My ninth and tenth top ten artists are Ruth Faktor and Marianne Huhn.

Ruth Faktor is an Isreali artist who lives and works in Tel Aviv.  She works most frequently with figurative images, portraying friendship, siblings, family, and home themes.  Her bas relief carving is simple and refined.  She draws from the architecture of Tel Aviv to form pathways and show journeys, and texture and matte to gloss finishes to bring depth to the images. She had a well received show in East Lansing, Michigan at Saper Galleries and Custom Framing.

http://www.sapergalleries.com/RuthFaktor.html

Marianne Huhn is from Melbourne, Australia.  She has taught and lectured all around Australia and draws from architectural and street themes to express concealing/revealing who we are and how we choose to portray ourselves.  She also uses landscape and text to create tender and slightly ethereal vignette narratives of life.

While she doesn’t actually work with tiles, her line and color work are two things that are absolutely inspiring to me.  She throws her pieces and leaves finger marks inside to leave her craft marks intact.  This idea of leaving your mark, a deep root, under the precise  illustrations of the outside surface is greatly appealing.

http://www.mariannehuhn.com/