The paintings of KC Collins are at once abstract and true to life. I equate them to freeze frames from a movie or other motion picture. They have the overall appearance of scenery, as viewed through a car windshield that has been dappled with raindrops.

Inspired by both historical and contemporary artists (including: JMW Turner, Franz Klein, Anne Stahl and Elin Neuman), Collins’ work, like Slinkachu’s, reminds me of some work of my own. The idea of artwork that is simultaneously gestural and motionless has always interested me.

Collins’ went to Elon University and has won several accolades for her work, including the Elon Annual Art Show and the 2010 Mayor’s Choice Award, among others.

Part street installation, part macro photography project, Slinkachu’s “Little People” are equally as fascinating as they are terrifying. I had a particular connection with his work because it echoes some of my own. I was working on a photographic project awhile back that involved people who were alone in New York City. The project took on a life of it’s own before long, and I realized that, despite the fact that the city was crammed with so many people, everybody seemed lonely.

Slinkachu uses miniature models of people he finds in hobby shops and on the internet, paints them, and sets them up on the street where they are sure to be passed by hundreds of times daily without anybody noticing.

Slinkachu’s “Little People” also comment on the ability of city-dwellers to not notice their surroundings. After all, the denizens of New York City are so often filled with things both small and large that are not worth taking note of. Eventually, people stop paying attention. But beware, hurried businesspeople and working stiffs alike, if you stop paying attention to the world around you, you might miss the beauty in the details.

“Raised without a television in rural Virginia” is how Randall Stoltzfus begins his biography on his website (located here). An interesting way to introduce yourself, but not altogether random. Stoltzfus paints abstracted landscapes that seem to be totally uninformed by any outside influence. In the end, his paintings are just as much about form, design and color as they are about the uniquely ethereal scenes they portray.

Stoltzfus lives in Brooklyn now, and has shown in galleries in New York, Virginia, Georgia and Washington DC. He’s also been displayed in Italy, where he held an artist residency at an active insane asylum. He works mostly with paints, but also uses pens, inks and Polaroid cameras.