BEAUTY: Photography--Peter Essick

Photographer Peter Essick must fly a drone to capture these marvelous images that read like fascinating abstract paintings full of texture. Hovering over construction sites, stacked shipping containers, or areas of mud, gravel, and snow, he frames and composes his shots so they are disconnected from their surroundings, making them objects of beauty in and of themselves. A statement on his website says, "His goal is to make photographs that move beyond documentation to reveal in careful compositions the human impact of development as well as the enduring power of the land."

http://www.peteressick.com/

BEAUTY: Photography--Mitch Rouse

The aerial photography of Mitch Rouse is epic and I especially love his shots of the new skyline in San Francisco, along with shots of the Golden Gate Bridge and other landmarks.

"Mitch began exploring the realm of aerial photography, with high tech drones. Unsatisfied with the limitations of drones, he began photographing primarily straight down from fixed wing aircraft. Mitch has now found the sweet spot between the two by developing a system that incorporates a Bell 407 helicopter, with a Shot Over gimbal mounted to the nose, which contains a 150 MP Phase One Industrial camera. This state-of-the-art system provides outstanding image quality and output superior to either of the previous iterations. Mitch is currently working with a retired NASA scientist to explore the worlds of photorealistic mapping with 10 times the resolution of Google and virtual reality of real world places."

https://www.mitchrouseaerials.com/

BEAUTY: Painting--Ben Reeves

I love the shimmering work of painter Ben Reeves. He creates magical images of city lights seen from above. There are some spots in the Berkeley Hills that overlook Berkeley/Oakland and across the Bay to San Francisco that look just like this...

Top to bottom: All Nighter; City Below; Evening Sun; Glimmer; Mid-1980s; Midnight; Port City; Summer

https://www.benreeves.org/

BEAUTY: Painting--Bradley Hankey

Bradley Hankey's color-saturated images of southern California at beautiful sunsets or glorious sunrises are lyrical and delicious. But it's his aerial shots of Santa Monica and the coast at night that make me swoon--I love seeing lights at night from the window of a jet like that. It's so lovely and provokes profound thoughts about how man manipulates the environment (we can actually light up the night when the sun is not shining) and the nature of reality in our universe (all is darkness unless you are near a star)...

https://bradleyhankey.com/

BEAUTY: Fabric Art--Victoria Rose Richards

English fabric artist Victoria Rose Richards makes unique, charming embroidered pieces: she shows aerial views of British landscapes featuring fields, forests, rivers, lakes (look for tiny boaters!), farm lands, and flowered meadows, some seen through wispy clouds.

https://www.instagram.com/victoriaroserichards/

And sells her work on Etsy.

https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/chromatomania