Editor’s Note: Roger Leege’s Photoart combines analog photography with digital artist’s tools, resulting in a blending of reality and fantasy. The images below are from a series of “portraits”, both animate and not quite, that he’s been working on during the past couple of years. Click any image to enlarge.                 * * * About Roger Leege: I am a former painter, printmaker, and analog photographer (BA and MA, Visual Arts, Goddard College) who, as an early adopter of small computer technology, has become an advocate and evangelist for digital art and artists’ tools.  I’ve been fortunate to have print, gallery, and online publication credits in the US, Canada, the UK, and Germany.  I keep a portfolio site at rogerleege.net and use roger-leege.pixels.com for custom printing and online…

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While touring Taiwan in December, 2016, I was fortunate to attend an exhibition of Lee Yuan-hai’s ink paintings at Taipei’s National Museum of History. I’d never been to this museum before and knew nothing of the painter, but learned about him quite by fortune or serendipity. Here’s how it happened. My wife and I were in Taipei to attend our niece’s wedding. Wanting to give her a and her husband a gift of art and lasting permanence, I had chosen on of the few remaining serigraphs from my mother, who was a well respected artist in her own right. I brought it rolled up in a cardboard tube and intended to have it matted and framed upon arrival. That worked out quite well. The framing shop was about four blocks from our hotel and when we…

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Editor’s Note: We hope you enjoy the sights of downtown Philadelphia. We think that the true beauty of the city can be seen through Julia’s use of black and white photography, capturing the grandeur and minutia all around her. Please click on any image to enlarge.   * * *                           * * * Julia is a freelance photographer and photo editor in Philadelphia where she explores the city with her camera and Siberian Husky. She enjoys shooting black-and-white photography to get the look of classic film photography, and she aspires to capture beauty in the every day aspects of city life with details and texture that may get overlooked in color photography. Julia is an aspiring travel photographer and dreams of being…

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From Martha Leduc: I like symmetry, I like things to feel connected. Maybe being an only child, I longed for connection. My paintings explore order and chaos, tension between shapes and colors in order to then unify them. Expressive lines and ambiguous images appeal to me. In some cases, the work looks chaotic but there is always an underlying line or shape striving to unify the elements.                     * * * Martha Leduc is an artist living in New York. You can see more of her work on her website. She’s also a friend of Fictional Café member and former Featured Writer/Artist/Musician Phil Demise Smith. She does small illustrations of New York in pen and animal paintings on paper. She really enjoys doing both realistic little…

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In the French village of Dourdan, the sculptor Sophie Vincent carries on a tradition of making ceramics which dates back to the first century BCE, a period when France was known as Gaul and part of the Roman Empire. It was a time when clay kitchen and tableware changed from being purely utilitarian to becoming more expressive and decorative shapes and figurines – in a word, art. And thus Sophie, working in her studio in Dourdan, just south of Paris, brings this ancient Dourdan tradition into the twenty-first century. Here is a sampling of her work, with titles in their original French. Please click on the images for a gallery view.             * Sophie says, “After four years of training and nice meetings with other artists, I opened my own ceramics studio in Dourdan. Since then, I spend most of my…

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