We are excited to shine a light on some of the incredibly talented members of the Beautiful Bizarre Artist Directory.
In this month’s Member Spotlight we are focusing on the following artists and photographers:
- Anna Wypych
- Emmi Mustonen
- Liz Gridley
- Larysa Bernhardt
- Carolin Leary Prinn
Anna Wypych
Painting | Poland
Anna Wypych is one of those artists whose paintings become more interesting the more you know about her. A painter based in Gdynia, Poland, Anna has always marched to the beat of her own drum and has never liked to blend in with the crowd.
Anna paints realistic portraits in the traditional oil technique. Her art contains elements of hyperrealism, surrealism and pure imaginative realism. She concentrates on the human condition and her powerful women portraits show a variety of inner strength which can be found in people seen from the positive point of view. As a full-time artist who is also a mother and wife, Anna typically paints women displaying multifaceted strengths, such as determination, passion, and positivity.
Emmi Mustonen
Painting | Finland
Artist Emmi Mustonen works mainly with the old masters’ painting technique inspired by the renaissance. This technique comprises of slow and meticulous painting. She is fascinated by how certain works rise up to take their place in art history, by the power art wields to connect with individuals despite differing backgrounds and cultures. As an artist, Emmi is a master conveyer of emotional landscape, a master painter who does not shy away from technically challenging solutions.
Emmi welcomes the idea of a community even when its members vividly differ from one another. She depicts such differences in her paintings and aims to prove that the differing traits in our personas are but superficial. Humanity encompasses us all. The main goal of the artist is to show the diversity in a light where the viewer finds something to which to connect. Emmi ’s work touch both by the avid consumers of art as well as the uncomfortable visitor to an art gallery.
Liz Gridley
Painting | Australia
Liz Gridley is a realist oil painter from Melbourne, whose work centres on ‘hyper-emotion’—distress triggered by overstimulation and physical overwhelm from external stimuli that cause a physical response in the body. Though her recent diagnosis with ADHD has shed light on Liz ’s emotional nature, ‘hyper-emotion’ remains a core element of her personality and sense of self.
Liz is enamored by expressing her psychological conflict of external stressors on the body and finding visual catalysts for universal human connection between the portrait and viewer. Vulnerability, fear, strength and consummation. Utilizing the language of high drama subject paintings, she pushes to look past the vagueness of beauty in representational painting and analyze how your external influences have elevated or plagued you in your own story.
Since 2023, Hunting for universal moments of human connection: the personal, inevitability of death & death care is a point in which discussion can be culturally celebrated or silenced. Here Liz’s experience with hyper-emotion is immune to medications and coping strategies and has space to allow for conversation that is otherwise often assumed knowledge or pushed aside as taboo.
Larysa Bernhardt
Sculpture | Canada
Larysa Bernhardt was born in Ukraine and moved to United States in her thirties. Her skill of textile smithing was passed down through the generations on the maternal side of her family, which she honed by years of working in the fashion industry.
Larysa Bernhardt has been collecting vintage and antique textiles for decades, checking them for moths obsessively. It made her think – what is the moth’s tireless search for the light in dark places but the perfect allegory for humanity? Human life is short but human stories persist. At the end we will all become stories – I think Margaret Atwood said this.
In her work Larysa attempts to weave silky threads of the ephemeral into the eternal, webbing together stories already told and the ones that still needing telling. Creating a dream within a dream, her personal universe where time isn’t linear and everything happens simultaneously – past, present, and future.
Carolin Leary Prinn
Painting | United States
Carolin Leary Prinn weaves ethereal realms from a love of myth, history, the human story and recollections from her world travels. A recipient of scholarships and artistic merits since childhood, she began penning her mythical world, The Islands of Niljora, from a young age which would become the rich narrative and symbolism behind her work.
Carolin sees her works as artefacts of her mythos, The Islands of Niljora. Part myth, adventure and spiritual journey, The Islands of Niljora has evolved into a symbolic reflection on the universal human story. Her works herald tales of heroes and deity-like observers, passing their quiet gazes over the patterns of the human world. Discovered through her world travels, those she meets and the conversations of life, she explores life’s journeys, philosophies, concepts of hope, destiny and cautionary tales. Her work weaves into a lifelong fascination with nature, the mystical and the mythological
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