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 Didi Menendez of PoetsArtists, our great supporters and Platinum Sponsor of the Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize Drawing 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 PoetsArtists!
We would like to thank Didi Menendez of PoetsArtists once again for their support and generosity, allowing us to provide a significant cash prize for the 2026 Drawing Award.
Didi Menendez of PoetsArtists TAKE OVER
Brett Moffatt
Brett Moffatt is a contemporary realist painter, photographer, and novelist based on the Gold Coast, Australia, working in a register he calls Romantic Noir. His paintings live in the last moments of light — the threshold where glamour meets its own mortality, where beauty is most luminous precisely because it is about to fade. He is drawn to the gap between the image and the person inside it: the public face and the private cost of wearing it, the seduction of the surface and the loss it conceals.
His work asks what we project onto beauty, and what it costs to be looked at. Across canvas, camera, and page, Moffatt returns to thresholds and last light — to what might have been, and to the ache of the almost. The result is work that is romantic without being nostalgic, and dark without being despairing: an elegy for the moment before the light goes. His solo exhibition After The Golden Hour opens 7 November 2026 at HOTA (Home of the Arts), Gold Coast, Australia.
John Hyland
John Hyland, a New York-based painter, brings a unique perspective to the art world, shaped by his decades-long career as a journalist. His journalistic pursuit of truth and narrative translates into vibrant and emotionally resonant oil paintings. Hyland’s journey to becoming a full-time artist is as compelling as his artwork. For decades, he honed his craft as a journalist, working as an editor at The New York Times and previously as a reporter and editor at The Hartford Courant. This background instilled in him a keen eye for detail, a dedication to truth and a profound understanding of narrative — qualities that show up in his paintings.
His journalistic career, from which he retired in 2017,provided a foundation for his artistic exploration. Hyland believes that, like the stories he once edited and wrote, his oil paintings present a narrative where “the story and the image become one.” Whether he is painting portraits, figure studies, still-lifes or land- or seascapes, this fusion of storytelling and visual art allows him to explore emotional and psychological beauty and truth.
Leo Rebolledo
Leo Rebolledo is a visual artist and architect based in the United States whose practice has focused for over three decades on the exploration and expansion of oil pastel as a primary medium. His work has received international recognition, with exhibitions at institutions such as the Salmagundi Club in New York and MEAM in Barcelona, as well as features in leading art publications. He is a member of the American Artists Professional League and PoetsArtists, and one of his works is included in the Lunar Codex project. Largely self-taught Rebolledo has developed a pictorial language that combines the technical foundations of classical painting with contemporary themes and sensibilities.
Working primarily through realism and the human figure, he constructs evocative and enigmatic scenes in which light functions as the central organizing force of the image. Rather than merely describing form, light shapes atmosphere, directs perception, and transforms familiar subjects into spaces of ambiguity, contemplation, and poetic resonance. His paintings create a subtle tension between the visible and the implied, inviting viewers into images that are at once intimate, mysterious, and open to interpretation.
In recent years, Rebolledo has expanded his practice through an ongoing investigation into wine as a pictorial medium. Combining conceptual concerns related to memory, time, and material transformation with extensive technical research, he has developed methodologies aimed at ensuring the permanence and stability of this unconventional material on professional supports.
Operating at the intersection of tradition and experimentation, his work continues to explore new material possibilities while remaining grounded in a commitment to figurative painting, poetic narrative, and the transformative potential of light.
Lorena Lepori
Lorena Lepori is an Italian oil painter with a background in cartooning and more than sixteen years of experience in theater. She developed an enduring interest in narrative, character, and transformation. Her figurative oil paintings explore feminine energy beyond gender, often employing cross-dressing, role-playing, and iconic alter egos to reveal hidden dimensions of her subjects’ personalities. Blending fairy tales, mythology, and cultural clichés with contemporary symbols, she creates layered narratives that challenge conventional representation and reframe familiar archetypes within a modern context.
Lukas Moll
Lukas Moll is a German Cologne-based visual artist whose work explores themes of identity, memory, belonging, and emotional vulnerability through a queer lens. His paintings create an imagined archive of queer experiences, often depicting blurred, anonymous figures that appear both familiar and distant. Existing between nostalgia and melancholy, visibility and self-protection, his work invites viewers to connect with the emotional traces of longing, isolation, and the universal desire to belong.
Rather than portraying specific individuals, Moll’s figures function as vessels for shared emotions and personal reflection. Through these intimate yet ambiguous portraits, he seeks to make visible the inner worlds shaped by societal expectations, exclusion, and resilience, while creating space for empathy and recognition. In 2025, Moll received the KÜFO Art Prize from the Künstlerforum für bildende KunstSchloss Zweibrüggen. His work was also featured in the exhibition Intimität – Queere Kunstder Gegenwartat the Kunstmuseum Albstadt.
Mike Gordon
Based in Austin and entirely self-taught, Mike Gordon’s practice is focused on hyperrealism. He’s pushing his limits in the world of hyperrealism with his graphite and charcoal drawings. Exhibiting locally and internationally, Mike has devoted much of his practice to drawings that display a life-like quality. He’s inspired by the classical artists like Davinci and Michelangelo, and more recently, CJ Hendry, Jono Dry and Emanuele Dascanio.
In his practice, he draws motivation from a deep desire to connect with the human form and figure on a visceral level. Ultimately, Mike’s drawings are a pursuit of mastery over technique, but more importantly, they’re an exploration of connection—bringing the human figure to life on paper in a way that resonates with others; inviting them to pause and appreciate the intention behind each pencil stroke. He hopes to push the boundaries of what can be achieved with traditional mediums while deepening his own understanding of the human form and spirit.
Patricia Schappler
Patricia Schappler is an East Coast, representational artist focused on people in their surroundings, both natural and invented. She has a love of materials with an emphasis on weight and scale. Exhibiting nationally, Schappler has work in public and private collections in the U.S., China, Ireland, and India. A member of the Pastel and Portrait Societies of America, the Women’s Caucus for the Arts, Allied American Artists, and several regional artist associations; her drawings and paintings may be found in publications including Studio Visit, INDA, INPA, Café Review, PoetsArtists, Hashtag and American Art Collector.
With over eighty awards for drawing and painting including the Fikva Representational Prize, semifinalist for ARC and first in the IBPC, she has taught at Montserrat, Rivier University, NHIA, and NEC. Patricia currently works out of her studio in Bedford, New Hampshire. Born one of eleven siblings, married with four grown children, she is inspired by family and community. Using biblical, fairytale, myth, and personal story, Patricia focuses on the themes of our human condition via stories of home. “In painting and drawing, a mark that exists is momentary, shifting, growing…scraped or layered to be reborn in another mark; a metaphor of our journey, and a cycle that encourages discovery and intimacy.
This building of form, weight, light, and energy is transformational…a magical burgeoning of what is good and sustaining in our lives. ”Patricia Schappler focuses on storytelling through connecting her home life to the lives of the viewers. Using graphite, pastel, and oil as spring boards for the movement and depth she finds within living forms, Schappler focuses on narrative via biblical, fairy tale, myth, and personal story. Patricia builds form to encourage intimacy between viewer and viewed. Themes of home include adolescence, motherhood, partnerships, grief and our connection to the natural world.
This was the last inspiring post from our fabulous guest curator for the day, our dear friends at PoetsArtists. Thank you for the Take Over on our Instagram feed and for the inspiration you shared with all of us!
