After college, I felt a little lost for a while. My technical ability wasn’t quite what I wanted, and I didn’t feel I was part of an artists’ community.

“There is a sense of stillness in the paintings. I think that comes from being content,” Patricia Coonrod says.

Norwegian-born painter Cornelia Hernes spent much of her youth living on three different continents: Europe, Africa, and North America. She studied psychology at university of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, and then changed her major to visual arts.

Art is a matter of pure passion for the Spanish painter Arantzazu Martinez. When her craving to paint like the 19th century masters could not be met at the academy in Madrid, she left Spain to study at Jacob Collins’s Water Street Atelier in New York.

When Stephen Bauman was young, he used to sneak into his brother’s room to rustle through the notebooks of the grafitti he was making.

Though Carlo Russo (born 1976) had been fond of drawing and painting since his early childhood, the idea of ever making a living out of it never really occurred to him.

Marina Dieul describes her relationship with the trompe-l’oeil genre as a love story.

Adrian Gottlieb manages to imbue his works with an exceptional sensitivity that sets him aside from many of his technically acclaimed peers.

For many years Maureen Hyde worked as a book illustrator. Her interest for making a transition to fine art painting was deeply stirred by the works of Italy-based Daniel Graves, which she came across at a gallery.