Summer Exhibition 2012

Zainab Ali
www.zainabali.co.uk

Zainab is a Surrey based artist working with mixed media, who graduated with a Bachelors degree in Textile Design from Middlesex University in 2001.

“I am mostly fascinated by simple things around me. They could hold some sort of memory for me or it could be just the shape of the object which grabs my attention. I love playing with colours and I use a lot of vibrant colours in my work. I want the viewer to enjoy depth of the colours in my work. Acrylic is my main choice of medium, but I also use a lot of different kind of materials to produce a more textural effect such as sand, plaster, etc.”

Zainab’s work can be seen throughout the year at Carredartistes London Gallery in South Molton Street  and Hays Gallery in London Bridge.

Tom Cartmill
www.tomcartmill.com
Tom is a Reading based painter who exhibits regularly Across Hampshire, Berkshire and Greater London.

“My work deals with visual perception, in particular the fact that we can receive conflicting information from a given visual stimulus. The preconceived assumptions of eye and brain are challenged, raising questions about the subconscious and how we interpret what we are looking at. Memory plays an important part in how we perceive the world around us and the recent series of paintings ‘Remembered Present’ and ‘trace’ address this concern.
Change through time and the inevitable accumulation of experience are themes that have underpinned my practice from early on. The way for example that buildings, much used objects and faces age, weathering and transforming with the passage of time, is a constant source of inspiration. I try to evoke a patina of experience in my pictures. This directly relates to the methods used to make my work where I combine conventional painting techniques with more innovative processes.
I incorporate a variety of materials in each picture, from paints and inks, to gesso and earth, which are applied in numerous layers. Each strata of material is laid down in varying thicknesses and finishes. A textured surface is produced, where the layers are often rubbed away unevenly and evidence of previous activity can be glimpsed.”

Jonathan Chapman
www.jkchapman.com 

Jonathan graduated from the Winchester School of art in 2010 with a Masters Degree in Fine Art Painting.

“My work is a striking contradiction of impressionism and graphic design. Modern studies of small suburban areas and vast cityscapes, soaked in colour and framed by dark inks. Each canvas is a postcard of unchartered territory, mixing together natural elements with manmade structures and capturing a sense of the unfamiliar.”

Jonathan has travelled extensively and pulled influences from across the USA and Europe. His quiet and methodical approach to life is always reflected in his work, where despite the sometimes busy and overbearing subject matter, his paintings retain an eerie calm.

Emily Cooper
www.emsart.com
Emily Cooper was born in Buckinghamshire in 1988. She recently graduated from Bath Spa University with a 1st Class Ba in Fine Art and is now based in Buckinghamshire.

Emily paints the moods of mountains and the elements that continually exhaust them. Her impactful landscape scenes are influenced by the emotions of the sky, the weather and the land. The scenes explore how untamed nature can mimic the extreme emotional states of man and how our lives are synonymous with the exposed landscape, bare, brutal and bruised.
Rooted within the terms of Romanticism, with its validation of strong emotion as an aesthetic source; they attempt to capture the Sublime experiences of untamed nature and its overpowering qualities on man.
The works simplicity opens it up to an environment for the viewer to impose their own experience. The focus of the painting is the horizon and how the paint is blended into a controlled unified surface. This blurred horizon suggests infinity, creating a space where one part is part of the other, uniting.

Kanwal Dhaliwal
www.kanwaldhaliwal.com 

Kanwal studied for a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Art Painting at Chandigarh College of Art in India, then competed a Masters degree in Russian before studying MA Art in Architecture at the University of East London in 2002.

“The life around me has always been a theme for my artistic expression. Being born in the rural Punjab, India in 1960, ‘The Village’ remained the main content for my works during the early period of my career. Practicing as contemporary painter and sculptor, I produced works in Oil, Watercolour, Ink & Wash, Wood, Brass, Clay, Terra Cotta, and Stone.
Coming to live in the UK in the mid 1990s has considerably influenced my subject matter. ‘The Rootless’ series, deals with the questions of the consequences of cultural substitutions resulted out of the human migrations from one culture to another. The works are symbolic representation of the uprooted identity, where the silver and the gold are the cost of the sacrifice.”

Martin Edwards
www.formcolourandscale.com

Martin Edwards is a digital artist based in London. He explores the properties of form, colour and scale, focusing on the boundaries between lens-based media and other art forms. Martin creates his images using a combination of high resolution photography, digital imaging software and intricate colour printing by hand.
Martin studied at Oxford University and at the European University Institute in Florence. He has also studied art history, theory and photography in courses at the Tate Modern and Tate Britain, and at the University of the Arts in London.
The series of 4 works shown here are from a larger series called “Smoke” which explores the patterns created by smoke and the images they create in the viewer’s mind.
Martin created the images using close-up photography of the patterns created by the smoke of a burning intense stick, before colouring and digitally manipulating the photographic images on computer. The final step in the process was careful grading and printing of the images using specialist giclée printing techniques on an inkjet photographic printer.

Caroline Hall
www.carolinehall.net
Caroline worked as a television reporter and presenter for the BBC for 15 years before moving to Berlin in 2000 with her family. Graduated from Winchester School of Art with a first class honours degree in Visual Art in 2004, and completed a Masters in Painting in 2007.

“All my paintings reflect a life surrounded by the moving image. They explore the boundaries between video and painting, the traditional and the contemporary. The ‘moving pixels’ series is driven by a process – a filming and editing sequence which allows me to deconstruct the digital image deliberately removing all trace of narrative. The resulting pixel video is then projected onto the surface of the canvas while I work.

More recently I have been using video of filmed journeys as a springboard. My subject matter is the fleeting moment, but my method of working means each painting takes days and sometimes weeks to complete. It is this pairing of opposites, the fact that I am attempting to make the transient tangible, that intrigues me.”

Gillian Hawkins
www.gillianhawkins.co.uk
 Gillian studied painting at the Winchester School of Art and graduated in 2012 with a Masters degree in Fine Art. She has been an active member of ‘Art Space’ in Portsmouth since 1993 (www.artspace.co.uk), and Omega Printmakers (www.omegaprintmakers.co.uk) since 2009.
“My paintings in this show are part of a body of work made recently in response to the experience of taking on an allotment with a co-worker eighteen months ago.
However, my work here is not a representation, or documentation of the allotment but rather an examination of feelings around it. The interior domestic space of the main body of my usual work has here become the exterior domestic space, and the working garden of the allotment: to me a whole world in itself, separate and personal and deeply intimate. I have examined the constraints of the plot itself, nature (which can come as a big surprise to city dwellers when it goes its own way), the pleasure and satisfaction in addressing physical problems rather than mental ones and (sometimes) in producing something edible and useful.
The subject itself is traditional, but I have dealt with it mainly in an abstract rather than figurative way, and used colour and line to convey the feelings of this attempted domestication of a small plot of land.”

Benjamin King
www.artbenking.co.uk

Ben King was born in Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk in 1987, and moved to the New Forest in 1998 where he has lived and worked since. He studied at The Arts University College in Bournemouth, and graduated in the Summer of 2010 with a BA (Hons) degree in Fine Art. He specialises in Painting, and recently completed his challenge to complete a painting every day for an entire year.
“As a landscape painter I work directly and indirectly with nature, painting from drawings and referential photographs. I don’t aim to re-create the landscape as such, but I explore the movement of light, and describe experiences and emotions felt within the landscape. Colour is vital in this.

I see my work as being an extension of the Romantic period, although I am exploring what it means to be a painter in the twenty-first century. The New Forest is currently my area of study. Being a protected National Park, it’s a quiet, scenic area, a place of escape from traffic, towns and cities.

I draw directly from observation as I feel that recording information in this way is far more personal and thought provoking than taking a photograph. Yet together, drawings and photographs play a vital role in my work.”

Sue McDonagh
www.suemcdonagh.co.uk
Sue owns her own small gallery and studio in Cowbridge. Her work has been distributed by Fine Art publishers Washington Green, DeMontfort Fine Art, hand finished frame specialists Frinton Fine Art and she has recently been signed by Artworks Fine Art.
Her delightful and popular brightly coloured pastel studies of children at play feature on greetings cards and calendars, and she has a comprehensive range of over 70 paintings published as limited edition prints.

She is also the resident cartoonist for prestigious publication The Picture Business, and a consultant for Lion Fine Print specialist suppliers, running regular workshops for clients wishing to self publish.

Lyra Morgan
www.lyramorgan.com

East Midlands based artist Lyra Morgan graduated with a Master’s Degree in Advanced Theories and Practice from the University of Derby in 2011, having previously received a First Class Honours Degree from the Birmingham Institute of Art and Design.
With high standards of production, Lyra creates her ‘scapes’ by taking inspiration from seeing the extra-ordinary in the seemingly every day or ordinary, the natural world and being free enough in spirit to allow each work to build through a cycle of evolution. She creates abstract but instinctively balanced compositions, sensitive to the gradations of tone using unique techniques she has developed through the open and experimental approach to her practice.
Colour has always played a big part in Lyra’s life and art career, loving the way it can transform how we experience and live in any space.
“When I first started painting, I had reasonably clear ideas about what I wanted to paint. Now that I paint on a daily basis, the paintings seem to take on a life of their own and I realise now more than ever that a big part of my arts practice is about being ‘present’ in the moment and embracing process itself.”

Arabella Nock
www.saatchionline.com/shapingreality

Now based in London, Arabella originally studied metal casting, fabrication and welding as part of her Bachelors Degree in sculpture at West Wales School of the Arts in Carmarthenshire.

“I use the figure as a vessel with which to carry an idea or emotion. It has become a fantastic tool for fostering understanding between artist and viewer. I aim to permeate the piece with my own style, being vigorous and energetic with the material to achieve something which is tactile and has a presence within its setting. Cast metal is the ideal media for preserving this sense of physical interaction and I have experimented with the full range using their different properties for aesthetic and metaphorical contrast, from lead and bronze to cast iron. I am intensely interested in the process of creating a sculpture and the different stages it goes through.”

Since graduation, Arabella has been showing and selling consistently, including high-profile shows in Cork Street and regular exhibitions with the Society of Women Artists. She has attended several international conferences and shown as far abroad as New Mexico, USA

Junko O’Neill
www.junkooneill.com 

Winchester based artist Junko O’Neill, graduated from the Winchester School of Art in 2009 with a Masters Degree in Fine Art.

Her work reflects the Japanese concept of ‘Ma’ which is unique to Japanese culture, and can be seen in literature, architecture and the visual arts including painting and filmmaking.

Unlike the Western view of empty space as lacking everything and having a negative value, Japanese see it as having a positive meaning. And as well as space, ‘Ma’ also reflects the flow of time, and Junko’s work also contains a real sense of time passing as well as sense of space.

Di Peisley
www.dipeisleyart.co.uk 

Based in Hampshire, Di graduated with a Masters Degree in Fine Art, from the Winchester School of Art in 2009.

“Take one image, combine it with another and yet another is created.  Combining and layering images can develop even further layers of memory and nostalgia, transforming them, making them more substantial, creating tension and a feeling of unease. Exploration of what is hidden is essential to create illusion, a fantasy world, an area between reality and imagination.

I continue to experiment with collage using architectural structures, internal and external, ancient and modern, mythical and everyday. It is a continuous process of discovery and exploration. Recently I have been working with architectural images together with borrowed elements from famous artists and sculptors, as well as the mundane, endeavouring to construct an enigmatic narrative which is open to individual interpretation, encouraging the viewer to use his imagination to create his own story. Variety in scale continues to appeal to a mischievous element, a wish to play.”

Nadja Gabriela Plein
www.nadjagabrielaplein.co.uk 

Nadja is a London-based painter. Her pictures are about colour, tension and intensity. Then, they are about humanity, intimacy, fragility, loneliness, but also closeness, sensuality and sexuality. Finally, they are about pausing the moment to get intensely close so as to see the beauty of vulnerability and the movement within stillness.
Before dedicating herself to painting Nadja was a composer. She gained a doctorate from the Royal College of Music, won the prestigious Mendelssohn Scholarship, her music has been performed in the UK, Germany, France, Switzerland and the USA by leading performers, including the Arditti String Quartet, and was heard on BBC Radio 3 as well as USA radio stations.
Nadja’s paintings are exhibited frequently in solo and group shows in the UK. Nadja paints at OPEN Ealing studios.
“These pictures are about movement. They were drawn quickly from live moving dancers. With this approach to drawing the hand on the paper becomes part of the dance. The movement of the hand creates the line that becomes an expression/celebration of movement itself.
These pictures are about drawing the movement of the dance through the bodies of the dancers but allowing the bodies to distort freely so that the focus is not on the shape of the bodies in dance but on the shape of the movement itself.”
http://www.nadjagabrielaplein.co.uk
Follow her daily picture blog on Facebook and Twitter

Angela Smith
www.angelasmithsculpture.co.uk
“I am primarily a sculptor, carving 3D imagery in wood and stone that explores and develops the poetic quality of shape and space. The images often start with a drawing. This piece combines drawing and carving. I spent a lazy, hot afternoon in my local park with lots of people lying, sitting and walking in its landscape of low, undulating hills, trees, made paths and scudding clouds. I made an abstract sketch incorporating contours, lines, textures and surfaces from the scene, adding opposing and co-ordinating curves to suggest lightness and movement, with a strong, diagonal orientation that seemed to capture the mood of unhurried escape. I then carved it as a relief in wood, using what the wood and tools can do to enhance these details.
As well as drawing, I also study maths as a way of exploring physical form. I visit the Welsh coast regularly to study the coastal shapes and landscape.
I was born in London in 1950 and am largely self-taught. I work part-time as Finance Manager in a GP Surgery to support myself.”

Jane Swan
Jane is a Hampshire artist and illustrator who places a love of drawing at the heart of her creative practice. “I have had no formal art training, but have had a life long long love of drawing. I come from a family of creative people , which included wood engravers and illustrators. In my later life I have been able to spend more time drawing, glass engraving, water-colour painting and pen& ink illustration and have illustrated several children’s books. For many years I have exhibited locally, and in open exhibitions in Mottisfont Abbey and The Gosport Gallery.”

Deborah Taylor
www.deborahtaylorphotography.co.uk
Deborah Taylor is a professional photographer who lives and works in the Thatcham area. She studied at the Berkshire College of Art and Design in Reading.
She is a creative photographer in the fine art field, with a specialisation in landscapes and still life. With a love of black and white photography, she feels that it allows the subject to be laid open for the viewer to see it more clearly. Current influences are André Kertez and Bob Carlos Clarke.
Her inspiration is found in everyday objects and beautiful vistas. People have often described her work as having a graphic, and almost a painting-like quality.
Exhibitions include Open Studios West Berkshire & North Hampshire and other local and national exhibitions throughout the year.
You can buy beautiful hand-made cards and mounted prints online at her website:

Jo Wade
www.britishwomenartists.com/Jo Wade
Originally from Manchester, Jo graduated with a Bachelor’s degree from Staffordshire University before completing a PGCE at the University of Central England.
She then went on to Staffordshire University and graduated with a Master’s degree in Fine Art.
“My paintings use the changing seasons to imply the transience of time and its fleeting memories. Like a tune that wafts in the wind, a memory flits in an out of the mind. Often triggered by music or a smell, the past briefly touches our present.
Similarly, the end of summer hovers between one state and another. The moment when a recollection traces its images onto our present, hovering like the leaf that lingers between summer greens and autumn gold. Both for an instant, are the past and the present and in the changing seasons symbolic of a new stage in life.”
Member of the Society of British Women Artists, Jo has exhibited across the UK and taken work abroad with the Bank of Cyprus group exhibition in the Mediterranean.

Suok Won Yoon
www.isaacyoon.com
Originally from Seoul in Korea, Suok Won graduated with a Master’s degree in Photographic design from Keimyung University.
He recently won the Woolgather Art Prize and is working towards a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Art at Coventry University here in the UK.
“There is life under the water.
There is also the sound of breath in unsighted places.
There are words which remain in my heart and
Give consolation after wandering through turbulent life.
Those words became like mother’s hands which
wiped the sweat from my feverish brow.
Those words became like my father’s hands which
Picked me up when I fell.
There is life in those words, those hands, and those hearts.
I spent time observing life under the water.
The sea creatures became my friends and I gave my heart to them.
I want my pictures to become like water, embrace life,
Hold up those who have fallen, and give rest to the sleepless.”