James Michalopoulos paints en plein air, or outdoors, using an abstracted, figurative style where each artwork focuses on color, volumetric shape, and graphic lines. Intrigued by the duality of beauty and decay, the architecture of New Orleans became his muse and, later, the French countryside and musical imagery. Michalopoulos is known for rendering shotgun houses and Creole cottages in thick impasto layers and vibrant colors. “Elemental truth of and in my subject and life drives me. I am focused on the expression of the essentials—the force and essence of my subject. [The] highest and best representation recreates the heart of the subject and its outward evident beauty or qualities,” he says.

Anastasia Pelias’s diverse craft includes oil paintings on canvas, works on paper, sculpture, video, and site-specific and site-responsive installations. Informed by her native New Orleans and ancestral roots in Skopelos, Greece, Pelias embraces subjects that involve love, death, destiny, and the female experience. In 2021, the artist collaborated with Folie à Plusieurs, a concept perfumery that “develops contemporary olfactive projects with artists and art institutions.” Along with six additional oil sticks and gesso works on paper, 7 (Entanglement) was inspired by the selected fragrances and created to visualize the experience of scent. “Color, and its emotional power, is a critical component in all of my work. I believe in the power of painting and its ability to evoke a visceral response from the viewer and to change how people see the world. I want to create work that is full of emotion and visual pleasure,” she says.

Laurel Porcari specializes in both two- and three-dimensional work. Saturated in pigment and suspended in resin, her layered acrylic artworks are atypical representations of physical spaces that map “intersections of visual and cultural coordinates and question the standard formalities of topographical surveying,” resulting in landscapes that are alien yet familiar. Color of the Year #3 is an example of how “emerging and submerging patterns and colors are metaphors for the actions of memories.” Each piece allows Porcari to “mine her past to formulate ideas and dreams of the future…in an effort towards stability, her works are encapsulated [and] frozen within a border of clear resin—a sort of specimen of her world’s geographical space.”