CFA Artist of the Month | 10

French painter Marion Tubiana is known for her emotionally resonant, hyperrealistic portraits of animals that combine technical mastery with profound empathy. With formal training in academic drawing and a background in graphic design, Tubiana made the decisive shift to full-time painting to pursue a more intimate and expressive creative path. Her chosen subjects—wild, domestic, or mythical—are rendered with striking realism, yet always carry an inner life that transcends the surface.

Working in oil and soft pastel, Tubiana approaches each portrait with an almost meditative dedication. Her compositions are minimalist and focused, often isolating the animal against a subdued background to highlight its essence. In works like “Le curieux” and “Le gardien,” the gaze of the subject becomes a portal to emotional connection. In “Nemean” and “Le pêcheur,” she invokes symbolic weight and narrative stillness, revealing the timeless, almost sacred role animals play in our imagination.

More than visual likeness, Tubiana seeks to portray soul and presence. Her works resonate with collectors and audiences alike for their ability to evoke silence, stillness, and respect for the non-human world. Tubiana continues to build a remarkable body of work that invites contemplation, empathy, and a deeper reverence for life.

London-based artist, designer, and researcher Liang Junpeng works at the intersection of biotechnology, architecture, and algorithmic design. Affiliated with The Bartlett School of Architecture at UCL, Junpeng explores biodesign and computational aesthetics as speculative tools to reimagine sustainable futures and multispecies cohabitation. His work merges scientific precision with conceptual inquiry, constructing systems that engage both living and digital matter.

In his recent installation series, Junpeng presents a modular array of bio-fabricated forms grown and suspended within aluminum scaffolds. Each “installation unit,” composed of microbial liquids, bio-based materials, and translucent containers, resembles a hybrid between a lab experiment and an altar to emergent life. These structures cultivate material over time—dripping, layering, mutating—evoking processes more grown than made. The “final models,” printed in organic biomaterial, recall unfamiliar anatomies or future relics, questioning the boundary between design and organism.

Junpeng’s research-based practice interrogates our evolving relationship with nonhuman systems and the ethics of fabrication in the age of biotechnology. Through a fusion of synthetic and natural processes, his work critiques anthropocentric paradigms while proposing poetic alternatives. What emerges is not only form, but dialogue—between biology, machine, and maker—embodied in structures that pulse with quiet potential.

Sharon Covert is a fine art photographer whose haunting self-portraits exist at the intersection of myth, memory, and feminine identity. Working primarily in black and white, Covert creates enigmatic tableaux that evoke the language of dreams and the timeless rituals of storytelling. Her background in music and performance informs the emotional cadence of her imagery, which often features veiled figures, forest paths, birds, or symbolic gestures rendered with cinematic softness.

In works such as “A Life in Peace and Love” and “I’m Coming Home,” Covert explores themes of vulnerability, transformation, and the invisible realms between worlds. “Written in the Stars” conjures the vastness of the cosmos within the contours of the human form, while “I Will Follow You to the Ends of the Earth” and “L’âme de la forêt” immerse viewers in a lyrical, forested unknown where soul and shadow merge.

Entirely self-taught, Covert uses photography as both personal ritual and universal expression. Her images transcend time, appearing as visions from folklore or memory, suspended in poetic ambiguity. With each composition, she invites viewers into a contemplative space—one of silence, intuition, and sacred presence—where the unseen becomes visible and the internal world is gently revealed.