Polish artist Leszek Kostuj works in traditional media like acrylic and oil, as well as in drawing and digital art.

His flights of imagination are often intricately detailed, layered with overlays of faces and eyes, and arranged in waves of cool colors laced with warmer accents.

Kostuj’s subjects, which often include stylized birds, fish and other natural forms, can vary from whimsical and somewhat representational to more pattern-like divisions of space, dimensionally rendered as fantastical reliefs.

I enjoy the way he plays with the relative size of his elements, giving suggestions of distance with scale and pulling your eye deeper into his images. He combines this with compositional arrangements of curvilinear or wavy forms that suggest movement and energy.

There is a playful, dreamlike quality to his paintings, suggesting a stream-of-consciousness approach to their creation.

His website is in Polish, but with translation flags for other languages at upper right>. The galleries in the translated versions are more limited, though, and the full ones are easily navigated in the Polish version. (I also found that once you click on the English translation flag, some of the navigation for the Polish language site does not work properly, particularly the gallery links.)

I found the gallery of new work particularly interesting. You can also find his work on deviantART and other sites linked below.

Franz Xaver Hoch was a German landscape painter and printmaker active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

His dramatic compositions are often cast is subtle, almost melancholy light. Unfortunately, I can find few images sources for Hoch, and little in the way of biographical information — most of that on German language sites.