Vonn Cummings Sumner 'Reliquary' Print Available

Artist: Vonn Cummings Sumner
Title: Reliquary
Medium: Giclee Print
Size: 24 x 30 Inches
Edition: 25
Prices: $500

Vonn Cummings Sumner is a Los Angeles based painter and professor who transforms existential unease into luminous, gently humorous tableaux. Born in 1973, he earned a BFA at UC Davis, where Wayne Thiebaud first showed the class a Krazy Kat strip and declared George Herriman the equal of Goya; that moment sparked a lifelong obsession with the gender-fluid, brick-loving cat who now populates Sumner’s canvases.

Working in oil on panel, he layers translucent glazes over soft monochrome grounds, creating depth that feels both old master solemn and Sunday paper light. His palette shifts from desert ochres to pool water cyans, echoing the sudden time of day changes that define Herriman’s original strips. Figures are rendered with delicate modeling yet placed in absurd scenarios: Krazy wanders a forest at dusk, dons a haz-mat suit to queue outside a supermarket, or stares at a dumpster fire while clutching a single red brick. These vignettes serve as stand ins for contemporary anxieties pandemic protocols, consumer absurdity, ecological dread yet they maintain the strip’s tender optimism.

Sumner insists the paintings are not nostalgia but sideways self-portraiture; by approaching issues obliquely through an “empathetic effigy,” he avoids didactic cliché and invites viewers to laugh, wince and recognise their own bewilderment. Recent exhibitions such as Second Nature at Morton Fine Art pair Krazy with floating dollar bills, toilet-paper still lifes and protective-tape barriers, turning gallery walls into a gently surreal mirror of our collective moment. Whether teaching at Fullerton College or painting into the night, Sumner keeps the anarchic spirit of Krazy alive, proving that a century old sprite can still help us process the ever shifting world outside the window.

Kukula 'Cake Room' Print Available

Artist: Kukula
Title: Cake Room
Medium: Giclee Print
Size: 15 x 20 Inches
Edition: 50
Price: $450

 

Kukula, whose given name is Nataly Abramovitch, is an Israeli painter celebrated for a self coined style she calls Pop Rococo. Born in 1980 and raised in a quiet village an hour north of Tel Aviv, she grew up surrounded by Holocaust survivors whose stories of trauma mixed with her own childhood fantasies of princesses and ballet. This collision of horror and sweetness became the emotional engine of her art. She earned a degree in illustration from Vital-Shenkar in 2003 and soon relocated to the United States, where she now lives and works.

Her oil paintings centre on doll-like female figures posed with the haughty grace of eighteenth-century aristocratic portraits. Rendered in intricate layers of luminous colour, these heroines confront the viewer with direct, wide-eyed gazes while surrounded by gilded filigree, lollipops, songbirds and baroque ribbons that sometimes morph into their own skin. The ornate flourishes reference French Limoges porcelain and the decorative excess of Rococo masters such as Boucher and Fragonard, yet the flattened planes, candy palettes and subtle nods to manga give the work a contemporary pop edge.

Kukula’s creative process is intuitive. She gathers visual stimuli from haute couture runways, vintage opera costumes and independent women designers, then blends them with personal memories and symbols of feminine power. Each accessory carries possible meaning: a pearl choker may suggest innocence, while a lurking cat could hint at hidden danger. By presenting these icons within idyllic, dreamlike landscapes, she invites viewers to lose themselves in a world where beauty and melancholy, innocence and eroticism coexist in delicate balance.

Her work has appeared in solo shows from Rome to Los Angeles, and luxury labels including RED Valentino have commissioned capsule lines featuring her signature characters. Through every painting, Kukula offers an enchanted universe that resurrects the lightness of Rococo while telling modern stories of strength, identity and resilience.

Jeff Soto 'Migration' Print Available

Artist: Jeff Soto
Title: Migration
Medium: Giclee Print
Size: 16.7 x 25 Inches
Edition: 50
Price: $210

 

Jeff Soto is a Californian painter, muralist and printmaker who fuses gritty street energy with dreamlike fantasy. Born in Fullerton in 1975, he grew up skateboarding and simultaneously discovered graffiti and traditional oil painting, twin passions that still feed his work. After earning a BFA with distinction from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, he spent years travelling the globe, exhibiting in galleries from New York to Nuremberg and translating band posters into collectible art.

Soto’s distinct colour palette glows with phosphorescent greens, radioactive oranges and deep midnight blues, laid down in acrylic and aerosol. His imagery bridges pop surrealism and street art: robotic owls, blooming skulls, circuit-board forests and gentle giants stride across canvases that feel like storybook pages left in the rain. Influences range from eighties fantasy films and science-fiction paperbacks to Max Ernst and Frida Kahlo, yet the final vision is unmistakably his own.

He approaches each mural without projections, sketching loose charcoal arcs then building layers of spray and brush until walls shimmer like arcade cabinets. Gig posters for Phish, My Morning Jacket and The Flaming Lips showcase the same ethos, marrying technical screen-print precision with raw, emotional colour. A retrospective titled Potatostamp at Riverside Art Museum gathered over seventy posters and dozens of original ink drawings, celebrating fifteen years of printmaking obsession.

Today Soto balances studio work with teaching studio art at Riverside City College, mentoring the next generation while continuing to paint public walls and release limited editions that sell out in minutes. Whether rendering a six-storey endangered bee or a small talismanic print, he seeks the fragile moment when nature and technology, beauty and decay, dissolve into luminous harmony.

Travis Louie 'Horned Sparkletail' Print Available

Artist: Travis Louie
Title: Horned Sparkletail
Medium: Giclee Print
Size: 16 x 20 Inches
Edition: UNSURE
Prices: $170

 

Travis Louie crafts monochrome “family albums” for a parallel Victorian planet. Born 1964 in Queens, New York, he grew up on Atomic-Age sci-fi, German Expressionist films and Saturday comic-shop runs, influences that still drip from his brushes today. After a Pratt Institute BFA in Communication Design he freelanced as an illustrator, but by 2003 the tiny sketches and marginalia in his journals had snowballed into a fully fledged mythology: a world of gentle werewolves, goat-cursed accountants, vibrating engine-drivers and other “human oddities” who queue up to have their formal portraits taken as proof they existed.

Working on smooth board, Louie lays down tight graphite drawings, then builds velvety grey tones with thin acrylic washes until the figures feel like antique tintypes unearthed in a dusty attic. The faux-historical finish is deliberate; it lets him smuggle modern themes; racism, xenophobia, immigrant otherness into faces that appear reassuringly vintage. Each sitter arrives with a micro-biography penned by the artist, turning exhibitions into storybook parlours where viewers read how a hedge-sleeping fur-being or top-hatted spider-lover earned their place in society.

The conceit has travelled far: from “Art From the New World” at Bristol City Museum to “Pop Surrealism” in Spoleto, Italy, and the pages of Hi-Fructose and Juxtapoz. Institutions such as the Virginia MOCA and numerous private collectors now count Louie’s portraits among their treasures, ensuring his quiet cast of misfits continues to petition for empathy, curiosity and wonder one sepia stare at a time.