On Friday, January 24, 13FOREST Gallery will open The Great Season, an exhibition of new and recent acrylic work by painter Nicole Duennebier. Dark and sumptuous, The Great Season highlights a fantastical six-panel painting that associates the random beauty of nature with an elaborate 19th-century parlor game. Set against black backgrounds, Duennebier’s complex forms strongly refer to Baroque still-life paintings in which fruits and vegetables simultaneously emerge and pass into different stages of maturity. A key difference in Duennebier’s work is that, rather than render images of everyday objects, she bases them on her fascination with biology, particularly bacteria, fungi and other objects hidden from view. Referring to her use of darkness, the artist states that her inky backgrounds are “like a primordial soup, a pool of black that springs forth a decadent and sometimes horrible growth.” Each of the paintings in the show is associated with lush proliferation. In Bright Beast After Nature, for instance, a black background gives rise to a nebula of unfolding, biomorphic forms that seem to divide and overtake one another. Painted in thin, translucent layers, the work suggests a still life captured in only one of many stages it will eventually pass through. With Bright Beast Dissected View Duennebier gives an equally fantastic image of the engine behind such proliferation. Similar to vivisections seen in science textbooks, the painting shows the surface of a soft, woolly plant and the interior, biological source of its existence. In content the “engine” plays with the idea of a still life, but one made of flowers, vegetables and animal viscera. Duennebier’s centerpiece in The Great Season is a vast, six-panel painting titled, Hydnellum Myriorama. Its title refers to a type of fungus found in nature and to a Victorian card game – myriorama – in which children could arrange a series of illustrated cards to form hundreds of different landscapes. In Duennebier’s six panels are hybrid images that resemble Baroque still lifes, coral, fur, crystals and close-ups of microscopic fauna. Each of the forms emerges from nothing and stands bathed in a common light source. Despite the panels’ differing environments, Duennebier negates their importance by enabling viewers to arrange the panels into aesthetic experiences of their own choice. With Hydenellum Myriorama, the random potential of generation and decline in nature is given its parallel in art. Of her own work Duennebier states: “My interests in natural phenomenon (dermoid cysts, fungus, invasive flora/fauna) and my love of candied Old Master opulence always seem to be present in my painting… Painting with attention to detail, I’ve become accustomed to the fact that nature in itself, or anything living really, never totally allows you to have a perfectly idealized experience. Everything is always spewing, dripping, rotting a little.”
Barry Webb Documents a Marvelous, Macro Array of Colorful Slime Molds
Thanks to Webb's up-close, high-resolution shots, we glimpse a phenomenally beautiful world that is otherwise virtually invisible.
Polina Bright | Watercolor Brushes, Prints & Original Art
Cruelty-free watercolor brushes, limited edition Giclée prints, and original artworks by artist Polina Bright. Worldwide shipping available.
Pictosky ✦ Retro Drawing for Bluesky
Draw on a vintage-style canvas and publish your masterpieces directly to your Bluesky feed!
The Global Village Coffeehouse Aesthetic | Are.na Editorial
Woodcuts, tribal imagery, suns, curvy figures, aroma swirls, and earth tones: Evan Collins defines the look of the 90s
Designing Imaginative Environments by Nathan Fowkes
Join industry veteran Nathan Fowkes on a deep dive into the hows and whys of designing environments for entertainment. From creating mood with color and light, to exploring different biomes and weather, to crafting architecture and props, he will teach you how to design amazing environments that make your work stand out from the crowd.
A Catalog of an Entire House/Life
In a period of four years, Belgian photographer Barbara Iweins took a photo of every single thing in her house, “from my daughters torn sock to my sons
Read The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
1935 essay by Walter Benjamin; proposes that mechanical reproduction devalues the aura of an artwork, that—in the age of mechanical reproduction and traditional ritualistic value’s absence—art production would be inherently based on political praxis
What does it really mean to have a moment of insight? | Psyche Notes to Self
From art to science to love, the moment of insight happens when we see a likeness between different things
Vanishing Treasures: A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endang…
From the award-winning author Katherine Rundell comes a…
Weird Studies
Professor Phil Ford and writer J. F. Martel host a series of conversations on art and philosophy, dwelling on ideas that are hard to think and art that opens up rifts in what we are pleased to call "reality."
Ratioed — dame.is
I began this social art experiment in June 2025 and have “performed” it periodically since. My intent was to explore what it would look like to use a social media post as a medium for art (not for sharing art). Because I used Bluesky, the social data underlying this art projec…
The Death of DeviantArt and the art-site shaped hole haunting the Internet - Multi-hyphenate
Why every new "Art Community" fails. Equal parts eulogy, condemnation, and mourning.
Trevor Paglen and Holly Herndon on Making Art with AI and What the Discourse Is Missing
The artists talk process, slop, and why optimism and pessimism don’t quite cover it.
Ditherpunk — The article I wish I had about monochrome image dithering — surma.dev
I always loved the visual aesthetic of dithering but never knew how it’s done. So I did some research. This article may contain traces of nostalgia and none of Lena.
A Showcase Of Caravan Sandwitch's Beautiful Art
We chat with art director Charles Boury about the game's various visual inspirations.
