Author: Aria Sorell Vantine

Vandorn Hinnant was born in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1953, and his practice has always lived at the intersection of making and thinking. From the start, art wasn’t just a skill to him—it was a tool for asking questions about how we live, what we value, and what shapes us. He earned a B.A. in Art Design from North Carolina A&T State University, then deepened his command of three-dimensional form through sculpture studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. That mix—design discipline paired with sculptural training—shows up throughout his career: his work is built with clarity and intention,…

Sonja Kalb comes to painting through an unusual doorway: engineering. Born in Stuttgart, Germany, she started out in textile and design engineering, a field built on exactness—systems, structure, materials, and the quiet logic of how things hold together. That background still shows up in her art, but not as stiffness. It shows up as clarity. She understands construction, and she understands restraint. What makes her work feel fresh is that she doesn’t treat discipline as a cage. She uses it as a base, then steps past it. In her abstractions, control and release sit side by side. There’s planning in…

Haeley Kyong doesn’t make art you solve. She makes art you register. There’s a difference. Some work invites analysis before anything else happens. Kyong’s work moves in the opposite direction—it lands in the body first, then the mind catches up. It’s built on a quiet confidence that art can reach us before we find the words for what we’re experiencing, before we file it under meaning, before we decide what it “should” be. Kyong grew up in South Korea, and later spent formative years in New York, studying at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University and…

Sylvia Nagy works in the space where hand-built skill meets bigger frameworks—where a ceramic form can carry private feeling while still echoing ideas about technology, process, and a world in motion. Her background moves between industrial design and fine art, and you can feel that dual training in how she treats material: with respect for structure, but also room for intuition. She studied at Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest, completing an MFA in Silicet Industrial Technology and Art, a program that honed her understanding of fabrication and how concepts translate into physical reality. Over time, that technical…

Nicola Mastroserio doesn’t make work to keep pace with what’s “in.” The studio, for him, isn’t a place to answer demand or anticipate what will appeal to buyers. He’s after something slower and harder to pin down—questions that don’t expire. Art becomes his way of investigating what lies beneath the visible: not the look of things, but their underlying nature. What he returns to, again and again, is essence—how reality is formed, how it’s experienced, and how it might be approached beyond the noise of everyday surfaces. That focus gives his art a distinct tone. It feels contemplative without turning…

Eliora Bousquet is a French-listed abstract painter and illustrator whose paintings sit right where emotion starts to widen into something hard to measure. Born in Angoulême, France, in 1970, she fully entered her artistic life in 2009. Rather than reading as “late,” that start feels intentional—like she waited for the moment when instinct could take the wheel without apology. Her work follows intuition more than blueprint. There’s a gentle, persistent sense of wonder in it, along with a clear attraction to the night sky: its stillness, its distance, its repeating rhythms. In Bousquet’s hands, nature and the cosmos aren’t separate…

Kathryn Trotter paints the way some people speak when they’re excited—fast, bright, and with zero interest in toning it down. Her canvases hit you first with color and surface. You can feel the paint in them before you start naming what you’re looking at. Animals show up like celebrities arriving to a party: centered, confident, and surrounded by an entire world of florals, pattern, and ornament that refuses to stay in the background. The work reads as joyful on first contact, but it doesn’t float on charm alone. If you give it a moment, you start to see how controlled…

When Oenone Hammersley settled in Palm Beach Gardens in 2024, Florida’s lush environment quickly began to show up in her studio. She brings a practice informed by theatre design, years of travel, and a deep commitment to the natural world. Internationally recognized for mixed-media paintings that combine saturated color with tactile surfaces and glowing light, Hammersley often circles back to water—its shine, its movement, and its fragility. Her work has been exhibited in Palm Beach, New York, London, Paris, Washington D.C., and Miami, and is held in both private and public collections. The tropical gardens around her have become a…

Paul “Gilby” Gilbertson approaches painting the way some people approach science: start with the materials, pay close attention, and keep testing until something clicks. In the early 1970s, he stumbled onto a watercolor method that would later become strongly linked to his work—dropping salt onto wet pigment to create textured, crystal-like patterns. It wasn’t a planned discovery, and it didn’t arrive with a neat explanation. It simply worked. The important part is that Gilbertson stayed with it. He kept exploring when salt produces the most interesting results, how it changes depending on timing and moisture, and how it can shift…

Pasquale J. Cuomo’s story starts the way a lot of real creative lives start: with a teenager and a camera, not fully aware of what he’d just picked up. He was born in the United States, and over more than fifty years behind the lens, photography didn’t stay a hobby or a phase—it became a steady through-line. Cuomo moved with the medium as it shifted from film to digital, learning the patience of darkroom time and the speed of modern capture, and letting both approaches shape the way he sees. What comes through in his work is a long relationship…