Artist highlight
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Artist highlight
Top 5 Artists | Max Trowbridge
Image credit: Lola Stong-Brett, Until At Last It's Just Me & You, 2026, oil on canvas. Image taken from artist's Instagram.
A spotlight on the Top 5 artists to watch. This week's Top 5 comes from Max Trowbridge, an entrepreneur, writer, and arts advocate who has spent over three decades working across the worlds of contemporary art, fashion, and publishing.
Image credit: Max Trowbridge and Rachael Wise.
Max Trowbridge
Max (Maxine) Trowbridge is a British-American entrepreneur, writer, and arts advocate who has spent more than three decades working across the worlds of contemporary art, fashion, and publishing. A passionate advocate for the visual arts, she has built a career connecting artists, collectors, and cultural institutions through creative collaboration, editorial storytelling, and philanthropy.
As founder of the women's fashion brand Eve & Max, Max explores the dialogue between art and conscious design through collaborations with contemporary artists and thoughtfully produced collections that celebrate craftsmanship and creativity. In 2019, she co-founded Artrinity alongside Joyce Goss and Kenny Goss, a contemporary art collective that connected artists and collectors, through curated exhibitions and philanthropic initiatives.
Her career has also encompassed publishing, digital media, and brand strategy. Max founded the online publication PinkMemo in 2008 before serving as Dallas Editor-in-Chief of PaperCity magazine and Dallas Editor of DuJour, having begun her editorial career at Ocean Drive magazine in Miami.
A former Board President and longtime board member of Dallas Contemporary, Max has remained deeply committed to supporting contemporary art through board leadership, collecting, philanthropy, and championing emerging and established artists alike. Originally from England and now based in Dallas, Max divides her time between Dallas, Dorset, and Palm Beach. She graduated in Fashion Design from the London College of Fashion, where her lifelong appreciation for creativity, craftsmanship, and visual culture took shape.
Lola Stong-Brett
Lola Stong-Brett (b. 1996) is a British artist living and working in Margate. Inspired by Margate’s seascapes, Stong-Brett creates fluid, boldly saturated oil paintings. Drawing from her surroundings, memories, and nostalgia, Lola’s paintings function as diaristic experiences which contemplate existence and the spectrum of human emotion.
“I am fascinated by Lola Stong-Brett’s work, blending abstraction with almost hauntingly cartoon-like figuration and cultural relevance, all while honouring the traditions of fine art and the rich materiality of oil painting. I love the scale of her work—emotional and overwhelming, inspiring yet darkly contentious—drawing me into a world that feels playful, unsettling and deeply human. Lola is definitely on my radar.”
Lola Stong-Brett, Après de L’Orangerie, 2024, oil on canvas, 75 x 67 in. Image courtesy of artist.
Jack Coulter
Jack Coulter (b. 1994) is an Irish artist who creates abstract expressionist paintings informed by his synaesthesia, which causes him to experience sound as colour. Coulter’s paintings are named after the songs which inspired him, actively transmuting the listening experience into visual elements. Earlier this year, Coulter collaborated with Sir Elton John to paint Tiny Dancer whilst listening to John perform live on a piano beside him, after which the painting was auctioned to benefit the Elton John AIDS Foundation.
“The freedom of Jack Coulter’s abstract expressionism—oscillating between music, colour, movement and painterly storytelling—is quite literally breathtaking. His synaesthesia gives him the extraordinary ability to see sound as colour, translating the music he hears and the emotions he feels into intensely expressive, visceral paintings. For me, it’s his instinctive rhapsody of sound, colour and feeling that makes his work so utterly compelling.”
Jack Coulter, Tears Dry on Their Own (Amy Winehouse), 2026, oil, acrylic, enamel and ink on canvas. Image courtesy of Winsor Birch.
Daisy Parris
Daisy Parris (b. 1993) is a British artist who creates work that explores inner, psychological territory. Their paintings — some text-driven, some abstract — draw on a visual language shaped by lived experience, relationships, and the full emotional range of being human. Parris is represented by Sim Smith in Camberwell, London.
“Daisy Parris’s work draws me in through its deeply human vernacular—at times poetic, at others brutally honest or quietly tender. Their layered combination of gestural brushstrokes, colour, text, stitching and mark-making creates canvases that seem almost alive, speaking from somewhere profoundly visceral. When a work of art can communicate so directly, provoking an emotional response that feels both deeply personal and universally shared, it reminds me why we seek out art in the first place.”
Daisy Parris, Gush, 2026, oil, collaged canvas and cord on canvas. Image courtesy of artist.
Savannah Harris
Savannah Harris’s (b. 1999) abstract paintings evoke a sense of unfiltered thought taking shape — spilling into layered, intricate compositions. Geometry, texture, and colour intertwine intuitively throughout her paintings, drawing on the geological and archaeological forces that have carved and reworked the earth over time. Sand appears frequently in her work, linking back to Harris’ appreciation for her Cuban and Caribbean heritage.
“What I find most compelling about Savannah Harris’s practice is that time itself becomes an abstract medium. Her paintings are built slowly over months, with layers of paint and sand repeatedly accumulated, scraped back and weathered, allowing time and erosion to become embedded within the surface. Knowing that the sand references her Cuban and Caribbean heritage adds another compelling dimension, grounding her canvas in personal heritage—becoming an emotional excavation as much as a painting. Her layered surfaces weave together geometric forms, texture and colour, while accumulating paint and sand evoke the geological and archaeological processes that overall shape an intuitive, chaotic balance.”
Savannah Harris, Bordering Scenes, 2024, oil paint and sand on canvas. Image courtesy of Harlesden High Street.
Olivia Jia
Olivia Jia (b. 1993) is an American artist based in Philadelphia. Jia’s paintings often depict invented books and ephemera, arranged from objects collected or borrowed from family, layered with references to American and Chinese art history. Shaped by her identity as the child of Chinese immigrants, Jia’s work explores heritage, longing, and belonging.
“I recently found myself seriously considering one of Olivia Jia’s paintings, captivated by her extraordinary ability to render light across the illusion of folds of paper with such precision that the work seemed to lift from the wall. Painted in what she describes as a nocturnal palette, her dreamlike medium—inspired by books, photographs, and personal ephemera—explores themes of heritage, belonging, and the emotional resonance of the Chinese diaspora. Jia’s work reminds me that art should be something we feel. Through her meticulous oil paintings, symbolic storytelling, and an almost cinematic use of light, her work has such quiet power that I find it profoundly moving.”
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Olivia Jia, Unfolded (magnolia, moonlight), 2026, oil on board. Image courtesy of artist.
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