Explore diverse interpretations of vision in art and writing. View this online exhibition featuring one selected work from each artist and writer. To experience the complete collection, order your copy of the Vision 2026 issue of ArtAscent Art & Literature Journal.

ArtAscent Gold Artist of the 2026 Vision call for artists.

Miguel Barros

ArtAscent Gold Artist of the 2026 Vision call for artists.

Miguel Barros paints from memory—not the passive kind that merely records, but the kind that aches. His imaginary landscapes of Lisbon are equal parts homage and elegy, holding a city between what was lived and what is longed for.

For Miguel, Lisbon is not merely a place; it is a visual language. In works such as “The Sky of Lisbon” and “When the Lisbon Cathedral Flies,” the city’s architecture dissolves into vertical rhythms and colour fields that feel simultaneously immediate and dream-like. Rooftops, arches, and façades are distilled into bold geometric passages—terracotta and gold anchoring the lower registers while luminous blues ascend and dissolve, evoking the azul of both the Tagus River and the city’s iconic azulejo tilework. These paintings do not depict Lisbon so much as embody the sensation of remembering it from afar.

What makes Miguel’s practice particularly distinctive is his material process. Working in oil on canvas, he incorporates recycled fabrics, canvas remnants, and found textiles, stitching and layering them into the picture surface. In “Arch and Palm Tree,” “Bairro Alto,” and “Words Are Carried Away by the Wind,” vertical strips of repurposed material run the full height of the canvas, simultaneously suggesting architectural columns, the striations of memory, and a commitment to sustainability. The texture these elements introduce is not decorative; it makes physical the accumulation of time and experience that the paintings thematically explore.

The French painter Robert Delaunay pursued a comparable ambition in his early-twentieth-century studies of Paris—most famously, the Eiffel Tower series. Like Barros, Delaunay fragmented recognizable urban forms through prismatic colour and planar abstraction, believing that the emotional truth of a city could only be released by breaking apart its literal appearance. Where Delaunay’s Orphism sought the dynamic energy of modernity, Miguel’s canvases are weighted with a quieter tenderness—the saudade, or untranslatable Portuguese longing, of exile.

Vision, for Miguel, is inseparable from migration and loss. Having moved from Luanda, Angola, to Calgary, Canada, in 2014, he paints Lisbon from across two continents, and that distance is built into every canvas. The imagined city is always just beyond reach, held together by the will to remember. Through colour, layered material, and abstracted form, he invites viewers to ask what it means to carry a place within oneself—and what responsibilities that preservation demands.

Miguel Barros was born in Lisbon in 1962 and holds citizenship in Portugal, Angola, and Canada. He holds a degree in Architecture and Interior Design from IADE, Lisbon, and has exhibited across Portugal, Canada, India, and Angola, with group exhibitions in the U.S., Japan, and Italy. His work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Modern Art in India, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and Oriente Foundation in Portugal, the Sanctuary of Fátima, and the embassies of Portugal in multiple countries. His awards include the 2025 MAC Painting Prize in Lisbon and first prize in the Skies category at the Colours of Humanity exhibition in the U.S. in 2024.

Miguel Barros is the Gold Artist of the ArtAscent “Vision” call for artists. To see the full body of work and profile, get a copy of the 2026 ArtAscent Art & Literature Journal “Vision” issue.

https://www.miguel-barros.com

Gold Writer of the ArtAscent 2026 Vision call for writers.

Lynn Tait

Self-Reflections as One Door Opens

How many times must I walk through gateways leading to the next opening or closing? There’s some serious repetition here.

Some days, believe entering and leaving leads to change, learning curves will straighten out, a different world view born. Something wonderful to gaze on besides my navel…

Gold W. Lynn Tait arrives at vision by way of threshold—the gate, the doorway, the in-between space where what we have been and what we might become stand briefly face to face.

Her poem “Self-Reflections as One Door Opens” is an ekphrastic work, meaning it is written in direct response to visual art. The tradition of ekphrasis—from the Greek, meaning description or vivid representation—has a long history in poetry, from Keats’s meditation on a Grecian urn to W.H. Auden’s engagement with Bruegel’s Icarus. Lynn brings her own irreverent intelligence to the form. Her two source images are a photograph of the vermilion Torii Gates of Kyoto, Japan—the sacred arches of Shinto tradition that mark the passage from the mundane into the divine—and Hilma af Klint’s “Group X, No. 1, Altarpiece,” a large-scale abstract painting from 1915 in which geometric form and spiritual symbolism converge. The pairing is unexpected and entirely fitting. Both images are concerned with the unseen: what lies beyond the threshold, what cannot quite be named but can nonetheless be moved toward.

What Lynn does with these twin prompts is characteristically her own. The poem does not describe the images so much as think through them, using their visual logic as a scaffold for an interior reckoning. The speaker is wry and self-aware, not above puncturing solemnity with a well-placed observation, and the poem balances the serious and the playful with the ease of a writer who has long understood that wit and vulnerability are not opposites. Readers will recognize something of themselves in the voice—its impatience, its longing, its refusal to pretend that the path forward is simpler than it is. The poem moves through shifting registers—abstract and concrete, comic and earnest, inward and outward—and arrives at a point where the reader must ultimately decide how to read.

The American poet Kim Addonizio, whom Lynn cites as a particular influence, works in a similarly confessional and formally limber mode—poems that are streetwise and emotionally unguarded, that locate the sacred in the difficult and the everyday, and that earn their grace through unflinching honesty rather than decoration. Lynn’s voice carries that same quality: sharp enough to cut, and tender enough to matter.

Vision, in this poem, is not clarity but courage—the willingness to keep walking through gates, to look at what follows, and to make a choice about what to do with it. The poem asks us to consider our own thresholds and the shadows that accompany us across them.

Lynn Tait is a poet and photographer residing in Sarnia, Ontario, Canada, on the traditional territory of the Aamjiwnaang First Nations. She is the author of “You Break It You Buy It” (Guernica Editions, 2023), available in Canada, the U.S., and the U.K. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Fire, FreeFall, Vallum, CV2, Literary Review of Canada, and over 100 North American anthologies. Her digital photo art has appeared on the covers of 10 books and in Still Point Arts Quarterly.

Lynn Tait is the Gold Writer of the ArtAscent “Vision” call for writers. To see the full body of work and profile, get a copy of the 2026 ArtAscent Art & Literature Journal “Vision” issue.

ArtAscent Silver Artist of the 2026 Vision call for artists.

Leanne Trivett S.

ArtAscent Silver Artist of the 2026 Vision call for artists.

Leanne Trivett S. works at the threshold between what is seen and what is felt, between the world as it appears and the world as it is remembered.

Her series “What the Garden Asked Me to Remember” draws its deepest source from Leanne’s grandmother—a porcelain painter who understood flowers not merely as subjects but as quiet companions, expressions of patience and living beauty. That grandmother’s vision, precise and tender, shaped the way a granddaughter would come to see. Leanne’s images gather those inherited fragments of perception and reimagine them through a more fluid, contemporary language: colours bleeding into one another, forms dissolving and reappearing, clarity giving way to the softness that memory itself has. To look at these photographs is to experience seeing as it actually works—layered, atmospheric, and always tinged with what came before.

Working with DSLR and mirrorless cameras, Leanne builds her pictures through in-camera multiple exposures, intentional camera movement (ICM), blur, and digital collage assembled in Photoshop. In “I Am a Reflection of What I Grow” and “The Garden Remembers,” floral forms—roses, hydrangeas, seed pods—are simultaneously hyperreal and spectral. Botanical structures float against deep, near-black grounds, shot through with radiant colour; a barely legible face emerges from petals, the self and the garden no longer distinct. In “Seed Chambers,” a single explosive bloom on a circular ground sends filaments radiating outward like a diagram of memory mid-motion. In each image, the literal and the dreamed coexist without resolution—and that irresolution is the point.

The Swedish artist Hilma af Klint, one of the earliest pioneers of Western abstraction, provides a compelling parallel. Like Leanne, af Klint held that true seeing reaches beyond the visible—that feeling and time must be rendered through intuitive rather than purely descriptive means. Whereas Klint used geometry and symbols to map the invisible, Leanne uses photographic layering and dissolution; both share the conviction that art is not a record of the world but a felt encounter with what lies beneath its surface.

Vision, in this series, is understood as lineage—a way of attending to the world reverently, with devotion to what might otherwise fade, passing across generations. Leanne’s photographs are the continuation of that conversation: her grandmother’s careful gaze is present within every dissolving petal, every half-remembered colour.

Leanne Trivett S. is a photographer and visual artist whose work explores identity, memory, and emotion through experimental self-portraiture, florals, and abstraction. She holds a BFA in Theatre from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and brings a background in professional singing to her visual practice. Her work has been exhibited at the Griffin Museum, the Los Angeles Center of Photography, PH21 Gallery in Hungary, and Fotonostrum in Barcelona. She is a recipient of the EMERGE 2024 Fellowship from the Midwest Center for Photography and the Julia Margaret Cameron Awards. Leanne teaches at Santa Fe Workshops and Maine Media, and has three solo exhibitions forthcoming.

Leanne Trivett S. is the Silver Artist of the ArtAscent “Vision” call for artists. To see the full body of work and profile, get a copy of the 2026 ArtAscent Art & Literature Journal “Vision” issue.

www.leannetrivettsphotography.com

ArtAscent Bronze Artist of the 2026 Vision call for artists.

Melissa S Zane

ArtAscent Bronze Artist of the 2026 Vision call for artists.

Melissa S. Zane builds her paintings as much as she paints them, constructing dimensional surfaces from acrylic that shift and reveal themselves differently as light moves and the viewer’s position changes.

Her practice encompasses two distinct but related bodies of work. The Illuminated tree paintings—among them “Illuminated Aspen Trees,” “Illuminated Lancaster Ginkgo Tree,” and “Illuminated Oak Tree”—are built through successive acrylic layers that rise from the canvas into sculptural relief. Trunks and branches emerge as raised, three-dimensional forms, finished in metallic gold or silver against deep black grounds. Individual leaves, rendered with botanical specificity—ginkgo fans, oak lobes, aspen ovals—cluster densely across arching canopies, while root systems curl and interlace along the lower edge. As light moves across the surface throughout the day, details appear and recede, so that the painting is never quite the same twice.

Her floral works engage vision from a different angle. In “Poppies,” blooms fill the canvas at close range, their petals layered in reds and oranges that pulse with warmth against silvery-green foliage. “Purple Crocus” presses deeper still, its interlocking petals dissolving the boundary between foreground and background until the composition becomes nearly abstract. “The Gilded Lotus” takes a quieter register—pale blue lotus leaves edged in gold, each one veined with precision, suspended in a luminous field. Across all these works, Melissa moves fluidly between representation and decoration, between close observation and pure sensation.

Georgia O’Keeffe, whom Melissa cites as a primary influence, pioneered the practice of isolating and magnifying natural forms until they become something larger than themselves. Both artists understand that enlargement is a form of argument—that to bring a flower or leaf to monumental scale is to insist on its significance. Where O’Keeffe achieved her power through the spare luminous flatness of oil on canvas, Melissa works through accumulation and dimension. Her surfaces are not windows but objects, textured and responsive to light in ways that flat painting cannot be.

Vision, for Melissa, is neither instantaneous nor passive. It is a process of discovery sustained over time, in which the painting collaborates with its environment—the hour, the angle of light, the position of the viewer—to produce an experience that is always unfolding. Her work asks us to look slowly, to stay longer, and to accept that what is visible is only ever partial.

Melissa S. Zane is a contemporary visual artist based in Pennsylvania, specializing in high-relief illuminated tree paintings and organic botanical compositions. She is a resident artist at Lancaster Art Vault in Lancaster. Her paintings have been exhibited in juried and invitational exhibitions including the “Nature Magnified” exhibit at the Lancaster Art Vault (2025) and the David Lyall Gallery (2023), “Night Trees” at the Jury MH Art Gallery in Marietta (2023), and the “Vivid” national juried exhibition at d’Art Center in Norfolk (2025).

Melissa S. Zane is the Bronze Artist of the ArtAscent “Vision” call for artists. To see the full body of work and profile, get a copy of the 2026 ArtAscent Art & Literature Journal “Vision” issue.

https://mszfineart.com

ArtAscent Distinguished Artist of the 2026 Vision call for artists.

KP Miller

ArtAscent Distinguished Artist of the 2026 Vision call for artists.

Distinguished Artist of the ArtAscent “Vision” call for entry. To see the full body of work and exhibition, grab a copy of the 2026 ArtAscent Art & Literature Journal “Vision” issue.

KPOEgoesplaces.com

ArtAscent Distinguished Artist of the 2026 Vision call for artists.

Debra Soule

ArtAscent Distinguished Artist of the 2026 Vision call for artists.

Distinguished Artist of the ArtAscent “Vision” call for entry. To see this in more detail and the full exhibition, grab a copy of the 2026 ArtAscent Art & Literature Journal “Vision” issue.

djsouleartstudio.com

ArtAscent Distinguished Artist of the 2026 Vision call for artists.

Aaron Krone

ArtAscent Distinguished Artist of the 2026 Vision call for artists.

Distinguished Artist of the ArtAscent “Vision” call for entry. To see this in more detail and the full exhibition, grab a copy of the 2026 ArtAscent Art & Literature Journal “Vision” issue.

https://kroneaaron.wixsite.com/aaronkrone

ArtAscent Distinguished Artist of the 2026 Vision call for artists.

Lee Lessem

ArtAscent Distinguished Artist of the 2026 Vision call for artists.

Distinguished Artist of the ArtAscent “Vision” call for entry. To see the full body of work and exhibition, grab a copy of the 2026 ArtAscent Art & Literature Journal “Vision” issue.

ArtAscent Distinguished Artist of the 2026 Vision call for artists.

Alison Lake

ArtAscent Distinguished Artist of the 2026 Vision call for artists.

Distinguished Artist of the ArtAscent “Vision” call for entry. To see the full body of work and exhibition, grab a copy of the 2026 ArtAscent Art & Literature Journal “Vision” issue.

www.alisonlake.photography

ArtAscent Distinguished Artist of the 2026 Vision call for artists.

Dakin Roy

ArtAscent Distinguished Artist of the 2026 Vision call for artists.

Distinguished Artist of the ArtAscent “Vision” call for entry. To see the full body of work and exhibition, grab a copy of the 2026 ArtAscent Art & Literature Journal “Vision” issue.

https://www.dakinroy.com

ArtAscent Distinguished Artist of the 2026 Vision call for artists.

Moti Bazak

ArtAscent Distinguished Artist of the 2026 Vision call for artists.

Distinguished Artist of the ArtAscent “Vision” call for entry. To see this in more detail and the full exhibition, grab a copy of the 2026 ArtAscent Art & Literature Journal “Vision” issue.

motibazak.com

ArtAscent Distinguished Artist of the 2026 Vision call for artists.

Geetika Bansal

ArtAscent Distinguished Artist of the 2026 Vision call for artists.

Distinguished Artist of the ArtAscent “Vision” call for entry. To see this in more detail and the full exhibition, grab a copy of the 2026 ArtAscent Art & Literature Journal “Vision” issue.

art.pinkbluepurple.com

ArtAscent Distinguished Artist of the 2026 Vision call for artists.

Christian Rieben

ArtAscent Distinguished Artist of the 2026 Vision call for artists.

Distinguished Artist of the ArtAscent “Vision” call for entry. To see this in more detail and the full exhibition, grab a copy of the 2026 ArtAscent Art & Literature Journal “Vision” issue.

www.christianrieben.com

ArtAscent Distinguished Artist of the 2026 Vision call for artists.

Aurelie Moutien

ArtAscent Distinguished Artist of the 2026 Vision call for artists.

Distinguished Artist of the ArtAscent “Vision” call for entry. To see this in more detail and the full exhibition, grab a copy of the 2026 ArtAscent Art & Literature Journal “Vision” issue.

ArtAscent Distinguished Artist of the 2026 Vision call for artists.

SandExperiment

ArtAscent Distinguished Artist of the 2026 Vision call for artists.

Distinguished Artist of the ArtAscent “Vision” call for entry. To see this in more detail and the full exhibition, grab a copy of the 2026 ArtAscent Art & Literature Journal “Vision” issue.

https://linktr.ee/sandexperiment

Distinguished Writer of the ArtAscent 2026 Vision call for writers.

P.S. Gama

Natural Envisagement

At beautiful sight (and with precision)
flowering branches come into vision
full of sweet scent in concision.

Best flourishing season is imminent
to one’s eye merry contentment
hope and tenderness in sprouts
ornamenting all whereabouts…

Distinguished Writer of the ArtAscent “Vision” call for entry. To see the full body of work, grab a copy of the 2026 ArtAscent Art & Literature Journal “Vision” issue.

https://medium.com/@RVPSG