Jana Brike is an artist from Riga (Latvia, small country in the Baltic region of Northern Europe). Inspired by her children book illustrations, the Russian realism, Soviet animation masters or renaissance master’s biblical paintings. She creates powerful and strange imagery of ordinary scene of daily life twisted in some surreal universe. Her paintings are beautifully haunted with a particular interest to identity, sexuality or any emotional landscape.
Jana Brike has exhibited his work all through Europe as well as in several parts of the US.

Shohei Otomo (Hakuchi) is a famous Japanese illustrator, however he doesn’t speak English so there are very few informations on the internet about him. He is born in 1980, at Kichijoji, Tokyo. After graduating from art college, he started working as a freelance illustrator. Shohei Otomo works using a ballpoint pen, creating very detailed black and white pieces of art. His site is called “idiot land”, showing a mix of Japanese traditions and punk-rock modern style… Making references to Japanese characters like Samurai, Geisha girls or Yakuzas.

Yuta Onoda, originally from Japan, is an illustrator and painter based in Toronto, Canada. He has developped a great personal style mixing Japanese and American influences. Apart his great mixed media and digital illustrations, Yuta Onoda shows an impressive list of awards, clients and exhibitions…

Nicolas Nemiri is a French comic author and illustrator, early influenced by masters like Moebius or Pratt and who also have a true passion for Japanese comics. Nicolas Nemiri has developped a very mature and sensitive style through different journeys in Japan and China and he publishes drawings on his personal blog. Represented by “agence Patricia Lucas”.

Violeta Hernández is an llustrator & Graphic Designer from Monterrey, Mexico. Her work centers on feminine esthetics and art toys. She finds herself at ease in drawing, paper texture, the effervescence of colour, inks, shades and fine lines that can only be obtained when working by hand. Violeta Hernández is a member of the rising creative class from Monterrey, being featured in individual expos such as “Exótica” at the Arte Cocodrilo Gallery (Mty, Mx 2010) and diverse collective expositions such as “El Arca de Neón” (DF, Mx. 2007), “El Último Mono” (Barcelona, Spain 2009), “Animalia” (Mty, Mx 2010), & “Muera el Perro” at the Pristine Galerie (Mty, Mx 2011).

Matteo De Longis is an Italian artist with a very obvious influence coming from Japanese comic books.

Carol Sachs is a young Brazilian photographer living and working in London, UK. Among her clients are Vogue Hommes Japan, Wallpaper, American Lawyer Magazine, the Scandinavian, British, and Belgian editions of Vice Magazine, Nowness.com and various Brazilian magazines.
Carol Sachs is also very interested in cinema and theater photography, having worked with Sutil Theater Company in Brazil on all of their productions since 2006, photographing their creative process, rehearsals and performances. As she is travelling often, she had this great idea to publish her travel photographs on a personnal project, a blog we already featured here: Nakedeye.

Marina Coudray is a French artist doing great characters with a manga inspiration. She works as a set designer for a game as well as various multimedia projects called Wakfu. She also works on comics and children books as personal work.

Hikari Shimoda is a young artist from Nagano, Japan. She creates beautiful emotional paintings with a very unique style.

Naked Eye is a new blog curated by photographer Carol Sachs, and featuring places like the Grand Canyon, Utah (USA), Tokyo, and the Dolomites, the Italian mountain range that can be discovered on a fascinating journey through the photos of this young restless photographer. Carol Sachs is a young Brazilian living in London, subverting the values of conventionality to cross oceans in search of original pictures. Her photos have illustrated pages of magazines like Wallpaper, Vogue Hommes Japan, Vice UK, and the site Nowness.
In Brazil, she has photographed for some of the big publishing houses such as Trip, Glamurama Group, Carta Editorial, Abril, Globo, among others. In addition to her editorial work, during the past five years Carol has been lending her eye to document the plays produced by Sutil Theatre Company, of her countrymen Felipe Hirsch and Guilherme Weber.
Trained as a graphic designer, photography found a place in her life when she was still in college, quite suddenly, as the story on her first blog post tells. Later on, after moving to London, she pursued an MA Photography from the London College of Communication. Since then she has been moving around, capturing people and places and turning them into visual poetry.
The blog project was born gradually until an invitation to write about a trip to Tokyo gave it the final impetus. The site works something like a virtual organiser of her growing travel archives. “The name means looking at things directly, without the aid of lenses. Because before you shoot anything you have to be physically present in one place (the trip), but once there, you have to look around, to see, and only then you are prepared to shoot. The photo is the final product, which sums up the experience, and sometimes my only reason for being in a place, but everything starts with looking at things with the naked eye.”
Her blog also has special contributions from friends who tell her about their favourite places in cities around the world, and include maps indicating locations and reviews. Her photographs are combined with a highly personal narrative, which sometimes bring not only inspiration, but also useful information about the trip. There is space for visual reports, small galleries of images without captions, often with aerial and road views and also brief notes and curiosities.