Grryo believes that abstract artists deserve to be recognised. Every Sunday join us in celebrating creative photography and art, from collage, design, multi layered textural compositions, to minimal colour pieces. We want to see diversity and images that cross and merge the boundaries of our imaginations.
We hope to support the abstract arts community by having a place for artists to share imagery that goes beyond the everyday snapshot and pixel and is transformed into a digital artwork that makes you feel something. Abstract art needs to be seen and experienced. We look forward to you and your expressive art and we want to spread the word about your Abstract talents. Thank you for your contribution to the mobile photography/arts community. Please join us by tagging your unique abstract images to #wearegrryo or #grryo.
We hope to see you there!
We invite you to take a look at these artist selections from February and March and experience their extraordinary galleries for yourselves.
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Erin McGean
Ground control to major tom. Take your protein pills and put your helmets on. Strap yourselves in and sprinkle yourselves with star dust every Sunday for Abstract Art features from all around the IG galaxy.First up in the digital stratosphere is the exceptionally talented graphical goddess and all round gorgeous being Erin @lifewithart who masterfully experiments with collage and editing elements to create wonderfully surreal images like this one – Iconoclast. Truly in a class of her own.
One of the things I love about Sundays is uncovering new artists that inspire, move or simply take my breath away. Looking through your images for this weeks grryo abstract feature i uncovered a dreamy, layered, gem of an artist whose work both transcends time and evokes a sense of mystery that leaves you wanting more and more.
Ethereal, dreamlike, poetry only begins to paint the artistry of the exquisite images of Kim @kimmibird where you can lose yourself in the layers of textures both hidden and revealed. Tattered and torn fragments and portals to a completely different reality, I highly recommend you visit.
If, like me, you adore subtle works on found paper, experiments with mixed media, expressive mark-making, and dabs of colour, then this dynamic combination of fields between painting and photography is just the sunday abstract discovery for you. Gary Edward Blum @garyedwardblumis a deft hand with delicate lines, textures, and juxtapositions, and has a keen eye for still life which speaks my kind of visual language. There is nothing ‘incidental’ about his artwork, everything is carefully considered and thoughtfully placed. “Utilizing a mixture of realism and minimalist abstraction, I create a narrative between pictorial reality, artistic process and formal composition.” This converging contrast in his body of work highlights not only his remarkable vision of the world but teeters on the edge between real and perceived reality and abstraction, dotted with smears of colour along the way… ∞
Its that time of the week again – Abstract Sunday, as the day draws to a close here in Australia. This time round we venture to Japan where @studioshuko caught my gaze with her hazy abstract umbrella in my favourite colour – red. Shuko Kawase’s delicate sensibilities and art leave a dusty and delightful impression on the senses. A dissolving rain of colour and an abstract silhouette bleeding at the edges as if seen through a foggy window or snow storm is just enough detail for our mind to fill in the gaps and form a picture in our minds of the mood and moment captured here in Hokkaido’s Moerenuma Park. Thank you so much for sharing your beautiful memory of the day – Portrait of a lady.
App-stacking, there’s a term you dont hear much of these days… well guess what, i’m bringing it back with this beauty. And yes, i’ve checked, its still Sunday in the Netherlands where this weeks’ artist is from… When I asked Bonny about how she creates her images I was amazed how many levels of work went in to transform this ‘manny’ into an almost unrecognible but absolutely Abstract Sunday marvel. In case you were wondering – that’s a mannequin, for the uninitiated, and I love mannequins! Also, are you into textures, scratches, layers of type, creating a multifaceted, multilayered artwork? More is more with miss @beezzz_ and I couldnt help but notice how it adds depth to her dark, inkylicious, moody and mysterious images. For a unique beez eye look at the weird but oh so wonderful world of bonny, buzz on in to to her feed.
I hopped aboard the yellow submarine again with our latest artist, Tim Matregrano @ruxco_tim for this Sundays escapism treat. It’s been a bright, sunnylicious day here and i’m extremely excited to introduce you to the wonderful waves of moon beamy goodness that radiate from this space age digital collage artwork. But… rather than subject you to my nonsensical ramblings I’d rather you heard it from the man himself. You see, i’m a curious sort and asked the question, “Where does your inspiration come from?” His answer, like his creativity – was rather impressive, so i’ll share it with you now… “I enjoy seeking nuance from composition, shapes, color, texture, and finding the harmony and balance of these. I’ve found that I’m able to create these ‘strange’ scenes, or worlds, with mobile editing that I wasn’t able to achieve with my tactile art. Each piece is an experiment, a push to create the idea I have…” Oh and those tactile things? I wanna hear more about those – it sounds kinda fancy. Drawings, collages, sculptures too? Multitalented – yes. Do we dig it? Oh Yes.
Don’t be fooled by the apparent simplicity of her photographs. There is something innately intuitive that I was drawn to with this artists’ work among the thousands of images tagged to the grryo gallery.
How she sees and more importantly how she feels what she photographs is really compelling. Her work is a mixture of abstract reflections and segments of street photography handled with a sensitivity and dusty use of colour that feels like its from a time gone by… Layer by layer she peels back the underlying essence of New York, as she sees it, a fleeting glance, a pair of heels walking out of frame, a window … A frame that is constantly moving and shifting, such an alluring picture of how she breathes in and paints the colours of the city through her eyes.
Thank you Jeanette Vazquez @_jeanettevazquez for revealing your fascinating fragments of art with us this Abstract Sunday. Please wander down the dusky pavements in her footsteps and take a peek into her beautiful world of photography.
What’s in a name? This week for our Sunday burst of Abstractness, a tidy little square package of pop sung out to my graphic heart in the mix of #wearegrryo. How could i go past this bright geometric image by Andrew Hays @andrewjhays . Who doesn’t need a few little splices of multicolour in their life, right?! I’m not always just about black and white you know, and what a mood lifting antidote with this selection. An Amalgamation of cool, cropped, compositionally, correct, crazy, colour treats with mind spinning minimalism. Linear pieces and slices of shadows on this delicious candy coloured wall. This refreshing blend of shapes and colours makes a lively geometric flavour combination for my Sunday Abstracts pick.
And yes getting back to Amalgamation, what a brilliant word and title.
Immerse yourself in the creative work of the extraordinary artist Agnès Lanteri @ellla_k . She is an exquisite painter of light who has envisioned this brilliantly hued blue abstract piece called Passengers in Transit. This monochromatic mist series 3/6 is a beautiful balm for eyes that see beyond the routine of everyday life and recognise it a true piece of art.
Agnès handles colour and light like they were old friends, each going hand in hand, it doesn’t matter the subject, even a simple piece of fabric or a stranger on the move can be illuminated in her eyes.
This is a remarkable gift.
I for one want to take a meandering journey with this artist and escape into the dreamy quiet of her imaginative space, who’s with me?
Graceful, captivating, and full of emotion, this exquisite celestial being Heather McAlister @poppybay takes my Abstract Sunday heart this week with an ethereal self portrait. From behind her gauzy veil her porcelain skin is illuminated against the murky shadows by a most radiant light.
I’m fascinated by art which strips back the layers and reveals something true and real about the artist themselves. Heather does that with elegance and a glowing bouquet of luminous colour cascading down her canvas.
An entrancing hum of divine, glorious, light and dark woven together with her gossamer thread.
It isn’t possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal. E.M. Forster
Ebrahim Mirmalek takes us on a hypnotic visual and sensory journey that is infused with stories within stories … as he passes through rugged terrain in the small border towns of Iran he is not only observing, but living, breathing and sending visceral echoes over and through these vast landscapes and majestic mountains to his lens …. He stays in the homes of locals, entering their lives as a stranger but leaving forever changed after immersing himself into the everyday reality of a people often ignored and forgotten.
Sistan & Baluchestan is a south eastern, underdeveloped region, with vast areas of rugged, mountainous terrain, bordering the neighboring Pakistan and Afghanistan. Here, smugglers illicitly enter in and out of the lawless borders through risky routes, in order to survive the poverty inflicted by the high rising unemployment. A province isolated due to its relentless droughts and desolate lands – its people repleted with pride and poetry, but bonded to their ancestral soil where they endure the harsh climates throughout the dry seasons. Mirmalek’s dusty impressions will long leave their trace where few photographers have tread before…
Why did I choose this area?
In Iran this province has been given the least attention for certain political and social reasons… the image of this province has been crippled mainly because of the security and political issues from hostage crises to kidnapping and sectarian attacks to smuggling. It’s interesting to note that Lonely Planet, the most popular book on traveling, has only devoted a few pages on this the 2nd largest province of Iran. I have since realized that for foreigners it’s considered a red zone, meaning that their government takes no responsibility for their risk of traveling here and so it remains deprived from being seen…
I’ve seen the dark side of this place as well …
Because of a misunderstanding, my iPhone got smashed on the floor and I was close to getting beaten up… but nothing changes the fact of how lovely these people are. I think one should experience the extreme dark side of a place as well to better understand the mentality and extremities of these people, and avoid romanticizing, as often people do, when they travel to these places. I was lucky though, but bad things can happen.
I never separate my everyday reality from what I see through my lens.
It is all part of it, every picture I have taken is a reflection of my own personal feelings and it embodies a reality I choose to capture. Since I’m working alone and not on an assignment I’m free to connect to whatever hits me and that’s the joy of being a photographer and traveling for yourself… Other than photos taken for certain historical and cultural reasons, I take photos for the story I want to tell…
Even landscapes are like monologues to me, they ignite an emotion and feeling to the one who sees it.
There are plenty of sunrises and sunsets taken everyday all around the world, we all see it and they all look the same, but only the ones you take speak personally to you … working in the field of film and documentaries has made me more aware of how the mind and perception works when you are faced with a reality – that’s why I’m interested in fiction. They say to understand the truth one needs to know and understand the myths behind it… I feel it is the same in art and photography in general, there are plenty of documentaries of the same subject and not one of them are the same, as they are all bound to their own unique perspectives… that’s why I believe in journeys, diaries…
Ghaleh no in the Sistan province.
The village is slowly being abandoned due to the devastating drought hitting the region.
An old Sistani shepherd with his livestock grazing in the drylands of the Hamoon Sea, behind him is Khaje Mountain. This black volcanic rock used to be called Rustam Mountain which is derived from an old famous Persian myth character, and also sanctified by the followers of Islam, Zoroaster and Christianity.
An abandoned British railway custom house overlooking a skeletal tree located in the desolate town of Mirjave in the Baluchestan Province of Iran. The building has now turned into wreckage, walls covered and etched with scribbled words of regret, the rooms covered with drug addicts needles and ashes…
Young people drive for days making a risky journey into the borders of Pakistan, illicitly smuggling gasoline to support their family. They are forced to do this work for many reasons, but mainly because of the high-rate of unemployment in this province. They often get arrested, fined or shot by army police, the dust is made by the smugglers trucks taking off-road routes to avoid official check points.
A Baluchi man holding a klashnikov while climbing a hill in the Bamposht mountain area in Baluchestan. It has been one of the most insecure provinces of Iran due to the abductions and insurgencies by rebels.
A Baluchi girl helping her family washing the dishes in Sirkan, Baluchestan. In the Baluchi culture children play an important role helping the family’s household responsibilities from a very early age.
In the untouched mountainous region of Bamposht / Baluchestan during sunset.
A Baluchi man collecting hay for his farm in a village called Nahook.
A Baluchi peasant holding a bundle of harvested crops he gathered early in the morning in Nahook. Traditional farming is still widespread in the small villages of Baluchestan.
An ancient local tradition, weaving baskets, home accesories or bags for transporting goods out of a very common local tree called Daz.
I started filming when I was a teenager with our home video camera, it is then that I became interested in filmmaking and started working as an editor, making documentaries and short films, it was up until my 25th year when I moved to Dubai with my ex-wife that things changed after our separation. It was during the financial crisis, I bought my first digital camera and started shooting the streets or anything that would reflect my internal feelings of isolation and remoteness. Photography wasn’t anything I wanted or was interested to do but rather a necessity, to capture and share these reflections and imagery that I could hardly put into words or even film. The timelessness of photography is magical to me, and allows me to tell stories within a fraction of a second… images turned into a voice for me unlike any other medium I’ve experienced.
Photography has become my closest and only medium of expression.
I believe in the subjectivity of truth and the power of personal photography wishing the mainstream media breaking into small streams of personal truths told by genuine and passionate story-tellers all around the world, where the significance of a story is not based on the hype of our time but purely based on personal connections of the individual with it’s subject matter he/she is photographing…
Ebrahim Mirmalek is a remarkable documentary / travel photographer and documentary video editor who is currently based in Iran…. His background is in film and documentaries. These images are a sample from his Sistan & Baluchestan Travel-memoir, where he traveled overland for 2 months trying to capture his own personal experience as well as the feel and spirit of the people and the lands they dwell in… the rest of the series can be found on his website, he also shares his daily / weekly stories of this trip and many more on Instagram.
Grryo believes that mobile photographers/artists tell stories through the photographs/images and art that represents their families, their environment, themselves. This is important because of the level of communication that is portrayed in imaging today. We want to support the mobile arts community having a place for artists to share, discuss, and critique (if requested by individual). These dialogues help the individuals and the community to grow. We look forward to you and your art. We thank you for your contribution to the mobile photography/arts community. Join us by tagging your images #wearegrryo or #grryo. We hope to see you there!
Through my pictures I try to communicate a sensation, my different states of mind. I’m an unconditional lover of David Lynch and for this image I watched Blue Velvet. I shot this palm tree on the road and after I blended this together with my self portrait, et voilà!
I have quickly become passionate about iphoneography and the power of differents apps, with my pictures I use several softwares. For this one I used Paintfx and Icolorama. Generally, I take my picture and make it really by feeling, depending on the mood of the day. I almost always do self portraits.
Why this title? Right now I am listening to David Bowie a lot, and when I created this picture I was listening to his song We Can Be Heroes. The title goes well, you can imagine a lot of things, a photo, a reference title and we can use our imagination to make a story. This is a photo exhibition created with the dual Union app, Mextures, and Cameramatic. I love this kind of photo double exposure, it is not new but it’s always beautiful.
She is the queen-bee she holds all the answers and she is our protector, she is the root of all and everything.
I’m inspired by the mystery of nature, the human body and our psyche and especially insects and the process of the metamorphosis. The mystery of life itself the hidden parts of our psyche, secrets within that we can sense but not see with complete transparency.
My images are never planned from the start, it’s a process where the image takes a life of it’s own, it’s a journey for me. A journey where I search for questions and that feeling of mystery, where the answers are almost in reach but still always hidden. I wish for the viewer to find their own mystery in my photos, their own questions and answers.
This is my sweetest personal model, who is my niece =) Her name is Nicky, she is 12, and is one of my favorite and graceful subjects for shooting. I would not say that all other children are my favorite subject for shooting. No! I find it [photographing children] a pretty complex process, requiring serious psychological knowledge. However, I loved Nicky, at first sight. You know, with this child who is already 12 years old, it is quite difficult to control the balance; to not cross the line when the photograph becomes too provocative. However, I really like to work with her.
One day I was fortunate to work with a russian director, who is one of the best at working with children in the russian movie industry (which is my main profession, I’m an actress). I chatted with him, asking him a lot of questions and watched him work finally making a lot of conclusions and discovering a few secrets about how to work well with children. Since then my shooting with Nicki has been great fun, filled with new discoveries and positive emotions.
And now we are just happily playing around and get great enjoyment from this process! Every new photo session with Nicky is like a new play with some rules which are agreed beforehand, each has its own story and circumstance behind it (like a screenplay). Then, forgetting about real life we immerse ourselves in a fictional story. We just have fun and I shoot it!
Apps used : Native camera iPhone5S, Retouch, Relook, Provoke (for b&w)
This image was taken in the Nautic Club of Tenerife (Canary Islands), I don’t know this person, she was a stranger, but when I saw her, I knew I had to take a picture. I followed her and took four or five photos very nearby with my iphone 6. I like street photography very much and although on my main instagram account I have not developed this style too much, it is with my other account @shotandmore where I started with the real street photos.
To edit this image I used the apps Skrwt, Oggl, Snapped and PSexpress.
I’m a trained painter, and I’ve always in my paintings had a tendency to layer.. So transparencies, double exposure, and the like, come naturally to me in my photographic compositions. This particular image is a three-part portrait of the dynamics concerning the ego, the superego, and the id… and how in a given situation they will all three react in a different way which is what creates confusion and push-and-pull in the individual, because each of those psychological constructs is built to protect varying interests of the psyche, from values to image…
I used colour as a tool to divide the portraits whilst also uniting the whole space by its overlapping, which is probably also a visual device connected to my being a painter.
Grryo believes that mobile photographers/artists tell stories through the photographs/images and art that represents their families, their environment, themselves. This is important because of the level of communication that is portrayed in imaging today. We want to support the mobile arts community having a place for artists to share, discuss, and critique (if requested by individual). These dialogues help the individuals and the community to grow. We look forward to you and your art. We thank you for your contribution to the mobile photography/arts community. Join us by tagging your images #wearegrryo or #grryo. We hope to see you there!
I just love to use multiple apps and create a piece from scratch, combining different sources.
This piece consists of twelve layers, combined with apps like superimpose, modern grunge and union. I used photoshop brushes within icolorama. It’s great to be able to use them on an iPhone!!
I make mobile art as a form of relaxation and to escape the busyness of my every day life for a bit.
This image was taken in a small border town in the Sistan & Baluchestan province of Iran called ‘Mirjave’ an old railway town I happened to stop-over while I was traveling, here is where the railway of Iran ends and begins. A few years ago a cross border attack left a deep scar in this town, drug addicts still consuming drugs in old abandoned British custom houses, gasoline smugglers spewing out their dusty trace…. nothing seemed lively here, just left with a deep feeling of desolation…while walking along the dirt roads I was surprised to see a group of kids biking around with sheer enthusiasm, here I started communicating and photographing them, they told me such heartbreaking stories from their town, these innocent children made me wonder how they are growing up and where will they all end up?
This shot is from my Sistan & Baluchestan Travel-memoir, where I traveled overland there for 2 months trying to capture my own personal experience as well as the feel and spirit of the people and their lands they dwell in…the series can be found on my website and I’m sharing my daily/weekly story of this trip on Instagram. I’ve also made a short 4min Video/Photo clip of my Journey…
For this self-portrait I wanted to represent the link of the bird (which I believe always symbolizes new opportunity) with my representation forming a connection with the thread extending to my right hand representing the power to share and connectivity. For this edition I began to form my collage in Superimpose, then use Snapseed, MonoVu and photocopier to add texture.
Just one moment
Where paths crossed.
You-so strange and foreign,
Nothing in common.
Both on the hunt
To forget about the loneliness in us.
Just one moment
Where eyes crossed
And bodies mingled.
To recognise
The you in me.
All things sorted in black and white.
Just one moment
That my loneliness took on a darker shade of happy.
Grryo believes that mobile photographers/artists tell stories through the photographs/images and art that represents their families, their environment, themselves. This is important because of the level of communication that is portrayed in imaging today. We want to support the mobile arts community having a place for artists to share, discuss, and critique (if requested by individual). These dialogues help the individuals and the community to grow. We look forward to you and your art. We thank you for your contribution to the mobile photography/arts community. Join us by tagging your images #wearegrryo or #grryo. We hope to see you there!
My dog is always in the water, since he was a pup. For almost a year he’s been hypnotized with the fishes in the water. Mesmerized, always staring at the water and trying to catch them (he caught one a month ago). He is the primary subject in many of my shots. In my images I try to catch him and the nature that surrounds him. I took this shot standing a few meters above him. My goal was to create color contrast between him and the water, and to add a little mood into the image. Shot was taken in the northern part of Croatia, where the river (Mur) borders with Slovenia.
This piece titled Eastern Glow was named after a song from the band Album Leaf. I was on a big Album Leaf kick at the time, and I was creating that piece when that song came on and I remembered it being titled Eastern Glow, and I felt it was perfectly fitting to the theme of my piece. Generally, you’d find jelly fish on the Eastern coasts of Canada and New England, so I thought it was pretty amazing how well the two complimented each other. So I went with that title for the piece. I had also recently watched American Beauty for the first time in a while, and there’s this one scene where Ricky Fitts is talking about a bag and how it effects him; how there’s so much beauty in the world that he feels like he can’t take it. And this bag is just floating around blissfully with no agenda. With this image, the jellyfish are the bag. They’re just being. It helps me remind myself that sometimes you just have to look beyond what you first see because there’s always beauty to be discovered.
This is Max, my oldest son, he’s six years old. In this picture you can see the most authentic smile of him, I think that Max was really happy in that moment showing how dirty his hands were after an afternoon playing with his brother Teo making somersaults on the floor.
I only used the drama effect in snapseed to increase the contrast of the color in his hands and some mellow tone in vsco… I love the mellow tone!
A story doesn’t always need to have multiple elements, nor it needs to come from the same common eye level angle. Stories can be told with few related elements, and by making the viewer engage always in different ways with the image. I was walking by midtown in New York and saw this lovely lady try grab a taxi. Chaos of humans and traffic was creating too much noise around what was really happening there and then… She was dressed up to conquer the city… her city.
I felt you like the cool rain in a vast dry desert
This image is part of a series called The Enigma Series on Flickr. I’ve often been told that my art is somewhat dark and at times evokes deeper emotions. I just begin a process of editing sometimes and the photo takes on a life of its own. I’m often inspired by the most unlikely things. I’m intrigued by how light contributes to the feeling or how color changes a mood.
The Enigma Series was just an idea that came to me from comments about my work and the deeper sometimes hidden meaning in words and art. I find inspiration from people, places, past experiences and also from photographers such as Lori Vrba and her Piano Farm series, Sally Mann’sAt Twelve series and Jack Spencer. There is an endless plethora of artists and photographers who inspire me endlessly on Instagram and Flickr.
I used hipstamatic for the original shot and edited in Icolorama. I don’t get too complicated with my editing these days as I have limited time. I’ve found that having a general idea in mind and less complicated editing gives me better direction with my art. Some people hate being called artists, others prefer the label photographer. I consider myself more an artist than photographer.
I feel my work starts in a photograph and ends with an unfinished story.
Thanks so much Giulia Macario for asking and allowing me to share my ideas on my work and thanks We Are Grryo for sharing my story.
