The distinct smell of wet paint permeates through the brick building. Aside from the light, jazzy tune which escapes an artist’s room and the hushed words of a shopper, the hallway is calm. Nevertheless, the energetic works of art that line each wall breathe the space to life.

Tucked away in Boston’s South End, the SoWa Artists Guild belongs to a larger collection of artwork in the SoWa Art + Design District. Over the past two decades, the area has transformed from a neglected neighborhood of run-down buildings to a cultural destination said to be the soul of Boston’s art scene.

The district now boasts artistry of every form: fashion boutiques, design showrooms and art galleries stretch the entirety of the street. In the summer, the SoWa district hosts an open market with entrepreneurs and local farmers and, in the winter, a market festival decked with string lights. Year-round, however, you can find the Artists Guild open to all visitors, a four-story-tall space that is home to the work of nearly one hundred ardent artists.

From impressionist-style paintings to clay sculptures and fine jewelry, the creativity within the studio is endless and astonishingly diverse. Each artist manages to capture their unique perspective on the beauty and hardships of life through distinct mediums and sets of talents.

Visitor and self-described art enthusiast Matt Callaghan said that he first stumbled across the Artists Guild when visiting the SoWa Open Market with his friends last summer. He said that the always-cordial artists and diverse artwork bring him back to SoWa every couple of months.

“I just love the atmosphere of this place—it’s super calm and the artists are so friendly. And, of course, the art is just incredible. I love how I can walk into one artist’s room and be absolutely blown away by their pieces, and then walk two feet to the next room and see something totally different, but just as great,” Callaghan said.

Paula Ogier uses her room in the Artists Guild to showcase digital art, a skill that she has worked to master over the past decade. Ogier has been selling her pieces in SoWa for nine years and said that the creation process for her designs have undergone major changes since she was first introduced to digital painting. Her work on the Cambridge Center for Adult Education catalog production team revolved around using Photoshop to resize images, which gave her the opportunity to explore the software in her free time at home.

“I got lost in it for hours and hours,” Ogier said. “This was 20 years ago when the equipment for it was almost non-existent, so I’ve gone through a lot of phases with the technology growing. I can do a lot more than when I first started out—I can work more precisely.”

Ogier now works with a stylus on a 22-inch monitor, where she applies digital paint to her photography, paper collages, colored pencil drawings and even blank canvases. Ogier said that she would classify her current artistic style as contemporary, although she finds it hard to label due to its uniqueness.

“People often tell me that they’ve never seen anything like my art before,” Ogier said. “I do a lot of city scenes that take place in Boston because there’s such a great range of architectural styles. I also enjoy painting animals—you’ll find a lot of animals stuck in my city scenes. What I usually say is that I like to paint the man-made world, the natural world and the soul world, and I like to see how the three interact with each other.”

Farther down the same hall brings a room which belongs to Colorado State University’s Creative and Performing Arts Award winner Heather Buechler. Large canvases of skillful splatters and vibrant strokes cover the white walls of her otherwise generic room.

Many of Buechler’s pieces showcase stunning swirls of blue but, while some are hazy and smooth, others possess harsher, more defined elements. She said that when working on these distinct pieces, a commonality remains: she hopes that her work with vivid colors can emanate peace and inspire creativity for the viewer. Buechler said that her intrigue towards these vibrant colors stemmed from her early youth, when she first got her start in drawing.

“All I did as a kid was draw. I loved it. My background is actually in drawing, which I did for about 25 years, but now I do abstract paintings that are loosely based on spirituality and interconnectivity,” Buechler said.

Patricia Busso, a self-taught artist, said that she finds inspiration from her fellow artists from the SoWa studio. She mainly focuses on encaustic, oil and mixed media paintings, but she said that she appreciates experimentation and that her art never ends up looking the same.

“I’m all about playing with new colors and materials. I love experimenting and I never finish a piece until I completely love it,” Busso said. “My love for art really started with photography. I traveled a lot and taking pictures while traveling led to me taking a film class, which then led to me painting. I never actually went to art school, but I still have a lot of mentors and people who I look up to.”

Busso, who also works as a full-time math teacher, said that she feels extremely fortunate to have two jobs which she loves.

“I tell my students how sad it is that most people can’t wait until the work week is over, because you’re essentially waiting for your life to be over; after all, work is the majority of life,” Busso said. “I think about it a lot—how lucky I am. I love what I do, and art is like my alter-ego. My husband asks me each week what my plan is for the weekend, and I always tell him, ‘Why bother asking?’ because he knows that I’ll spend my time painting.”

Busso said that, through her art, she has grown to find beauty in everything—in nature and in the simple things. Busso hopes to be able to convey the same message to her audience: that beauty surrounds us at all times. She said that, to add to what she calls the “beauty of randomness” in her art, she uses palette knives on her paintings to make bold marks, torches to create unique textures and paint scrapers to scrape away layers of wax from the canvas.

“I love that nature is always different, and so all art can be too,” Busso said. “Finding and sharing beauty is my favorite thing. Most of my pieces are nature-inspired, so what I’m trying to say through my work is to take the time to appreciate the beauty around us. We’re all so tall-visioned, and we don’t take enough time to look at our surroundings. Do it. This world can be really beautiful.”