I am a figurative painter. My main preoccupation is representing the human figure, ranging from life painting to an in depth analysis of an individual. I work from life. The process and the end product are of equal importance. I try to record what I see accurately, and although I work in a very controlled way, the discrepancies between what I perceive and what ends up on the canvas, due to inaccuracy, lack of control, or the limitations inherent in the chosen medium, result in a form of expressionism.

I occasionally undertake commissioned work and am represented in The Royal Collection, Windsor; the National Portrait Gallery; National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside; Trinity College Cambridge; University of Liverpool; Loughborough University; St Mary’s Hospital Medical School; the House of Commons; the private collection of HRH The Prince of Wales; and private collections in UK, Australia and USA.

I ride. I paint.

I’ve been a chap who has ridden a bike for as long as I can remember. I’ve also dabbled in painting over the last few years. As my day job (Owner and Creative Director at WASH studios) became more and more digitised, the desire to get my hands dirty again was overwhelming.

So, I now combine my passion for cycling with my passion for painting with an ongoing series of oil on canvas artworks, dating back to my first piece of work, December 2012.

The prime location for my inspiration is the Trough of Bowland, North West England. However, I’m not too far away from the West Coast, the Southern Lake District and West Yorkshire Dales which have now all become my beautiful playground for riding out.

I hope you enjoy viewing my work, if you would like more information, please do get in touch.

Award winning artist Alexandra Gallagher was born 1980, Lancashire, England

Exhibiting and selling internationally, including the world renowned Saatchi Gallery in London. Alexandra Gallagher's work celebrates the surreal and bizarre.  Between the realms of memory, dreams and experience, her work looks beyond our subjective limits and often tells a story of inner imagination and thought. 

"I take influence from everything around me - like every artist. Fashion, design, other artists, music, culture, society etc. Everything I see, hear and talk about. It all influences what I do. From a short abstract conversations with a strangers, to memories I have as an individual... we all have a story to tell, something interesting that is unique to all of us, as an individual. I love people watching. Looking at people and seeing how I could translate that into a piece of art - from my own perspective.” 

Award winning artist Alexandra Gallagher was born 1980, Lancashire, England

Exhibiting and selling internationally, including the world renowned Saatchi Gallery in London. Alexandra Gallagher's work celebrates the surreal and bizarre.  Between the realms of memory, dreams and experience, her work looks beyond our subjective limits and often tells a story of inner imagination and thought. 

"I take influence from everything around me - like every artist. Fashion, design, other artists, music, culture, society etc. Everything I see, hear and talk about. It all influences what I do. From a short abstract conversations with a strangers, to memories I have as an individual... we all have a story to tell, something interesting that is unique to all of us, as an individual. I love people watching. Looking at people and seeing how I could translate that into a piece of art - from my own perspective.” 

Exhibitions

Cruel and Tender Art Exhibition - Bricklane Art Gallery London 6th Oct 2010



Mindlands Art Exhibition - Sprout Cafe Blackburn 14th July 2012



Saatchi Gallery London 2012 - 2013



LAN Open Exhibition - Oxheys Mill Studio Preston 13th September 2012

Lincoln Art Works 2012 - 2014

BIC Sculpture - 40th Anniversary -London Victoria Station 23rd January 2014

Bradley Street Stores Blackburn and Liverpool 2014

Salon de Street Art Exhibition 19 – 24 June 2014

PaperGirl Belfast 27th June - 5th July 2014

Best of Salon des Refusés   3 – 13 July 2014 

Salon De Street Art II - London 7th August - 27th September 2014

Papergirl Blackburn 6th - 16th November 2014 

Affordable Art Fair - Singapore - April 2015

Pixel Lust - UK - March 2015

Blackburn Printfest - Blackburn - May 2015

Best Of Britannia - Preston - May 2015

Unique L.A - Sociale Revolution - L.A - May 2015 

Affordable Art Fair Battersea - London -October 2015

Pistol Art Gallery - Glasgow - 2015

Open Art Show- The Bureau, Centre for the Arts - March 2016

Well Hung Gallery - London - 7th April - 19th May 2016

 The Bowery - Leeds - 13th May - 29th July 2016

Limited Edition - Blackburn - 20 - 26th June 2016

ES-SEX-HIBTION June until  18 th July - 22nd August 2016

Monker Art Fair - 6th to 9th October 2016

Secreat Art Prize Winners Exhibiton  - Curious Duke Gallery London - 13th - 29th October2016

Affordable Art Fair Battersea - 20th - 23rd October 2016

Well Hung Christmas Bizarre  - Well Hung Gallery - London - 24th November till 7th December 2016

A Curious Christmas - Curiuos Duke Gallery - London - December 2016

Wall to Wall Gallery - Liverpool - 2016 - 2017

Flora & Fauna - London - 13rd July 2017

BoW Limited Edition ll - Blackburn - 3rd - 15th July 2017

Cover art for Melissa Lee Houghton's book Patterns of Mourning



Feature artist in Artist & Illustrators magazine Portfolio  section.



Interview - Writer and poet Melissa lee Houghton's blog



Interview - Saatchi Online From the Studio of..."



Interview - Open College of Arts blog



Interview - FAD Website Q&A

Feature in Catapult Art Magazine issue 26

Cover art for Melissa Lee-Houghton book 'Beautiful Girls' through Penned in the Margins. 

Interview and Feature in Artnois Magazine

Feature in By Skill & Hard Work Zine

Interview - Social Revolution

Interview - Diamond Arts

Interview - DUNIA

Interview/ All about Artist - RiseArt

Interview with DegreeArt - Meet The Artist

No 1 in the Christmas 2016 Gift Guide curated by Yatzer

Interview • 18 Page Feature • Cover art for LandEscape Art Review

Front cover and feature - Estila Magazine - 2017

Feature - Tie the Knot Scotland 2017

Feature - Stubborn Magazine • Red Issue - 2017

Saatchi Showdown Surrealism Second Place Winner 

Shortlisted Zealous X 2015

Secret Art Prize Runner Up Winner 2016

Commissions 

Sculpture for BIC both Anniversary of making lighter 2013

Bradley Street clothing stores 2013 - 2014 

The Mall Blackburn Bee Trail Sculpture 

Blackburn Is Open 

Blackburn Open Walls - Street art event

Urban Rooms

AWARDS

Saatchi Showdown Surrealism Second Place Winner 

Shortlisted Zealous X 2015

Secret Art Prize Runner Up Winner 2016



Painting directly from life, my work pays homage to the beauty of nature.  I am preoccupied with the human form and the wonders of nature, exploring both their presence and absence in space.  Unceasingly concerned with colours and their relationships, I explore what happens when two colours meet, how they dance side by side and what occurs at the borderline.  Understanding colour is fundamental to my creative process, each hue sings and resonates creating a rhythm within the composition.  Drawing inspiration from the shallow planes of modernism, I build form through geometric shapes, clear facets and defined edges. This ravenous enquiry results in paintings that are exuberant and deeply expressive.  

I studied at The Heatherley School of Fine Art and The Royal Drawing School.  I have exhibited widely including with The Royal Society of Portrait Painters, The Society of Women Artists, Chelsea Arts Society, National Open Art, The Ruth Borchard Prize and Jackson’s Open Painting Prize.

Dan Murrell is an experienced artist, illustrator and designer. Well known for political satire and photo montage illustrations. The New Statesman magazine commissioned Dan to work on a collection of sketches for their new profile articles. The works featured in both the Creative review and the New Yorker magazines culminating in an exhibition.

Welcome to Exhibit A. 

An exhibition of new work from Hugh Tisdale and Dan Murrell,
comprising 50 heroes and villains, both respected and notorious. Imagine yourself putting on a celebrity mask, looking through another’s eyes, and ask yourself, well, what does lie beneath? You might think of it as a mask that projects virtue or courage – perhaps Harvey Milk or the great Nina Simone – or as the kind of mask, like those worn at Venetian masquerades, that licenses otherwise unorthodox behaviours - the ghoulish, leering Jimmy Savile would be a particularly extreme example.
A word about technique. For all their photorealistic qualities, Dan Murrell’s portraits are in fact intricately hand-crafted pieces, employing careful draftsmanship in pencil or ink, overlaid with watercolour.
There’s plenty of wit in the way subtle differences in technique are used according to the subject – JF Kennedy as a cathode-ray tube image (complete with bullet hole), Debbie Harry in 1980s fanzine style, a pixelated Mohamed Atta. The faces are flattened, of course, but the box frames and lighting give an eerie illusion of a three-dimensional object.
London and politics were the reasons why the pair met, in 1997, at the offices of the New Statesman magazine, and they have worked together since that time on numerous design projects for online t-shirt publisher philosophyfootball.com, and their own publishing company, Owlgate Ltd.

Tisdale&Murrell
This is the second joint exhibition of prints by Hugh Tisdale and Dan Murrell whose work I have known and admired for over 20 years.

Hugh studied at Winchester School of Art, the London College of Printing and the Royal College of Art. As a recent art college graduate, he designed newsletters for the group set up to celebrate the centenary of the Russian revolutionary and writer Victor Serge in 1990. Later, he designed the New Times newspaper for Democratic Left, the Eurocommunist campaigning group which succeeded the Communist Party of Great Britain after the fall of the Soviet Union. It was there that he met Mark Perryman, whose partner edited the paper. Together, they created Philosophy Football, designing 100% cotton T-shirts, adorned with quotes from philosophers and dissenters such as Albert Camus and Tom Paine, as an alternative to the corporately branded, bri-nylon kits sold by football clubs. More than two decades later, the business continues to flourish and its humourous, left-field T-shirts now celebrate numerous other sports as well as football.

It was at another left-wing publication, the New Statesman, where Hugh worked as a freelance designer, that he met Dan Murrell in the mid-1990s. Dan studied at Ipswich College of Art and Bath Academy of Art. When I first joined the magazine, as literary editor, he was the man to whom one turned for help when grappling with the somewhat temperamental computers. But I soon learned that there was more to him than that. When I became editor in 1998, I struggled to get arresting covers that could sell the magazine on newsstands. Various ideas were tried and failed. All along, the answer was in the office, right under my nose. Dan’s brilliant illustrative skills, initially produced under the guidance of the former Sunday Times Magazine design supremo Michael Rand, came to the fore and took our covers to new levels of sophistication and daring.
Tisdale & Murrell
Think Morecambe & Wise meets Penn & Teller (they’ll make you laugh, they’ll make you think).

I first met Hugh Tisdale and Dan Murrell in 1998 when I joined the New Statesman magazine as Art Director. Hugh, The-Nicest-Person-In-The-Universe-And-Possibly-Beyond, was acting Art Director interregnum, but had offered to stay on to show the new guy – me – the ropes.
Hugh was very patient as I stumbled towards an understanding of the mechanics of the task in front of me and I was sad when finally he departed for pastures new.

Dan was the guy fixing computers and their technophobe users. But whenever a problem occurred he was always there, with a smile and a joke, to get me out of a hole. Then one day, when a certain cover idea had proved difficult to achieve Dan said casually “I could have done that for you”. Enter the fray Dan Murrell, Mr. Modesty, Mr. Photoshop genius and also the Nicest-Person-In-The-Universe-And-Possibly-Beyond!!!!!
It wasn’t long before I managed to persuade the editor that Dan would be far more useful in a creative visual role than telling hacks to switch off their computers and switch them back on again.

Over the next 12 years we produced some memorable covers for the New Statesman. Dan also contributed many striking images to illustrate articles (my all-time favourite was half of Maggie Thatcher’s head in formaldehyde – much funnier than Damiam Hirst’s shark original!).
Meanwhile, Hugh had set up a company - Philosophy Football - designing T-shirts displaying strong images and witty slogans. Dan was soon taken on board in his spare time to help the creative processes along.

This exhibition of bold graphic images represents Dan and Hugh’s creative and technical skills and above all their belief that life is about having fun and "less is always more" (and having the odd pint or two!). I hope you go home after this experience feeling just a little better about the world.

Fascinated by aircraft, animals and plants from an early age, Adam trained as a Sculptor between 1987 and 1991 before going straight into work as a sculptor and model maker for the Film and TV industry at Shepperton and Pinewood Studios. He progressed from here to working with Exhibition and Aerospace companies, creating one off pieces that other trades could not make due to their complex curves and diverse materials.

After 20 years of making and designing all kinds of shapes and forms, in all kinds of materials for a wide variety of people and companies, he found himself working as a Senior Design and Build Manager for several of the most well known construction firms in the UK and abroad but this came as a detriment to his personal work. After a sudden family bereavement he realised we should be following our dreams, not those of others, and so built and set up his own studio in 2010.

Inspired by aerodynamic, organic and animal forms, his work as an artist has always been a mixture of biology and mechanisation. Adam’s love of aerodynamic forms fuels his concepts; fusing mechanised structures with organic forms to create his pieces. Working from his studio near Bristol, using industrial metal construction and fabrication techniques, as well as traditional casting methods in bronze and steel, Adam sculpts, models and carves a broad selection of materials to create the Aerorganic forms that reflect the world we live in today, now mixed with half remembered ancient organic forms and dreams of another possible future. Adam works in several disciplines at once, carving in wax for casting in bronze or steel before stopping to view the progression of pieces and then moving to direct construction in steel, copper and iron.

EXHIBITIONS

FLUX Exhibition 2017 - Chelsea School of Art, London 12th to 16th July

Affordable Art Fair - Battersea Park - March 2016 and Hampstead Heath - May 2017

 FUSION III - Group exhibition by The Cult House at The Candid Arts Trust, Islington 0th March to 4th April 2017

New Exhibition at the D-Contemporary Gallery- Mayfair in collaboration with The Cult House13th to the 24th September 2016.

Lilford Gallery- Canterbury and Folkstone July 2016

Tunbridge Wells International Art Fair 2016 June 2016

Art Source UK- Contempory Art Gallery May 2016

Richard Cross was born in Derby, and studied at Liverpool College of Art and the Royal Academy Schools, London (1981-84) He has exhibited in the BP Portrait Award, Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, Royal Institute of Oil Painters, Discerning Eye, Royal Overseas League, Laing Art Competition, Northern Young Contemporaries, and in exhibitions at Christies and the Royal Festival Hall in London.

Richard's work addresses’ universal experiences such as moving to a new town, becoming a father and reaching the age of fifty. As such it is work that is both personal and easy to relate to.

" When someone looks at a painting of mine I want them to be aware they are looking at paint and not a photographic illusion. When you paint a picture you are literally constructing something out of paint, and one of my primary aims is to simply make something that is interesting and exciting as paint and colour, and to fully exploit the physical qualities of paint. The textures that build up in my paintings are a by-product of working and reworking the picture surface. I often rework my paintings many times before I’m satisfied with them and consider them to be finished."

Education : 
Royal Academy Schools, London (1981-84) PG Dip RAS
Liverpool Polytechnic (1977-80) Fine Art BA (Hons) 
Derby College of Art (1976-77) Art Foundation Course

Exhibitions : 
2017 - Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts, London
2015 - Discerning Eye, Mall Galleries, London
2014 - Royal Institute of Oil Painters (ROI) Annual Exhibition, Mall Galleries, London
2013 - Discerning Eye, Mall Galleries, London
2012 - Streets Places Journeys, Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery
2012 - Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts, London
2012 - Northern Art Group, Blackpool University Centre Gallery
2011/12 - Derby City Open, Derby Museum and Art Gallery
2011 - Representations of Landscape (with Julia Swarbrick), Rossendale Museum
2010/11- BP Portrait Award Tour, Usher Art Gallery Lincoln, and Aberdeen Art Gallery
2010 - BP Portrait Award Exhibition, National Portrait Gallery, London
2010 - One Person Show, Steward's Gallery Clitheroe Castle
2009 - Ribble Valley Open, Steward's Gallery Clitheroe Castle - First Prize Winner
2009 - One Person Show, BBC Radio Lancashire, Blackburn
2007 - 'Making Connections' Kunstammlung Neubrandenburg, Germany
2006 - 'Making Connections' Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery
2000/03/05/06/07/08 - Derby City Open, Derby Museum and Art Gallery
1998 - One Person Show, Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool
1998 - RAS Alumni Exhibition, Royal Academy Schools, London
1998 - Laing Art Competition, Salford Art Gallery
1988/89/90/91/92 - Derby City Open, Derby Museum and Art Gallery
1986 - John Player Portrait Award Exhibition, National Portrait Gallery, London
1985/86/90/91 - Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts, London
1984 - Spirit of London, Royal Festival Hall, London
1984 - Royal Overseas League Art Exhibition, Overseas House, London
1984 - Pick of New Graduate Art, Christies, London
1981 - Northern Young Contemporaries, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester
1980 - National Open Art Exhibition, Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield

Publications : 
500 Portraits, NPG Publications London, 2011
Artists and Illustrators magazine, October 2007
Who's Who in Art (35th and subsequent Editions), Charles Baile de Laperriere, 2006
An Illustrated Who's Who of Artists in Derbyshire, John Fineron 2004

Awards
2015 Discerning Eye Purchase Prize
2015 Runner-up Discerning Eye Drawing Bursary
2013 Runner-up Discerning Eye Drawing Bursary
2010 Short-listed for Travel Award, BP Portrait Award Exhibition
2009 First Prize, Ribble Valley Open, Steward's Gallery Clitheroe Castle
1983 Landseer Scholarship, Royal Academy Schools
1981-84 Leverhulme Scholarship, Royal Academy Schools
1981-84 Vandeleur Scholarship, Royal Academy Schools

These are very small paintings done outdoors quickly in one session using a Pochade Box which holds a little panel to work on in the lid of the box. I enjoy the contrast between the immediacy of working on these and the rest of my pictures which are built up in layers more slowly in the studio

Peter Ydeen is primarily an Urban Landscape photographer living in Easton, Pennsylvania, working in New York, and often traveling. He is widely published and shown internationally, and is the recipient of various international awards.  His major series include “Easton Nights” which brings us along to the solitude and romance of the small hours of Easton; “Valley Days” celebrating the reactions of our spaces with his minimal eye for beauty; and “Waiting for Palms” taking the same eye to the urban landscapes of Morocco and Egypt.  He was educated as painter - sculptor having studied with artists including Alan D’Arcangelo, Phillip Pearlstien, Ray Kass, among others.  This training pervades his photography, which is lyrical and romantic, reflecting an almost mystical animism evolved from his interactions with his environments.  Taking the poetics of George Tice, he applies a painters’ eye, creating a magical world humming with his own eccentric energy.

As an artist I feel that it is my job to filter and translate these experiences and share them in the pursuit of truth. It is my goal to achieve a kind of clarity, to make complex things understandable and perfectly obvious so as to give pleasure to anyone looking. I think that the work is the manifestation of the kind of thinking that tries to produce links between signs far away from each other, exploring feelings and sensations from the past, present and future to create original paths. 

There is a final element to the work that I would like to draw attention to. Madeleine Bunting articulates this element when she talks about the wilful degradation of the environment and how that new sense of preservation and guardianship (as opposed to ownership) is influencing the way we do things in everyday life 'Belonging can be reinterpreted and that's where a host of seemingly unrelated cultural responses to our predicament seem to be forging a new understanding'. She goes on to say 'the anonymity and homogeneity generated by globalisation leaves us drifting and disorientated; the organic food movement is, in part, about putting back the geography'. I would like to draw parallels with the way an artwork is produced. As an artist I have dedicated my professional life to understanding and forging an intimate relationship with clay just as I have forged intimate relationships with people and places that have grounded me. This kind of thinking has had a profound effect on the way I felt about the physical process of making this body of work. In a way I feel like I have followed on from my last major exhibition 'Throwing lines' which had many connotations mainly to do with the nature of touch as an abstract concept. Lesley Jackson (freelance writer, curator and design historian) wrote in my 'Throwing lines' catalogue 'drawing attention to the abstract qualities of Arroyave-Portela's work is crucial. Although his pots are evocative of natural phenomena, his response to nature is lateral rather than literal'. She goes on to say 'the contours on his vessels are eddies of the imagination'. Ultimately I felt that by exploiting the qualities of clay and drawing on those literal associations with the Earth I could start to tap into the psycho geography of place to express our primal and often overlooked intuitive relationship to the land of our birth and or ancestors. With that in mind I leave you with this powerful extract taken from "Iyani: it goes this way" by Paula Gunn Allen. 

"We are the land. To the best of my understanding, that is the fundamental idea embedded in Native American life and culture in the southwest. More than remembered, the earth is the mind of the people as we are the mind of the earth. The land is not really the place (separate from ourselves) where we act out the drama of our isolate destinies. It is not a means of survival, a setting for our affairs, a resource on which we draw in order to keep our own act functioning. It is not the ever-present "other" which supplies us with a sense of "I". It is rather a part of our being, dynamic, significant, real. It is ourself, in as real a sense as such notions as "ego", "libido" or social network, in a sense more real than any conceptualization or abstraction about the nature of human being can ever be....Nor is the relationship one of mere "affinity" for the earth. It is not a matter of being "close to nature". The relationship is more one of identity, in the mathematical sense, than of affinity. The Earth is, in a very real sense, the same as ourself (or selves)."

1972

Born Oxford, England

1991-1994

Bath College of Higher Education, Bath

From between 2006-2009 I have been developing a new body of work and have felt it important not to have any major exhibitions up to now.

Selected solo Exhibitions

January-March 2012

Solo exhibition of 'Todo Sobre Mi Padre' and 'Consciousness' at the Craft Study Centre Farnham. The installation piece 'Consciousness' was originally commissioned by the Craft Study Centre for the exhibition that took part in January-March 2012.

July 2010

Solo exhibition at Contemporary Applied Arts London, 'Todo Sobre Mi Padre' Catalogued.

2004

Solo Exhibition with Helen Drutt , Philadelphia Art Alliance, Philadelphia U.S.A.

2002-2003

'Throwing Lines' - A major solo touring exhibition, City Art Gallery, Leicester. Brewery Arts, Cirencester. The Pea Rooms, Lincolnshire. Gracefields Arts, Dumfries. The Mac, Birmingham, Catalogued.

2002

Beaux Arts, Bath

2000

Beaux Arts, Bath

1998

'Passage of Water', Beaux Arts, Bath

Selected Exhibitions

2013

'Exempla' at the Internationale Handwerksmesse, Munich 6th-12 March. Exhibiting the ceramic installation 'Consciousness' as well as demonstrating throwing. 
 

2012

'Eastern Vistas' , Smiths Row , Bury St. Edmunds 15th September- 3 November 2012. Group show of various media on the theme of immigration. 
 

2011

Collect at the Saatchi Galleries London with Contemporary Applied Arts

SOFA New York with Contemporary Applied Arts

2010

Contemporary British Studio Ceramics at the Mint Museum (the private Collection of Marc and Diane Grainer) 

Collect At the Saatchi Galleries London with Contemporary Applied Arts.

2009

'Hats off to Helen', A Tribute to Helen Drutt at The Clay Studio Philadelphia.

2006

'Sculpted in Clay' a group show including Daniel Allen, Felicity Aylieff, Kate Malone and Carol Mcnicoll at the Millennium Galleries Sheffield.

2005

Galerie Anderwereld Katuin, Groningen, Holland. Sofa New York , Helen Drutt.

2003

Two person show, Carlin Gallery Paris

2001

Group show, Gallery Norby, Copenhagen, Denmark. 'Home Sweet Home', A British Council exhibition touring Scandinavia, Australia and New Zealand. 'Poetics of Clay', an international perspective, curated by Helen Drutt, Philadelphia U.S.A.

Awards and Grants

1998

Young Achievers celebration at Buckingham Palace

1997

One of six prizes awarded at Talente, Munich

1996

First prize, Nache, Ceramic Contemporaries 2, Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Crafts Council setting up grant

Public Collections

'Home, Hogar' Arts Two building, Queen Mary, University of London

The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

The National Museums and Galleries, Merseyside, Liverpool

Leeds City Gallery

The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA

The Philadelphia Museum of Art, USA

Houston Centre for Contemporary Art

The Mint Museum, USA 

David Kenyon is an artist with a wide-ranging world view, addressing issues that inexorably affect us whether we are consciously aware or not.  He produces art with emotive colour, vibrancy and energy, expressing the conflict between chaos and order. His paintings ask questions, they are not merely referential but take the viewer beyond a casual acquaintance, being neither safe, decorative or comforting.

Having studied at Kingston College of Art from 1961-1963 and then History of Art at University of Essex 1969-72, David has produced a significant portfolio of work. He has shown at exhibitions in London, Edinburgh, Colchester, Norfolk and Denmark. His work is represented in collections in New York, London, Edinburgh, Cape Town, Berlin, Hamburg, New Zealand, Norfolk (UK).

Working mostly with oil on canvas/board/paper with multiple tools, David has created a unique portfolio, concentrating on themes which are linked in series. In challenging received wisdom on the need for stylistic homogeneity he takes on an array of subjects and motifs, giving his work depth, emotional resonance and a jarring veracity. It is borne out in the studied and the spontaneous, achieved through artifice and chance, metaphor and allegory,  a record of the dialogue between the artist, the subject and its making.

Artist Victoria Horkan shows her unique take on nature through a vibrant and expressive series of paintings.

Victoria Horkan brought up in a small mining village and studying in the famous grounds where Henry Moore sculptures provided the backdrop of the landscape of Yorkshire.  Horkan became fascinated with the idea of transcribing sensation by painting dancers in the studios at Bretton Hall University. Her ability to capture movement through painting was encouraged by her peers who encouraged her to follow this desire and helped shape her technique.

 ‘My paintings are so textural that plays an integral part of each piece, it means I can bring my butterflies to life, I am almost sculpting the forms of butterfly wings as I paint.’

Taking inspiration from the from the natural world her paintings make reference to creatures from the sky and sea. Yet her work is by no means representational and alludes to subjects such as birds and butterflies by offering a mere suggestion of their forms rather than any literal or realistic transcriptions. She playfully engages with scale and perspective, making large what is typically small but her central focus is on colour, gesture and mark making. 

Pure bright rich applications of colour are set in sharp contrasts of light and dark, warm and cold are combined with loose, distinct brushstrokes that resonate strongly with the impressionist tradition. These strong confidently placed marks are the sign of an assured accomplished painter and the manner in which they are applied creating a sense of movement, giving the work an energetic flickering quality.

Horkan is aware of what a powerful stimulus colour can be and recognises its capacity to effect mood and to generate particular emotions. She strives to make good use of this in her art, believing painting should be able to move the viewer in much the same way that music may move the listener. Kandinsky was the first artist to seriously explore the connections between music and art, believing musical and visual expression could be used to simultaneously illuminate and intensify each other. He saw the two subjects as deeply interconnected and claimed that ‘generally speaking, colour is a power which directly influences the soul’.  is the keyboard the eyes are the hammers and the soul is the piano with strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another to cause vibrations in the soul. Such theories apply to Horkan’s work. She is not looking to translate a particular narrative or to provide work that is radically conceptual, she doesn’t feel like she has to. Rather seek to leave the viewer with a lasting impressing, to bring them to a place of joy even on the darkest of days and her colourful paintings radiate an energy that is truly profound.

At times the process of painting takes her into totally abstract realms and this is where Horkan herself experiences the joy of artistic epiphany, absorbed in only the mark making and application of colour, she finds herself totally free to express the vision that comes from within. Having already exhibited in Hong Kong, (with Riseart), Soho, London, Belfast and with clients in America, Germany Abu Dhabi Victoria Horkan is definitely a name to watch.

Mac is a Scottish Artist who know lives and practices in Bolivia.

Thomas MacGregor wanders the city looking for faces, dogs, occupations and activity. looking for strategic images that tell a story with a brief and concise argument. He is not so much interested in representing the real personality of the individual nor in the cliche of the ‘picturesque’ (in a country different from his own).

His thickly laid brushstrokes upon watery shadows give us the academic style in figurative or pictorial tradition, however, his contemporary vision combined with the attitude and posturing of figures as well as the elements incorporated by the artist himself bring us to a realism that does not reflect reality but analyses it? A neorealism?

Photography for him is a tool, an album of sketches that don’t provide him with a theme but instead give him indications about the theme he wants to paint.

The result shows us the mythical aspect of the everyday life, an ironic glance and analytical observation. A characterized or Abstract Realism bringing us a mature and entertaining work.

(translated from spanish)

Alejandra Dorado, Caja Verde, Cochabamba, Bolivia.

This page is under construction. Amazing contemporary portraits.