Carol Carter is a contemporary watercolor artist based out of St Louis, MO. She is such a prolific painter that it proved nearly impossible to select just seventeen images to feature out of the hundreds documented throughout her website. Her subject matter is incredibly varied, ranging from swimmers, nudes, flora and fauna, to interiors and landscapes of the Everglades and Italy. In spite of painting such a vast range of subject matter, her work remains consistent with her personal style; painting with an electric color palette, she saturates values of light and dark with a brilliant range of unpredictable color that often takes on the effect of solarization. Her technique shifts between wet-in-wet application and controlled execution, producing work that is peppered with an incredible amount of detail and spontaneity. Carol’s mastery of watercolor and divergent way of seeing the world is apparent in her remarkable paintings. 

Langley is the first artist participating in Skylab Gallery‘s new artist-in-residence program in downtown Columbus, Ohio. Her exhibition at Skylab opens at the end of May 2012. Until then, view more of her work after the jump.

Landscape photography is a fickle mistress.  Jonathan Robert LeBlanc’s photographs weave an elaborate tapestry of cramped urban decay and endless country skies- facing history with little or no irony.

Anders Oinonen, of Ontario, Canada, just opened “People people”, a solo show at Cooper Cole in Toronto. For a while now, Oinonen has been pushing the features of the face to new bounds in his paintings. The artist has removed familiar eyes, noses, and mouths from their intended plane, and  inserted them along the lines of an Expressionist landscape.  Such a presentation of the face -associated with communication of our inner life more than any other part of the body- in tumultuous states of despair and incredulity as stimulating blocks of color masterfully applied to canvas arranges a statement which is hard to miss and extensive in depth.

You can also read a copy of Beautiful/Decay Issue: Z to read an in-depth interview with Anders.

Brett Amory’s landscapes are characterized by anonymous people in stark geometric abandoned city scenes. They’re breathtaking and heartbreaking.

Rune Guneriussen is a Norway-based artist who photographs orchestrated installations. Household objects are granted an anthropomorphic quality — they appear to be captured in a natural setting. Guneriussen believes “that art itself should be questioning and bewildering…” and would rather “indicate a path to understanding a story” rather than limit a viewer’s experience by being too prescriptive.

I’m loving this scanographic imagery by Portland based artist, Brandon F. Wilson. While Wilson does not explain his specific process on his website, I like to imagine the artist running through vast landscapes in Oregon, with a large scanner, to create these distorted images. More after the jump!

Brandon is also the founder of an awesome organization, We Are Fucking Awesome, which is a global artist collective dedicated to the support and development of emerging artists. Enjoy a lot more of his work on his website.

Lulu Wolf’s collages are clean cut and leave a lasting impression. She does a lovely job of balancing her composition, with shapes and touches of hand work, creating tiny worlds from bits of imagery from the past.  Her work is geometric and fluid, embodying both urban and rural environments, with human vigor.