If you’ve ever looked at a James Rosenquist painting and thought, “Is that a spaghetti? On a windshield? Next to...a baby?”—congratulations. You’ve had the correct reaction. Rosenquist wanted your eyeballs to trip over each other. He wanted you to stop and say, “Wait, what am I looking at?” And then—if he was really doing his job—you’d start to see the seams of the modern world splitting open in full technicolor.

I’ve been following Juan Zurita’s work for years, and I’ll tell you this: no one makes masking tape look this emotionally charged. Watching him work—painstakingly laying down strips of tape, painting over them, then peeling them off like he’s revealing a secret—is oddly hypnotic. It’s a method that shouldn’t feel dramatic, and yet somehow, in his hands, it’s quietly gripping. The end result? Paintings that look deceptively simple until you realize they’ve been engineered with a kind of obsessive elegance. Layers on layers on layers—like sediment.

Let’s be honest—some of the best art comes from people working through their shit.

And I don’t mean that in a tortured genius kind of way. I mean regular, human stuff: grief, trauma, boredom, rage, heartbreak, existential panic. You name it, someone has made a painting about it. Or a sculpture. Or a weird installation in the middle of nowhere that involves feathers, mirrors, and their ex’s old t-shirts. Whatever works.

Niki de Saint Phalle is one of those artists people like to describe with extremes—radical, chaotic, wild, visionary. And while some of that is true, the reality is that she was also just deeply committed to figuring things out through her work. She didn’t operate from a carefully laid-out career plan. She followed instinct. And her instincts took her to some pretty incredible places.

She started making art in the 1950s, not because she needed something to do, but because she needed a way to survive herself. She was already living a very different kind of life—she modeled for fashion magazines, posed for high-end designers, looked like someone who had it all together. Then she had a full-blown breakdown. And from there, something else started to take shape.

My friend Florencia Ferraco is an awesome artist—I’ve known her for many years. She’s also married to one of my closest childhood friends. I’m lucky to have had the chance to see her work evolve up close over time.

Flor lives her art. Not in a dramatic, tortured-artist way, but in a steady, grounded, get-your-hands-dirty kind of way.

She’s based in London, originally from Argentina, with a few years in Australia thrown in. That mix shows up in her work—not as obvious references, but as something quieter: a sense of movement, of cultural memory, of being rooted and restless at the same time.

Humans are wired to find meaning in chaos.

Show someone an arrangement of shapes and colors, and their brain will immediately start making sense of it. A face. A tree. Something vaguely inappropriate. Your mind fills in the blanks whether you want it to or not.

This explains why people see Jesus in toast. It’s why Rorschach tests exist. It’s also why abstract painting has never faded into obscurity. The second you look at it, you start making sense of it.

Dorothy Fratt painted with a clarity that left no room for hesitation. Her colors were bold, direct, and carefully placed to create balance and movement. Nothing felt accidental. She made decisions with precision, letting color relationships dictate the structure of her work. Instead of layering texture or complex compositions, she focused entirely on how colors interacted, how they could shift perception, and how they held attention.

A few years back, I placed a work by artist Sara Dare in a corporate collection. Not long after, I got a panicked call from the client’s representative. Someone—likely an expert in stirring up shit—had announced that they saw a vagina in the painting. The poor rep didn’t know what to do. Should they take it down? Would HR get involved? Was this an emergency? Meanwhile, I was trying to figure out how to explain that this was a very normal reaction to an abstract painting. People see what they want to see. It’s part of what makes art interesting, and it’s one of the reasons I love Sara’s work.

For centuries, embroidery was dismissed as decorative, domestic, and distinctly female—more of a hobby than an art form, more of a task than a form of expression. While painting, sculpture, and even textiles like weaving found their place in art history, embroidery remained trapped in the realm of “craft.”

Ghada Amer embroiders images, but her work does much more than that—it forces us to reconsider everything we thought we knew about embroidery. Her work pulls this historically feminine, decorative craft out of the domestic sphere and into the realm of subversion and critique. The delicacy of thread meets the weight of cultural expectation, and in that tension, Amer finds power.

I spent two days looking at Brandi Kole’s work online, and while I haven’t met her or spoken with her, I feel like I’ve been in a conversation with her art. It’s layered and deeply personal—built from fabric, thread, and torn materials that hold memory the way skin does. There’s a rawness to her process, an immediacy that comes from making images with a sewing machine rather than a brush or a pencil. Instead of smoothing things over, she lets the threads loop and fray, leaving behind a record of movement, tension, and release.

The human head is the first thing we recognize when we come into the world. Long before we know what words mean, how objects work, or what money is, we’re hardwired to lock onto faces. Infants, barely capable of controlling their own limbs, can already distinguish a face from any other shape. It’s not just recognition; it’s priority processing. The brain has an entire department dedicated to faces—the fusiform face area (FFA)—a specialized chunk of the visual cortex that exists purely to make sense of heads.

Nancy Grossman’s head sculptures don’t sit quietly. Wrapped in leather, bound with straps, and often gagged, they hold their ground with an intensity that is hard to ignore. Their surfaces, stitched and pulled tight, give no clear emotional cues, offering little in the way of easy interpretation.

If you’re not familiar with Arlene Rush’s work, let me paint you a picture: sculpture, identity, perception, and some shattered glass. What I love about her work is that it makes you think—sometimes uncomfortably so. Take her Headsseries, for example. She strips the human head down to its most basic form, forcing us to confront what we actually see when we look at a face. The result is an art of contradictions: delicate but tough, eerie yet inviting, universal yet profoundly personal.

Most people think aesthetics is about some highbrow metric of sophistication that determines whether you get invited to the right dinner parties. But aesthetics is about perception. And perception, as it turns out, is about everything.

Tetsuya Ishida’s paintings look like scenes from a dream designed to make you uneasy. His figures, often self-portraits, are trapped in machinery, fused with office furniture, or slumped over like abandoned puppets. They exist in sterile spaces—offices, classrooms, factory floors—where human bodies are reduced to components in a larger system. Their expressions are blank, their postures slack, their surroundings cold and inescapable. The message isn’t subtle. Ishida painted a world where people are treated as objects, where individuality is irrelevant, and where modern life quietly drains the soul.

Peter Ravn paints men who look like they’ve been dropped into their own lives without warning. Their suits are immaculate, their postures somewhat rigid, their faces frozen somewhere between bewilderment and resignation. They seem caught in the middle of a story, but the plot is elusive. There’s something humorous about them, but also something ominous, like they know they’re in trouble but haven’t quite figured out how bad it is.

There are two types of people in this world: those who confidently look at a work of art and say, “This speaks to me,” and those who look at it like they’re deciphering an ancient code, muttering, “I don”t know what I like.” If you fall into the second category, congratulations—you’re about to escape it.

Frank Stella didn’t want your interpretation. He didn’t want your emotions. He didn’t want your analysis. He wanted you to look at his paintings and just deal with them. And somehow, that approach made him one of the most influential artists of the 20th century.