I fell in love with this painting (on the right) by Ann Sophie Staerk months ago. It was featured in the September 2010 issue of House Beautiful.

A beach house living room with a gorgeous painting. (design by Christina Murphy, painting by Ann Sophie Staerk, image via House Beautiful, 2010)
Staerk’s current work is very different from the minimal but energetic painting featured in the House Beautiful beach house spread, but I did find an earlier image on her website that is quite similar. It’s called “Beautiful” and it’s from 2003.

"Beautiful" by Ann Sophie Staerk, 2003 (image via http://www.sophiestaerk.com)
I was reminded of Staerk’s fantastic piece of art last week when I came across this image of an abstracted seascape mural on Re-Nest:
This mural has much more severe lines and harsher colors than Staerk’s painting(s), but they are undeniably linked in form and cool color-palette. It’s painted and designed by Emily Knudson of Jessica Helgerson Interior Design. You have to wonder if there was some inspiration here from Staerk’s work; they’re very similar, but each has its own identity and concept.
Today as I was browsing online I saw an amazing image that accompanied a short article on Holton Rower, who pours paint over a mountain of boxes to create really interesting pieces that are shaped by gravity and chance just as much as they are by his hand. The actual piece of artwork created looks nothing like the two pieces above, but despite the warm colors I think that the process-image pictured below evokes the same type of random waves that I have been admiring.
You can read more about Holton Rower here at his website, and read the short article that I read here at Colour Lovers.
Funny how over the course of six months your mind can collect images and link them all together. It doesn’t happen to me often, but when it does I love to make the connections! Now, back to figuring out how to get my hands on an early Ann Sophie Staerk painting…
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What I find so inetertsing is you could never find this anywhere else.