TRINA STRUWE / MEREDITH PARDUE / MYONG STEBBINS

It is a fortunate circumstance that Michael A. Muller's musical vocation appears to inform and facilitate his alternate vocation, photography. There is a quietly rich, poetic quality to Michael's portraits and landscapes that invites a soundtrack, and the music of his band, Balmorhea, is sweeping and cinematic.

Both of these professions keep Mr. Muller constantly traveling and he was kind enough to share a playlist of some choice good time tunes for the road. 

When I was 17 and 18, I spent some time living in the mountains in Central Mexico. It was a time that changed my life, when I learned to investigate another world on my own terms and rethink all of my assumptions about travel, foreign cultures, and what it means to know a place and it's people. Not soon after, when I was living in New York, there was a massive Manuel Alvarez Bravo retrospective at the Met - literally hundreds of images.  I must have seen it five times. It was so evocative of all the things I loved and missed about Mexico- wandering the quiet streets in the afternoon or the empty rooftops at dawn, gauzy curtains billowing in and out of windows, distant church bells, and soft pools of light.

I have been spending some indulgent time with the work my favorite women artists this month and in the process of poking around I stumbled upon the work of British painter Amy Judd. Her dream-like portraits are dark and sexy, soft, captivating and oozing with a mysterious femininity.