January 1 - February 1, 2024
SKYIE MAGAZINE
Jullie Dias is a photographer, makeup artist, and surrealist self-portrait artist. She believes that art is the way for healing; it doesn't matter what the medium. She wants to give to as many artists as possible the stage to share their souls. The SKYIE Magazine grew out of a dream of a 12-year-old girl who saw her life taking unplanned directions, and ended up letting that dream hide in the depths of her heart. Years later, with many changes having taken place, that dream returned with brutal force, and along with the desire to spread art around the world and make space for those who share the same passion. This art magazine was born.
Right: Self-Regulation (2023). ©Jullie Dias
SELF PORTRAITS ON FIRE
Danielle Rackowski is a Self-Portrait Photo Artist based in New Jersey. She uses digital photography and digital photo manipulation to create expressive and semi-pictorial digital fine art images. Bold and bright colors are transformed to attain a sense of inner clarity and to reveal subconscious truths. Her images are grounded between reality and imagination (the familiar and the enigmatic), which create a stillness in motion.
Her passion for swift surrealistic, impressionistic, and expressionistic styles transcend and empower her artworks into deeper narratives of self-reflection and observation. By compositing, layering, and abstracting digital imagery through a painterly aesthetic, she undergoes a series of metamorphoses, and expresses subtle and complex intricacies on the surreality and duality of emotion.
Her studio practice and photographic process also bring attention to the healing nature of confronting her own introspective and intuitive gaze before the gaze of the camera. Her transformative artworks create meaningful connections between the harmonious balance of color, nature, and spiritual growth. These visual and textural elements enrich her self portraits, which visualize the intangibility of emotion as a tangible and inevitable force that can live beneath and beyond the surface.
Right: Golden (2021), Left: Glow (2020). ©Danielle Rackowski
DAISY'S GRILL (2020) ©Jo Ann Chaus
Jo Ann Chaus is a visual artist from and based in the New York metropolitan area. As a self-portrait artist in her sixth decade (b. 1954), she projects the psychological states of mind of the women she performs as and the experience of living as a female identifying individual in the roles and expectations adopted by and imposed on girls and women in a western culture. Her work is both direct and nuanced, giving the viewer space to bring their own narratives to hers.
The focus of this body of work, "Conversations with Myself," began in 2016, after a seven year project self-published as "Sweetie & Hansom," about a family experiencing loss and grief, learning along the way how to support one another. "Conversations" is currently under edit for publication.
Jo Ann began her photographic career in 2000 at ICP in NYC. She began with black and white film, moving toward her signature color work, first as a color medium format film photographer for ten years, ultimately switching to digital capture. She is influenced by "the light," anywhere, anytime, weather and the natural world, and artifacts from and of her past.
Her exhibitions and recognitions include Portland, Oregon's 2022 and 2023 Photolucida Critical Mass top 50; Julia Margaret Cameron Overall Winning portfolio, with a Solo exhibition in Barcelona, Spain 2024; Cortona on the Move Solo exhibition 2021, Cortona, Italy; Soho Photo Gallery Solo exhibition 2021; Fotonostrum Gala Awards Solo exhibition 2019.
Gaia in Leaf Dress ©Katherine Crockett
Having lived a lifetime as a dancer, I feel and experience the world in a sensual and kinesthetic way. My body is the instrument of my expression. In my film and photography work, my lens becomes an extension of my body, moving with me with each gesture, sensing my body’s instinctive connections to space, to nature, to the elements and to my own physical sensuality and how this connection is felt and expressed. The camera becomes a partner, engaging in an intimate duet, a dance, a conversation. Being both the photographer as well as the subject, I express a perspective that arises solely from my own female experience and gaze. I hold the autonomy on how my body is seen and an authorship of my own work in a way that I don't have when being seen through someone else’s lens and perspective. I use the camera not to capture, but to embody. This exploration of the undivided un-objectified connection to the body, is a priority in my work. I seek to reclaim the body in all its emotions, desires, and pleasure. Creating from inside my own body and generating from my own gaze, I invite the viewer into the intimate connection of the seeing-feeling experience.
Between the Lines (June 2023). ©George Elzidi
"I am a 22-year-old content creator from the Caribbean island of Saint Lucia. I specialize in fashion, lifestyle, and creative self-portrait photography."
bed of roses ©Emily Hafele
I am a photographer, artist, hairstylist, and cat mom. I found my calling as a photographer and love showcasing the beauty that resonates from deep within. There's something special about removing all the layers, so you're left with just the person -- raw, honest, and breathtaking. Each person I've had the honor of photographing has left a mark on me and their soul-spark leaves shining a little brighter. This is what I love about what I do. I discovered self portraiture initially, as a means to learn how to photograph others. In the process, I discovered so much more about myself. It has became an artistic outlet that I can get lost in.
Self-portrait red chair 3 ©Lalidi
This series is about life and death as the only certainty in life. You can hang onto life fiercely, you can try to hide from death, you can try to run away from death, but the inevitable jump will happen and we must all bow low as the curtain falls.
jack in the box ©Tiina Lilja
I began documenting my life through self portrait photography in earnest back in 2019, having accepted a gig way, way behind the scenes fine art and could not find the time to express myself through painting anymore and have not looked back since. My photography is inspired by storytelling, folklore and all things cute and colourful.
Duality (2022) ©Shannon Maltbie-Davis
Shannon Maltbie-Davis is a visual artist based in Basehor, Kansas. She received a BFA in Graphic Design and an MFA in Visual Communications from Kansas State University. She has worked as a graphic designer and marketing assistant at The Coleman Company, an Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at Friends University, and the Communications Program Director at Friends University. After leaving the workforce to focus on her family and raise her two sons, she returned to her love of art by pursuing a BFA in Photography at the University of Kansas. She utilizes her background in graphic design and visual communications to inform and construct the compositions within her photographs. By balancing the elements and principles of design with the conceptual layering of visual information and textures, Shannon aspires to produce artwork that resonates with the viewer.
My self-portraits are a direct reflection of my internal condition. The ideas I choose to visually illustrate are based on personal reflection. The culmination of deep introspection on the person I think I am and the person I want to become. Photography becomes a form of self-healing. The images produced are a vessel to hold my thoughts, emotions, and feelings. A physical space to discard and store the weaker portions of myself as I continually strive to evolve into a better person. Each finished composition incorporates multiple images that I have photographed, layered together, and combined with filters, masks, and adjustment layers in Adobe Photoshop. In each image, special attention is given to color, texture, and movement in an effort to strengthen the primary concept being conveyed.
Variants ©Quinn Miller
Quinn Miller was born and raised in Clewiston, FL. He discovered his love for photography during middle school when exposed to the work of Erik Johansson. This led him to pursuing an education in the arts, where he found himself at South Florida Community College and Florida Gulf Coast University, attaining a Bachelor's in the Arts. He currently resides in Lake Worth, FL and teaches art at the High School level.
"As a kid, I always wanted superpowers. Who didn't? My TV screen was flooded with images of X-men and the Justice League. What power would I get? That naivety eventually propelled me to fall in love with photography, my very first superpower: the ability to freeze time with the click of a single button. Eventually, I unlocked another superpower: Photoshop. I was able to bend reality to match the daily ideas that swarmed my head. As a narrator, I can manipulate the story you see before you to manifest my own, even though before that, it had its own. Oftentimes, I use the inquiry of, 'What do thoughts of stress, depression, anxiety, and so on look like as tangible scenes?' My style relies on surreal elements, and the incorporation of obscured faces to promote the idea of anonymity, so that viewers can insert themselves into the images."
'Inner Dialogue' (From the 'Inner Dialogue' Series), August 2023. ©gazelleinspire
I began my self-portrait journey almost 14 years ago to explore the creative process from the other side of the lens. My journey has led me to explore many themes and ideas from a different perspective. Some of my recent work has been focused on the Inner Dialogue of emotions that we all hide and often ignore to present a more socially accepted persona in our day to day lives.
"Don't Hesitate!" (March 31, 2023). ©Ethan Riddle
“Burnout” is a word that many creatives fear. Even a quick mention of it will have the nearest person blocking their ears and running out the room as if they’ve seen a ghost. A reaction may not occur to that extreme, but it is an unfortunate burden of many creative individuals. While I consider myself lucky to have avoided its grasp for such a long amount of time, I am often overwhelmed by the excessiveness of ideas for future artworks, all of which will take forever and will require my full undivided attention. It feels strange to state this, but I am declaring that having too many ideas can be a bad thing. If I plan to finish five artworks within a month and I manage to barely complete one of them, problems arise in my self-assessment of skills and motivation. “Am I still an artist?” I begin to second-guess whether or not I am capable of creating art that I will be truly happy with, in which works that are quicker to finish appear to be “lazy” and meant to not be taken seriously. However, this should not be the case since all projects are the embodiment of a creative person’s ideas, whether it takes an hour or a month; or even a year if determined enough. I get very depressed and generally hopeless when facing the realization that I may not create everything that I intend to within my life. Immortality would do little in soothing this affliction, for I would have more projects, most of which I could spend an eternity on. As of recently, I’ve come to the realization that I should work on one project at a time in order to avoid overthinking everything in case the finished work is not to my level of expectation. The process of creating art should be something that is entertaining and/or personally fulfilling, rather than being a list of chores. Overall, these photos are how I feel when presented with the anxiety of self-doubt, while the silly artworks are often tools of masking it.
Hello, my name is Ethan Riddle and I am a visual artist from Bangor, Pennsylvania. Although collage is my primary medium of interest, I often enjoy working on digital art, photography, drawings (which are often doodles that I find to be amusing), and anything else that may get my creative energy flowing. Collage art holds a special place in my heart because it was responsible for getting me interested in pursuing art as not only a career, but as a lifestyle. Sometime in 2017, I had moved my place of residency and did not know anyone for the approaching school year, in which I became interested in art as a way of identifying myself with something. The intricate and superb collage animations of Winston Hacking and the wackiness of David Firth’s strange and dark Youtube videos, in addition to the cd booklets of Stanley Donwood’s Radiohead artwork, immediately inspired me to acquire such themes in my own work. Whether or not I was successful in creating work that conveyed these many influences, I began to get tired of the collage medium and forced myself to discover the world of digital art, mainly focussing on editing random photos via Photoshop. As of current, I am pursuing a Studio Art Major at Lafayette College and I am hoping to grow my presence on social media, since it allows for opportunities like this to occur. I’ve been very fortunate from a few successes in my creative journey, and I hope to entertain the public and inspire artists through my body of work.
SMAG x SPOF Magazine Cover. Front Cover Art: Consumed by ©Quinn Miller. Back Cover Art: don't look back by ©Tiina Lilja
Jullie Dias - Founder and CEO of SKYIE Magazine
SKYIE Magazine is an International Art Magazine where the main mission is solely to be a safe place for expression of feelings in art form, without judgments, right or wrong. Just the singular. Here, we believe that there is no limit to creativity, not even the sky. If you draw, paint, photograph, sing, dance, Model, sculp, etc... We hope to have the pleasure of sharing a lot of art and passion in our magazine.
Danielle Rackowski - Founder and Curator of Self Portraits On Fire Gallery
Self Portraits On Fire is the FIRST and ONLY International Online Photo-Based Art Gallery and Community Platform that curates, supports, and specializes in Contemporary Fine Art Self-Portraiture. The gallery, founded and curated by self-portrait photo artist, Danielle Rackowski, began on October 2, 2020 as an Instagram account supporting and featuring the work of self-portrait photographic artists. Thousands of self-portrait photography submissions on Instagram led the niche platform to expand into a full-fledged online photo-based art gallery for self-portrait photo-based artists in late 2021.
Self Portraits On Fire strives to bring accessibility, inclusion, and visibility to ALL self-portrait photographic art and artists through various curatorial opportunities. Such promotional opportunities include online and virtual exhibitions, online features and publications via the curator's choice and the artist spotlight blog, and gallery collaborations.
Self Portraits On Fire is dedicated to highlighting, presenting, and preserving the creativity and artistry of ALL self-portrait photographic art and artists. This is a space for photographic artists to find meaningful connections and visual inspiration. We believe in celebrating community over competition. We welcome and support a diverse range of creative and fine-art photographic styles, genres, and lens-based methods created and/or captured with the photographic medium. The gallery continues to recognize and support self-portrait photographic art and artists through the acceptance of online submissions.