ARTISTS

Artur Aguilar is a contemporary artist born in Barcelona and currently working between London and Barcelona.  He studied in the Fine Arts Faculty of Barcelona and has won the First Drawing Award granted by the Spanish General Management of Culture and Arts. The Government of Catalonia awarded him a Plastic Arts scholarship. Since 1980 his work has been shown in different museums and galleries of Spain and in other European countries.  His pictorial practice is based on the application of geometric and mathematical rules. His work is formally reductionist because he returns to geometry in two-dimensionality.  He uses pure shapes and offers rationality through series of elements that are placed in the space, but the colour brings us closer to the warmth of the sensibility. In the Spaces series he invents interior perspectives increasing the geometric space towards a virtual dimension.

                

Kirsten Baskett is a contemporary artist based in London. Receiving an MA in printmaking from Camberwell College she engages with digital technology based on an understanding of traditional methods rather than regarding them as an out-dated medium. She is represented by galleries in London, New York and Paris.  Her work explores time and memory, traces and absence.  The impetus is obsolete technology, which has developed a patina through intense or prolonged human use.  She begin by constructing paper sculptures, which were then cast in resin blocks.  Through photographic, digital and traditional drawing processes, she dissolves away the original form and materiality of the image in order to create a photographic etching plate; a suspended moment.  Changing physical materiality is present in her pieces; where the etched delicate images are printed onto fine Japanese Kozo paper, later encasing them in clear resin.  The works are frozen in time, permanently available to view, but never to experience the true materiality of the object captured within.  All that remains is the latent emotional energy, which the original object had absorbed and the viewer is left uncertain, as to whether the images are dissolving, or coalescing into being.

Lene Bladbjerg is a Danish artist based in London. She was born in Denmark in 1974, but grew up in Brussels, Belgium. The multinational environment prompted Lene’s passion for exploring new countries and cultures, which has influenced her work as an artist.

            

Mary Burtenshaw studied Fine Art at the Norwich School of Art and Design graduating with a Fine Art B.A (Hons) in 1994. She has worked in children’s publishing for many years, illustrating children’s books and creating innovative novelty formats to educate and entertain. Mary paints dramatic impressionist and abstract landscapes which are inspired by her love of the countryside and the many and varied places she has visited, creating the atmosphere and feeling of a place with the use of texture and light. Her acrylics are painted on paper, canvas and wood which give an intensity of colour and a strong texture but also the soft contours that suit the space and changing mood of her subject matter. She continues to always explore the use of her medium.

  

Mark Charlton, born in Margate in 1976, studied at the North East Wales Institute of Art and Design, gaining a BA Hons in Animation Design in 2001.  After spending many productive years working as a freelance animator and motion designer primarily in the music industry, he has devoted his time to developing his own style in mixed media art.  His work is an abstract combination of screen print, painting and collage technique, which allows the exploration of surface texture and graphical composition and he takes inspiration from space exploration and science fiction from the 1950s and 1960s in which he embraces colour and shape and amalgamates with a contemporary gritty urban feel.  The work is energetic and spontaneous, using multiple layers, which are built up over a substantial period of time, until a final composition is realised and refined.  He finds a unique excitement in this layered approach which sees screen print forced to react with painted and collaged surfaces.  Multiple techniques are used to decay and age the surface, which culminates in a final piece that has a striking first impression and a gentle beauty within its close up detail.

          

British artist Jeremy Dickinson lives and works in London and attended York College of Art from 1982-83 and Goldsmiths College in London from 1983-86.  Through precise and playful mastery of oils and acrylics he is bridging several generations of imagination and memory with his work.  Relatable subjects and themes of mapping, transportation and collections have been the common threads of his work for the past thirty years. Toy cars, buses and trucks are stacked, in line, hanging and even flying across the canvas in fresh palettes and true detail.  Jeremy embodies the mastery of traditional still life painting with a conceptual and contemporary edge that verges on timelessness.

    

Gasediel is a figurative artist who creates rich and exuberant cement paintings on canvas.  The artist collects various scenes and features from any hidden and decrepit wall of the city, which are then joined to create poetic wall scenes.  Gasediel was trained as a painter at the Versailles School of Mural Art. Based in London for the past two years, Gasediel continues to work with decorative painting techniques associated with the original process that has been personally developed over time.  These works are inspired by the whole mystery hidden in the colourful torn-posters and graffiti left on the walls of forgotten back streets. After covering each canvas of real cement, Gasediel uses the trompe l’œil technic to recreate the look and feeling of time passing, of weather-worn surfaces that we are accustomed to see in urban areas but to which we do not pay attention.  Gasediel’s ambition is to perpetuate the spontaneous, poetic but also ephemeral and salvage testimony of the everyday life written on city wall .

   

Fran Giffard is a contemporary artist and illustrator known for her vibrant and detailed watercolour paintings of birds, inspired by ornithological natural illustrations. She combines traditional mediums like watercolour, ink, gouache, and pencil to create unique and characterful depictions of birds from around the world, with a focus on species from South America, Australia, and Europe.

 

Vaughn Horsman creates art inspired by the systems, memories and patterns of a synthetic world.  Each sculpture is assembled in wood, metal, paint, machinery and code.  Deliberately designed to resemble architectural forms and the familiar products of industry, they tell stories about the hidden structures inside the city and the complex flows of the present.

    

Kipling Hunt was born and raised in London. “I poke, prod, pull apart and put back together the things I see and feel until I find a meaning for it; in the new stuff I create, in the spaces I reinvent, where the truth as I see it can’t hide.” KH 2020. Hunt graduated with a BA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Arts in 2006; and spent a year in 2018 under the tutelage of Bob and Roberta Smith RA OBE and Joanna Melvin at the Essential School of Painting. Kipling primarily works in paint, ceramic, print, and film, enjoys collaborative projects and in the process of making things grow.

Jiménez’s work explores the intimate and personal ways of seeing the human form. He confronts parallel themes of isolation and attachment as a duality of the human condition. These works depict the effusive desire to capture the soul and the innocence of the human form through art. Full of feelings and ideas, textures and forms, these works reveal the essence of the human condition. Francisco’s aim is to immerse the viewer in his world with his characteristically strong style. This is a world of intimate places, imperfections and sensibility which follows the lines of the human body and the aura that surrounds people.  Francisco was born in 1987 in Jerez de la Frontera, Spain. He soon moved with his family to Madrid, where he became absorbed by the great world of painting. It was in this big city where he became absorbed by the great world of painting and in particular the beauty of the human body in art; the nude. Francisco was influenced by the rich artistic scene in Madrid and began to find his artistic style by experimenting with different mediums and materials. A significant turning point in the development of his work was attending an exhibition by artist Antoni Tàpies. Seeing the work of Tàpies allowed Francisco the freedom to experiment with applying different textures and materials to canvas.

   

Masako Kamiya is a recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship in Painting in 2006 and 2010.  She has a BFA from Montserrat College of Art, and an MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and she is an associate professor in Painting & Foundation Department at Montserrat College of Art.  In her painting, she engages in a dialogue with paint.  Her statement is composed of each dot that is made with the brush.  It requires intimate on the surface, and yet also moving away from the surface in order to see how the layers of mark-making negate earlier marks and reveal a new form.  In this way, she slowly arrives at her own truth, which is visual satisfaction.  The painting are made with gouache on a watercolor paper.  A build up of dots of color into half-inch, stalactite-like columns with rich variations in color layers.  From a distance the painting is a series of dots, which create larger patterns toward a uniformed center.  When observed more closely the third dimension is revealed, a forest of multicolored columns.  The surface is dense.  Colors on the flat surface of the paper react with the colors on the surface of each stalk when perceived closely.  Masako challenges the way a painting is conventionally perceived.  The sculptural surface moves viewers across the field of the painting.  This forces the viewer’s eyes to mix and optically process the various properties of color.  Ultimately, the viewers experience the subtle metamorphosis of the color in the paintings as the painting shifts from two dimensions to three dimensions and back again, according to the viewer’s angle to and distance from the work.

         

Volker Kühn was born in a small town called Neuenkirchen in 1948, but predominantly grew up in Lilienthal, near Bremen.  Eventually his studies brought him to Bremen in 1968 and he majored successfully in sculpting after four years, attending the Bremer University of Artistic Design. He was honored with the young-advancement award, given by the Bremen Senate. He continued his path of success and placed first, in a contest, created by the Bremer College of nautical science in 1976. That same year he created his first etchings, which vastly conquered exhibitions all over the world. After seeing the world during his exhibition tour, he decided, it was time for something new.  Since 1968 Volker Kühn combines his inexhaustible creativity and his motto “Just do it” into art objects.

Marianthi Lainas (born 1964) is a visual artist currently living and working in North West England.  Having spent most of her life living a stone’s throw from the coast, her photographic work is informed by the dynamic places at the far edges of the land, cycles of ebb and flow and the transience of the littoral landscape.   Recent work has focused on visual explorations of remote northern areas, including Arctic Greenland.  Hand-crafted artist books have increasingly become an integral part of Marianthi’s practice, offering an alternative and highly creative approach to presenting series of work. She is represented by galleries in London, Scotland and North West England and copies of her Collector’s Edition books are on permanent display in Ilulissat Kunstmuseum, Greenland.

         

Sarah lembo is a French artist. Her drawings combine tonality, atmosphere and graphic art directly inspired by her travels around the world. She loves to play with paradox, intertwining different worlds and finds in the art of symbolism messages both intimate and universal that enrich her paintings with hidden treasures. She works with different techniques such as pen, ink, watercolour, and digital painting while keeping the hand-drawn craft. Images collected during her peregrinations, such as crabs, virgins, octopus, and any type of flowers, constitute the shapes and forms that animate her fantastical universe.

  

Katalin Macevics (Kate Matsevych) is an artist and illustrator based in London, UK. She grew up in Ukraine where she graduated from School of Fine Arts. Art has always been a passion of hers, since she was 2 years old, little Kate knew she wanted to be an artist.  Kate’s another big passion is traveling, discovering. She has visited more than 40 countries and lived in 7 of them. Traveling is one of her biggest inspirations. She loves to see new places, to feel new emotions, to experience new things. This is what makes her feel alive.  But what inspires her the most in her art is a woman. She devotes her artworks to the beauty of a female body, women in general. Katalin wants to convey wonderful aura, warmth and love that come from women. A woman is not just a mother, not just the soul of the family. A woman is a strong, smart, brave being, capable of achieving anything.

            

Bridget is a ceramic artist with a fascination for stories. Geology is at the core of her work.  Every piece of work she makes begins with the same blank canvas:  a thin sheet of pure white porcelain with its connotations of beauty, value and fragility.  Into this she mixes local raw materials which she finds in the side of a river; in the excavation of a hole; at the edge of a car park.  These interact with the porcelain to build vibrant strata of colour and personal interest where the only limit to interpreting the finer detail is the viewer’s imagination.  She delights in taking risks with materials, repeatedly refining them as she constantly strives to create thin, lustrous work which only reveals its full nature on closer inspection. | Sometimes the interior of her vessels tells a little more of the story.  Bridget likes to incorporate materials from the places or emotions that inspired them.  Drawings, maps and hand-written notes hint at a place or time of significance.  The insides are glazed, which draws out the colours.  The exterior is polished and waxed to a unique glow.  | Bridget is a member of Design Nation, a Crafts Council body set up to promote British design by some of the most innovative designers and craftspeople from across the UK.  She was elected as an Associate Member of the Devon Guild of Craftsmen earlier this year.

        

Alistair was a Scottish photographer, born in Columbia.  He spent his formative years in Belgium and the UK, finally settling in London where he practiced law and pursued his passion for photography.  Over the years he had created a stunning and expansive portfolio of images that are sought after to this day,  Alistair passed away in 2019 at the young age of 58.

His work was inspired by both rural and cosmopolitan themes: from documenting the lives of wild horses on the Loughor Estuary, to abstraction from modernist architecture and to collaborating with actors, performers and artists from around the world. Ideas of transience and the beauty of imperfection had a significant influence on Alistair’s work. Alistair’s work had been exhibited and selected throughout his career and most recently honoured by inclusion into The Leica Meet and their ‘A Selection of Excellence 2016’ collection.

                

Graham is a Scottish artist who trained at Edinburgh College of Art and is now based in East London.  He is interested in architecture and urban spaces, in particular the social housing and iconic tower blocks built throughout London, Glasgow and more widely the UK in the 60’s and 70’s.  His paintings, drawings and prints document these buildings, the surrounding urban environments and our interaction with them.  His focus for the past two years has been the rapidly changing landscape of East London and more recently he has been working on a series of paintings, drawings and prints of the Red Road flats in Glasgow, the remaining blocks of which were demolished in October 2015.  He works principally in acrylics, building up layers of paint in order to achieve a level of luminosity and transparency.  He works from photos and drawings in an attempt to accurately represent his subject whilst incorporating areas of abstraction in his work.

Andrew Neumann is a Boston based artist who works in a variety of media, including sculpture, film and video installation, and electronic/interactive music.  His original artistic output consisted of single channel videos and films.  He then moved on to integrate a variety of electronic and digital technologies into his 3D and sculptural work.  In addition to this, he has been building electronic musical interfaces and is very active in electroacoustic improvisation.

 

Claire Newman-Williams was born and raised in the UK and moved to America in 1988. She worked primarily as a portrait photographer with her work appearing in national and international publications. Returning to the UK in 2005, she began working with alternative processes and old cameras, blending photographs with found images and old text to produce intensely personal multi-media pieces that challenge the viewer to examine the role that memory and nostalgia play in our lives.

   

Francisco Nicolás Parra, lives and works in Spain and London.  Having studied at the School of Applied Arts and Artistic trades of Barcelona, Faculty of Fine Arts in Barcelona and the Ecole Nationale Superieure et des Beaux-Arts of Paris he is now immersing himself in figurative elements, particularly the landscape, through the use of his unique “picture window” technique.  He has also begun to introduce and combine the written language into his pictorial language, graphically represented through acrylic and digital technologies.

          

Jack is a contemporary artist who started his fine art career in stencil graffiti on the streets of London. After graduating from Winchester School of Art with a BA in Painting he has become known for his amusing and thought provoking work. His early street artwork has been published alongside Bansky in the book ‘The London Street Art Anthology’. Recently Jack has focused on dioramas, small individual scenes that tell unique and often humorous stories. The viewer is invited into the lives of these tiny people, to create their own narrative to a moment captured within the work. His newest work is framed in custom acrylic boxes, antique projector lenses and some incorporate electronics, used to illuminate and add atmosphere to the miniature scenarios encapsulated in individual worlds.

     

Grant Simon Rogers is a visual artist who lives and works between London and Berlin. His highly individual style of  photography references a mid-twentieth century cinema technique known as “Day For Night” or “American Night”, which gives the impression that many of the pictures were made in the night time or twilight hours. He likes to use the available daylight; so he sets up his camera to make a very dark, underexposed image and then uses a hand held flash to relight the main subjects, trees and plants. Grant has set himself the challenge to make a photograph in the camera, and to not post process on the computer. All of the pictures in this body of work are virtually straight out of the camera with the bare minimum of post processing.  Grant trained at Portsmouth College of Art, and is devoted to art education and visual literacy for all ages. He regularly contributes  to the free life long learning programmes at the National Gallery and other museums and cultural institutions in London and  across Continental Europe.

                   

The essence of Lynne’s work is clean, strong, balanced form inspired by her architectural design background. She has a fascination with how materials are joined and how one finish is juxtaposed against another. Details of metals, sand and stone are incorporated to express the association of elements that, like clay itself, occur naturally within the landscape and beneath the earth.

Her pieces explore different making techniques – primarily slip casting and hand building. She likes to express the beauty of the natural fired finish of clay, whether it be creamy smooth porcelain or rough textured black earthenware with sand inclusions.  She uses minimal glazes, just the odd pop of colour, and almost always the addition of a detail of gold, copper or steel.

     

 The Skateroom is a social entrepreneurship whose main purpose is to help empower youth using art and skateboarding.  Their vision is to offer art editions at an affordable price and make art available to the greater public

                    

Satoru Tamura, born in 1972 in Tochigi, graduated from the College of Art and Design of Tsukuba University, Japan, in 1995.  Satoru creates art based on a theme or destruction of meaning and seeks for his artwork to be of a pure white idea without any distraction. The destruction takes place lightly and never gravely. It may even bring laughter. In the artwork, he constructively destroys the meaning, or creates a situation where no meanings are attached.  His aim is to stay liberated from meaning, establishment, and purpose of its material and form. Perhaps, because he has doubts about them.  Satoru Tamura lives and works in Tochigi, Japan.

     

Michael Ward has a sensitivity for all things made of metal and the function and beauty of industry.  A lot of his work includes references to his own very early fragments of sensation via colour, pattern, surface, material and touch.  There can be a lot of details, symbols and layers in his paintings.  Following a Foundation Course at Manchester, Michael attended Ravensbourne College of Art gaining 1st class hons in Fine Art Painting and then studied at The Slade School of Art obtaining a Higher Diploma in Fine Art.  He was then appointed Junior Fellow in Fine Art Painting at Cardiff School of Art. Following that he taught sculpture at The Central School of Art and painting at Lina Garnarde Foundation Course. Then was temporary Senior Lecturer in Painting and Photography at Camberwell School of Art and lectured in Photography, Film and Furniture Restoration at Southwark Institute. He was also shortlisted for resident artist at Caius and Gonville College Cambridge. He then became lecturer in Painting, Photography, Printmaking and Sculpture at South Thames College.

 

 Born in Los Angeles, graduating with a Bachelor in Industrial Design and a Masters of Architecture from the University of Oregon, the following years, prior to moving to Europe and pursuing life as a conceptual artist full time, were spent practising architecture in Boston as a licensed Architect. / As learned through the design of building, mainly public buildings, projects become rich and thoughtful through the process of design.  Working and re-working iterations in a tactile manner through models and drawings moulds and develops a project from a simple idea into an interweaving of informed decisions that transcend the work from good to great.  Counterintuitively, the more constraints placed on an architectural project from the beginning inform the design and guide the process towards a better outcome. / The process of making art is not dissimilar.  Discoveries are made and built upon during the total immersion of making a piece which informs that work and/or contributes ideas for the next.  As in Architecture, craft is an important component in working.  Thoroughly immersing oneself in craft and honing this skill throughout the process of creating yields pieces that are just as important as the finished work that is being constructed.  Jigs are made.  Waste is collected and saved.  A book has been cut in order to extract the words or names needed for a drawing.  Something from everything and everything is potentially a work of art. / As a conceptual artist I am most drawn to working with material and content that comes loaded with ingrained meaning and nostalgia.  I typically identify with a concept, whether playful or cynical, in the media I choose and this becomes the starting point.  From here I begin to deconstruct and completely displace the intended form from its original context.  Re-imagining and refitting in a very tactile process until a new form emerges along with the hope that a new perspective will be perceived from something that had such en-grained prepossessed meaning, challenging what we all take for granted.

                           

Originally from Sheffield, Yorkshire, Kate trained at Camberwell School of Art and the Royal College of Art. IShe now lives and works in both Rodmell, Lewes, East Sussex and South West France.  Kate originally trained and worked in ceramics but about six years ago moved from ceramics into painting full time.  She is the founder and head of the Ceramics Diploma course at City Lit in London.  Her work is loosely based on landscapes, seascapes and aerial views of areas she knows well – West Penwith in Cornwall, South West France, The South Downs, the West of Scotland and the East Sussex coast.  Landscapes, seascapes – mapping the land -, memories and symbols are explored to convey meanings beyond representation, by combining painting with gestural drawing and mark-making using a variety of mixed media.

          

Michelle Graduated from central St Martins College of Art and Design with a degree in Textiles Design. Her speciality was print making. Hand painting screens gave her work a loose, painterly and expressive immediacy. After college Michelle took her textiles and painting knowledge to work on feature films in costume departments for over 10 years. Only a few years ago Michelle finally returned to her first love, painting. Her collections most often are inspired by and start with a series of her own photographs which capture’s beauty and simplicity in the human world, quite often showing the stark contrast between harsh, angular industrial landscapes juxtaposed by the uncertainty and ever-changing nature around it. Then distilling compositions down to their raw, abstract, engaging interpretation through mixed media, collage and paint. The simplicity of her aesthetic belies a rigorous and frenetic work ethic which prevents her from ‘overthinking’ and stifling her mark making. Her thought process becomes a stream of conscious decisions flowing from one to another. Pushing each idea, and concept into the next.

               

Camilla Wordie is a multi-disciplinary art director, set designer and stylist. She started out at Chelsea College of Art, on to Edinburgh College of Art and Copenhagen School of Design. She works with a variety of photographers to capture food as a form of art. By creating minimal yet expressive still life’s she brings ingredients together to design series of conceptual images. For her, composition is key and the idea of treating food as a material to form a sculpture. (photography collaboration with Vici Watkins and Tasos Gaitanos)

Nadim is a practicing artist who lives and works in London. He graduated in BA Fine Art from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2008. Since then he has been working on art projects that incorporate a sense of playfulness and humour within the disciplines of photography, drawing, painting and sculpture.