Hi-Fructose Magazine

Memory may not be a tape-recorder, but in Sasha Gordon’s work, it serves as a device for the initial transportation. Characters wander this fluxing landscape—be it a drive-through window, a master bedroom, or white suburbia—shifting through the dynamic background of her dream-like haze. As a viewer of Gordon’s narrative paintings, you are intruding on intimate scenes of inciting trauma. There’s a word for this process.

Will Sweeney is a commercial artist based in the UK. With a big reach and an enormous imagination, his illustrations adorn album sleeves, shirts for big fashion brands, toys in Japan, and almost any other sort of wearable or product one could imagine. Recently, we asked Sweeney to describe a bit of the machinations that go into creating his twisted narratives, ghoulish characters, and phantasmagoric landscapes.

he paintings of Andrew Hem linger just left of reality. With his instantly recognizable style, Hem blends figurative painting and atmospheric landscapes, echoes of graffiti art and a deep understanding of color harmony. Rendering scenes both urban and rural, modern yet outside of time, he creates works that are a mix of realism and surrealism, personal truths and collective dreams. Read all about the artist by clicking above.

In 1975, Stuart Pearson Wright entered the world as a product of artificial insemination, his father’s identity kept anonymous for the entirety of his life even to this day. This fact would fuel Wright’s early, burgeoning interest in expressing himself through the arts and a later rise to prominence in portraiture.

In 2007, Magnhild Kennedy indulged a lifelong fascination by moving to London. “I have had London on my mind since I was a teen. I wanted to live there even before my first visit,” she says. Growing up in Trondheim, Norway, from the age of sixteen onward she devoured every image and word in issues of the famed English culture magazine The Face. “This was before the internet,” she says, “I come from a fairly small and homogeneous town. Foreigners were always exciting and inspiring to me.

On a perfect day, I would get up and not snooze,” says Brandi Milne of her ideal day at work. She would then head into the studio at her Huntington Beach, California home, do some warm-up sketches and paint for about eight hours. She would remember to take breaks to stretch. (“That’s really important and I never do it,” she says.) She would work “completely in the zone” with music playing in the background.

In Alexis Trice’s dreamy worlds, ethereal looking fish, hounds, shells, and clouds mingle and sparkle like jewels in a crepuscular haze. It’s in a hypnogogic state (where dreams and reality interweave) that they really spring to life: swimming, prancing, basking, and even weeping. Like sand passed through our fingers, though, their seemingly solid forms vanish under shifting tides of consciousness, should we wake too suddenly.

Ryan Heshka has a longtime love of science fiction, four-color printed comics from the 1950s and ‘60s and mid-twentieth-century mutant movie characters. In his comic Frog Wife, he taps into these influences while adding in a dose of contemporary themes, drawing upon not just the “anxiety of nuclear annihilation” that inspired so much twentieth-century pop culture, but also the “environmental anxieties” that permeate twenty-first century society.

Calligraphy is an ancient art with roots across the globe, dating back to early Chinese dynasties and Greek civilization, all through the Italian Renaissance. But one glance at a work by San Francisco-based artist Hunter Saxony III, and your understanding of calligraphy will be turned on its head. In an approach that is varied, yet distinctive, Saxony creates detailed works that fuse the decorative nature of calligraphy with imagery, drawing, and mixed media.

In the popular imagination, artists are often thought to create for the sake of creating, unfettered by the demands of the market-driven world outside their studios. Though many well-known artists have muddled the boundaries between art and commerce (Jeff Koons comes to mind), the two realms have a contentious relationship. Business savvy artists are often met with suspicious glances, especially in the street art and graffiti worlds.