Are you ready for the next Beautiful Bizarre TAKE OVER?!
If you are a follower of our Beautiful Bizarre community, you surely love this feature as much as we do. We’ve selected one of our favourite creative minds and friends to take over Beautiful Bizarre Magazine’s social media for a whole day. A magical dose of inspiration and creative energies directly from the source and curated with love!
We handed our socials over to 33PA, our great supporters and Platinum Sponsor of the Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize Emerging Artist Award. What a special day this was as our friends amazed us with their ingenious curation! In case you missed it on our socials, we put together the TAKE OVER right here for you to dive into. Join us on the adventure into the world of 33PA!
We would like to thank 33PA once again for their support and generosity, allowing us to provide a significant cash prize for the 2024 Emerging Art Award.
33PA TAKE OVER
Paulina Aubey @paulinaaubey
Paulina Aubey’s LEGO portraits ingeniously merge popular form with popular content in order to question our relationship to celebrity. Having begun her artistic career working with pastels, Aubey’s passion for pop culture inspired her to try her hand with a more popular medium: LEGO bricks. She has elevated this unusual medium to the status of fine art, creating expressive portrayals of contemporary icons and the idols of her 1980s childhood. Her portraits of religious figures, movie characters, and pop stars—including David Bowie and Marilyn Monroe—blur the distinction between figurative and abstract art. They appear highly detailed from a distance and become pixelated upon closer inspection; this viewing experience prompts audiences to reflect on how much we can ever truly understand our idols. In order to create her portraits, Aubey chooses a digital image of her subject and manipulates it to create the desired expression and color scheme before selecting appropriate blocks of LEGO to build the work.
J. Adam McGalliard @adammcgalliard
J. Adam McGalliard is a contemporary realist artist who masterfully blends traditional oil painting with modern technology to explore identity, myths, and the divides shaping today’s society. His artwork is rich in layers, weaving personal stories with archetypes and the intricate dynamics between humanity and nature. His latest series, “Erewhon,” captures unreal figures in surreal settings, envisioning potential futures amid societal polarization and climatic upheaval. Previous collections, like “Projections” and “Personas,” investigate the complex expressions and roles people adopt within our changing world.
Trained by notable artists Vincent Desiderio and Steven Assael at the New York Academy of Art, McGalliard honed his unique style and perspective during his MFA in Painting. He also spent nearly four years enhancing his skills behind the scenes as an artist assistant for the globally acclaimed Jeff Koons. His artworks have graced prestigious stages worldwide, including Context Art Miami, Sotheby’s, and Museo de la Ciudad de México. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor of Painting and Drawing at the University of North Florida and continues to push the boundaries of his craft in his Jacksonville studio.
Chris Clark @cooli_ras_art
Chris Clark is a self-taught visual artist, illustrator, and muralist living and working in Jacksonville, FL. Art, to him, is a form of journalism. Using acrylic, oil, ink, and spray
paint, he explores the rich culture and history of the Black community across the
diaspora and the social issues affecting them today. For Clark, reflecting the human
figure is very powerful, which is why he uses graphic-style portraiture and figurative
works to depict Black life in America through his personal lens of a Black man, husband,
and father. At the core of his work is the notion that representation matters. As the artist
explains, “By telling my story, I want to help the viewer rediscover theirs.”
Clark’s artwork has been shown in exhibitions around the U.S. and abroad, including his recent solo exhibition “New Growth” at Kent Gallery FSCJ in Jacksonville, FL and “Through Our Eyes: Journey to South Africa” at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. He has received multiple art awards and grants for his work. Clark was chosen to participate in the House of Sedulo Artist Residency in London, UK and the Chateau Orquevaux Artist Residency in Champagne-Ardenne, France in 2022-2023. Most recently he completed his first artist fellowship the DEAR (Digital Evolution Artist Retention) fellowship through the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute in New York, New York.
Amy Ordoveza @amy_ordoveza
Amy Ordoveza is a contemporary realist artist who creates detailed, imaginative stilllife paintings. She carefully crafts and arranges the delicate cut-paper plants, animals, and architectural elements that she depicts in her oil paintings. The fragility of the paper objects suggests impermanence while Ordoveza’s close observation and meticulous handling of paint hint at their significance. Her compositions evoke a sense of beauty and mystery in ordinary surroundings.
Ordoveza received her MFA from the New York Academy of Art and her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Her historical influences include 17th century Dutch still life painters including Rachel Ruysch and Jan Davidsz de Heem as well as surrealists such as Kay Sage and René Magritte. Ordoveza’s work is included in the Lunar Codex and the Nova Scotia Art Bank and has been featured in publications andwebsites including American Art Collector, PoetsArtists, and Booooooom!
Pippa Hale-Lynch @phalelynch
Pippa Hale-Lynch’s paintings use figures and portraits to capture intimate moments of solitude and grief. She is a contemporary figurative realism artist working primarily with oils. Her works incorporating figures suspended within water capture beauty in fleeting moments of solitude.
More recently she is exploring the theme of grief, stemming from her mother’s tragic and untimely death when she was 20. At first glance, the playful use of the sugary jam can be mistaken for blood, a visual representation of the wounds left by the destruction of grief experienced by the sitter.
Pippa uses techniques learned over 12+ years of practice and training in traditional representational drawing and painting. She uses herself, her family, and loved ones as sitters to best reflect the intimacy of the work.
Kate Van Doren @catvandoren
Kate Van Doren explores human resiliency, connection, and the healing power of nature through her realism paintings, drawings, and photography. With over two decades of experience as an art therapist in the mental health field, Kate offers a unique perspective that deeply connects with her subjects and fosters their stories about the human condition. Kate received an honors degree in Fine Art and Psychology from the University of Oregon (2002) and earned a double master’s in Counseling and Art Therapy from Marylhurst University (2006). As a board certified art therapist, she has developed and administered art therapy programs for at-risk youth, individuals with severe mental illness, trauma survivors, the elderly, and hospice care patients. She also mentors artists and art therapy students globally.
Kate is the creator of the Healing Words Project, a photography and painting workshop for women that documents the healing journeys of over 2,000 participants. This project has been recognized internationally, including in Newsweek Español, as an early intervention program to prevent violence against women.
Her work has been exhibited in galleries and museums across the U.S. and Mexico, including Art Basel Miami, and is held in private collections worldwide. Kate has been featured in Fine Art Connoisseur, American Art Collector, PoetsArtists, Mod Portrait, and the Art Renewal Center. In 2022, she was an ARC and Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize Finalist and earned 2nd Place in the international FIKVA award for painters. Her work is included in the Peregrine Collection, a time capsule of digitized art and literature sent to the moon. Kate is based in San Miguel de Allende, México, where she devotes her time to her family, her art therapy practice, activism work, and her fine art studio.
Traci Wright Martin @traciwrightmartin
Traci Wright Martin is an award-winning charcoal and mixed media artist residing in the U.S. in Greenville, South Carolina. Her work is featured in a number of prestigious art magazines and publications and has been acquired by private and public collectors, both internationally and throughout the U.S. Twenty of her pieces have been curated into the Lunar Codex, a group of permanent time capsules to reside permanently on the moon. A retrospective of Martin’s work entitled “North/South”, which includes a written introduction by Lunar Codex founder, Dr. Samuel Peralta, was published in 2024 by Snap Collective in Copenhagen.
This was the last inspiring post from our fabulous guest curator for the day, our dear friends at 33PA. Thank you for the Take Over on our Instagram feed and for the inspiration you shared with all of us!
