Rachel Tooth
Rachel Tooth is an artist living in London. She was raised in Sri Lanka where her family lived and worked in the tea industry. She was educated in Kodaikanal, in the state of Tamil Nadu in India, and Brighton UK.
Interested in colour, medium and material, always trying different combinations of colour, texture, light and shade, with a keen sense of spatial awareness. Complex layering of material and colour gives energy and strength to her work.
Hugh Hamshaw Thomas
Hugh Hamshaw Thomas is a London based artist who trained at Central School of Arts & Crafts and Bath Academy of Art (Corsham) in the late 1970s and early 80s. While studying as a painter under the tuterlige of such diverse artists as Michael Kidner, Peter Kinly, Michael Simpson, Maria Lalic and Susan Derges he spent much time exploring sculptural concerns. This was perhaps prompted by the emerging generation of New British Sculptors Gormley, Deacon and Kapoor that also lectured.
His growing up in the countryside of Farnham, Surrey and schooling in Sussex as much as the rural surroundings of Corsham, Wiltshire imbued a strong sense of place and landscape. Notions of the romantic, bucolic and arcadian became suffused in a growing imagination.
Matthew Hindley
Matthew Hindley graduated from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, Cape Town, in 2002, where he was awarded the Michaelis Prize.
As one of the countries' most recognized younger painters, Hindley’s intense, poetic and delving artworks have featured in various critical and seminal South African exhibitions.
In addition, he has presented at the world renowned Eli and Edythe Broad Museum, Michigan (2012) and the Kochi Muziris Biennale, India (2012). In 2014, he worked on a series of paintings inspired by the mythological African tales of South African writer Don Mattera, for a book published by Rhodeworks, in Berlin, Germany. In 2015, his artwork will be part of the imago mundi, Benetton Collection at the Venice Biennale, and his major public sculpture Speak Naturally and Continuously will undergo conservation, in order to have the delicate physical computing piece in permanent running order. The artwork is installed above the entrance of the South African National Gallery in Cape Town, South Africa.
Nigel Mullins
Nigel Mullins completed his Master of Fine Art degree with distinction at Rhodes University, South Africa in 1993. Since graduating, he has had numerous solo exhibitions in South Africa, the UK and Germany and has taken part in some 50 group shows. His work has been represented on the Cape Town, Johannesburg, Frankfurt and London art fairs and on the Mumia International Underground Animation Festival, Brazil.
In 2014 he exhibited a body of work called Chaotic Region at Oliewenhuis Art Museum in Bloemfontein, South Africa. Mullins is the winner of the first prize at the Royal Over Seas League 14th Annual Open Exhibition in London in 1997, he was a nominee for the Daimler Chrysler Award for Contemporary South African Art in 2000 and recipient of a merit prize at the ABSA Atelier in the same year.
Mullins work is held in public and private collections in South Africa, the UK and Europe.
Hilde Trip
The inexhaustible forms and color richness of nature is the source of Hilde Trip’s unique art.
Each season offers an infinite amount of seeds, leaves, feathers, tree bark and all sorts of grasses that she collects and processes into ‘Natural Art’ in the form of wall objects.
Having grown up on her parents’ farm where the rhythm of sowing, growing and harvesting was a matter of course, she now focuses more consciously on what nature has to offer.
It is an inexhaustible source of inspiration and challenge. Hilde permanently captures the diverse shapes and colors in frames and arranges them in repeating patterns. It requires great concentration which she experiences as calming and sometimes even meditative. She empowers the viewer to shift their focus and look at nature with different eyes! Her work evokes both tranquility and dynamics, wonder and admiration.
By recreating nature in a lasting work of art, the ordinary is elevated to beauty… of a different order without compromising its purity.
Fred Ingrams
British landscape painter Fred Ingrams is renowned for his captivating depictions of the Fenlands – the flat coastal plains in the East of England. His work highlights the subtle beauty and vastness of the scenery, often emphasising the ever-changing interplay of light, weather, and the natural environment.
Through his Expressionistic acrylic landscapes, Ingrams captures the timelessness of the Fens, masterfully characterising the serene yet dramatic atmosphere. As such, Ingrams is one of the most compelling contemporary landscape artists in the UK today.
Charlotte Edsell
Charlotte’s artistic practice is deeply informed by her Bahamian heritage which infuses her work with a distinct vibrancy. Having a focused palette and a kinetic approach to mark making, the work exudes a meditative trance in which viewers trace the fluid and skilful movements across the canvas. This work is grounded in a ‘felt sense’ of the world, where the physicality of the practice pulls you into otherworldly pictorial landscapes.
Across the picture plane, energetic atmospheres expand, contract, and disperse, resulting in a dynamic tension that is both conscious and unconscious. Layers of paint—gestures, erasures, and singular strokes—bring each painting to life through a process of discovery. Abstracted figures with no definite narrative emerges, becoming an ode to the medium’s alchemically transformative qualities, in which through various mixtures offer a contemplation of half a memory of a time, place and presence.
The paintings are in motion akin sequential and cinematic scenes which when looked at in unison surrounds us and takes us into a voyage across multiple temporal and spatial spans. Just like memories, they frame a sensibility of a detail that washes away with the passing of time, and with time, we encounter such expressions leading to other memories connected to the original.
Biddy Hodgkinson
Brought up in the 1960s on a farm in England, Biddy Hodgkinson was constantly observing life and death cycles. In mid-life, Hodgkinson attended Chelsea College of Art where she developed her true love of colour and painting, graduating in Fine Art (BA Hons).
Inspiration for her work comes from close observations of lifecycles and a fascination for the beauty and luminosity in decay. Through painterly and alchemic techniques, she interprets the violent intensity and beautiful imagery we see in natural decay and mould by using harmful agents, such as acids, to erase and bleach away large swathes of colours, showing them in the context of their own negation as they would be in nature. She creates intriguing, sculptural and tactile surfaces on the canvas. As Wallace Stevens wrote, "death is the mother of beauty".
Patricia Mitchell
Patricia Mitchell draws inspiration from experiences gained through her extensive travels and conservation work in Africa, Patricia’s love of nature, botany and global culture and tradition clearly resonates through her work as a mixed media artist.
PAPER: From the magic of a murmuration of starlings; the plight of global deforestation; a myriad of majestic African animals; origami diamonds; sculptured paper fish; origami Japanese slippers to even a colourful selection of bees, dragonflies and beetles – every piece Patricia sculpts from paper comes with a thought provoking narrative.
MESH: The other genre of her portfolio are her signature abstract elephant sculptures made with aluminium mesh,
coated with a mix of 24ct gold and Fools Gold. Her golden elephants can either be seen in family herds or alone, marching along on pieces of ancient drift wood, sourced from the Jurassic coasts of New Zealand. “No other wood will do – drift wood has withstood the test of time, yet it still holds its beauty, strength and power, much like our beloved elephants.”
Behind the awe inspiring intricacy of Patricia Mitchell’s paper and mesh sculptures, there always lies an empowering story which can be either be absorbed, be viewed in passing or can be used as an interesting topic to research and to discuss.
Chrissie Hynd
Chrissie Hynde’s voice is one of the most recognised in the music world. The backdrop to her voice is a tapestry of events formative, disruptive, destructive and creative. This unique voice is found in her paintings as well. Whatever the subject matter each piece is filled with Hynde’s spirit.
Hynde has always had a facility with the pencil or brush. From an early age she was able to create a likeness of people on paper. She enrolled at Kent University to study Fine Art, although at that time her interests were more musically oriented than art oriented. But if you have it, that visual facility never leaves you. Hynde moved back into the world of painting in a low key, private way. She found painting a meditative and affirmative process; and then, it feels almost by surprise, she realized that she was making paintings that talked to other people.
Hynde uniquely has found that her Rock n’ Roll voice is the same voice she uses in painting. She paints like she sings - to communicate, tell stories, talk about people, express her feelings. Her paintings are made using the established formats of portraiture, still life, abstraction.
Alison Dunlop
Born in Canada, Alison began her studies there before continuing in France and Britain. In 1982, she came to Scotland to undertake postgraduate studies at Edinburgh College of Art, and has made Scotland her home.
In 1989 Alison was elected a member of the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour and is a past Vice-President of the Society. She also served as President of Visual Arts Scotland for three years in the late 1990s and has been made an Honorary Life Member.
She was a founding Director of The Exhibiting Societies of Scottish Artists (ESSA) and a founding member of the Edinburgh College of Art Alumni Association. She was Honorary Arts Convenor of the Scottish Arts Club, Edinburgh from 2001-2004.
Twice the recipient of the Elizabeth T Greenshields Foundation Scholarship, she was short-listed several times for the Noble Grossart Painting Prize and received the Alexander Graham Munro Award from the RSW in 1997 and the John Gray Prize in 2007. Most recently, she received the Walter Scott Award at the RSW’s Annual Open Exhibition in November 2018, in Edinburgh.
Her oils and watercolours are widely held in both public and private collections throughout the UK and Canada have been featured in exhibitions at commercial galleries across the UK and Scotland.
Pierre Marie Brission
Pierre Marie was born in Orléans, France and knew by the age of 14 that he was an artist. Although he never had formal art school training, he did have a teacher who encouraged him to follow his dreams. As a young man, he was inspired by, and worked with, several artists including Bernard Saby, Bram Van Velde and James Coignard, essentially learning his craft as an apprentice.
As a painter, Brisson integrates French decorative aestheticism – evident from Manet to Matisse – into modernist Primitivism. Using a collage technique, Brisson combines various elements in his compositions, imitating the rough surface of an ancient wall, the craquelure of old paint, the decorative pattern of wallpaper and woven fabric. Brisson’s art is avant-garde and ingenious, yet timeworn and antique. It is skilfully crafted with the best materials, yet part of its success rests with the fact that his works are fashioned from the discarded fragments of our disposable civilization, rescued and revitalized by the hand of an artist.
Brisson has an extensive exhibition history, primarily in Europe and his work can be found in the permanent collections of institutions throughout the world. He has a studio in Paris as well as one in the ancient city of Aigues Morte in the south of France. He spends most of his time painting in the south and can often be found working on his boat as it drifts down the Rhône River in the warm summer months.
Richard Ballinger
Richard Ballinger is a British landscape and still-life painter. Ballinger's recent landscape paintings explore the theme of solace from the memories of a child. Although painted in Cornwall, where Ballinger has lived and worked since 1999, and occasionally informed by drawings, his series of brightly coloured, beautiful landscapes are symbolic meditations on formative experiences of a happy, carefree childhood in idyllic, rural Gloucestershire.
In earlier works, he painted lonely figures in the landscape. Though in his more recent paintings, the figures within the paintings have been replaced by an obvious viewpoint for the imager, from the viewer. This avoids an overly determined narrative interpretation and encourages imaginative engagement. A protective wall of trees may stretch across the foreground, beyond which a thin line or path draws the eye up the picture plane towards the horizon. Perhaps like the artist as a child, we are taking refuge behind the trees, contemplating whether or not we dare to take the path into the unknown?