight of images shot with a Polaroid camera alongside digital prints that experiment with manipulations of color. 

The five illustrators behind the project are María Jesús Contreras, Rakhmat Jaka, Sioe Jeng Tsao, Ori Toor and Tara Booth. They tackle a range of different issues affecting our creative industries to help us imagine how we can shape a more inclusive landscape. For example Tara Booth, who often uses humour to destigmatise invisible disabilities and mental health issues, explores wellbeing and accessibility.

Learn how to make a watercolor painting like Georgia O'Keeffe, Paul Cézanne, and other artists in this new episode of our tutorial series IN THE STUDIO. Artist Jia Sung teaches two different techniques: "wet on wet" for more improvisational work and a drier approach for still life painting and observational work. See how she uses tube and pan paints, different types of brushes, and looks at works in MoMA's collection for inspiration.

My work centers around a creative relationship with materials and processes, letting the act of making inform the finished work. I tease out material defects and stress the boundaries of what is traditional, melding the ancient and the contemporary.

Inspired Encounters is an exercise of imagination that takes as its point of departure the art collection at Kykuit—the former home of the Rockefeller family, now a historic house museum. The book asks: if exclusively women-identifying artists remained in this legendary collection of modernist art, what would be revealed?

Mtn Space gallery in Lake Worth Beach will unveil an exhibit of new bodies of work by New York-based painter Lily Morris, February 10. In Lily Morris: Witchcraft, several of the artist’s large-scale photorealistic paintings of women in unearthly settings, such as Arrival (2023) and Descent (2022), will be showcased. The works imagine women free from repression, with Morris inserting herself within a framework to disrupt it from the inside.

Tumbling through artist Tara Booth's Instagram feels forbidden yet right. It's the sensation of stumbling upon a secret diary only to realize the main character is you. Booth's relatable and fearlessly transparent art provides solace and a sense of shared vulnerability and starting on February 25, her childlike works will be on view at mtn space gallery in Lake Worth.

Artists have a knack for creating a sense of place in their works. With just a glance at a painting or a photograph, viewers are transported to places they’ve never visited. Mtn Space in Lake Worth will celebrate this phenomenon and the artistic interpretations of the communities around us with “Neighborhoods,” on view January 14 to February 20. 

Magnus Sodamin’s vibrantly colorful, Everglades-inspired murals have been turning heads across Miami-Dade County, from Miami’s FTX Arena to Edgewater’s 2500 Biscayne Boulevard building and the Miami Springs Community Center.

I am excited to talk to the NYC based artist Melissa Meyer. Melissa received undergraduate and graduate degrees from New York University. Her development has been surveyed in traveling exhibitions originating at the New York Studio School and Swarthmore College. She has completed public commissions in New York, Tokyo, Shanghai, and Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.

At 500 Lake Ave., an older graying building sits on the corner, awaiting renovation from new owner Melissa Delprete. The commercial lot in Lake Worth Beach had a lengthy ownership prior to being sold.  “It was owned by the same person since the ’70s. The plans are for it to be an art studio, and it’s a great spot for it,” said Albright. 

There is a generation of abstract artists born in the mid-1940s that the art world has yet to give their proper due. I suspect that one reason for this is because these artists first gained attention in the mid-1970s, during the decade when painting was dead and just before its so-called return with the hoopla generated by the Neo-Expressionists.

'The work of Melissa Meyer (NA 2010) possesses a kind of “sprezzatura”—meaning that it takes a great deal of skill and technical bravado to make it look so easy. Not many artists can pull that off.'

It is atypical to create a self-incriminating memoir, but Tara Booth is an anomaly, using that discrepancy as a jumping-off point. She released her first full-length comic, D.U.I.I, at the recent LA Book Arts Fair, and although the narrative is totally wordless, the comic is so rich with linear imagery that it keeps the reader both awed and repelled from cover to cover. 

Tara Booth’s work is an assertive clash of color that depicts the most humbling and sticky situations. Some relatable moments include trying to pee while wearing a romper, cutting bangs into near oblivion, and stoned Amazon shopping (with the resulting surprise package hangover).

Tara Booth is a comic book artist from Portland, however these detailed pieces with their mix of drawing and painting cover much more ground than that title. Tara’s work displays such character that after looking through her work you already feel like she’s one of your pals. This is due to her inspiration often coming from her diary, “I’ve always felt compelled to document my daily experiences…now I do it visually."