The Table

ARTISTS EXHIBITING @ THE TABLE

On pictures.

I really tried to make these pictures other than what they are. Each time the familiar squares and patterns emerged I changed them. I couldn’t cope with their unsubtlety, their barefacedness. Painting again after not doing so for ten years, I felt I knew exactly where to start in terms of technique, paint application, colour development, the steering with black splatt lines all came quickly and intuitively but the end results felt unacceptable and intolerable; so not-clever, so very unaccomplished.

During my hiatus from painting I began working on an Acute Adult Psychiatric Ward, one uncomfortable aspect of which is to become involved in the delineation of acceptable and unacceptable behaviours amongst people whose mental states are such that they cannot, or cannot see why they should, behave otherwise. Like three big elephants wandering around the ward corridors, “normal”, “acceptable” and “community”, are, to me at least, awkward presences.  

Now painting has my attention again. I realise that these pictures are what they are because of the time spent on the ward and how changed I am by that. The ward abounds in the irrational, things often just don’t work out, it’s messy, people die, it’s tragic. Some people have often had such shockingly bad luck that has impacted so negatively on their mental health that it is miraculous to see them with a cup of tea in their hand, talking. In the end we just grab the good bits, the funny bits, the rare times that do work out and celebrate them.

Whilst I have become aware of the influence the ward has had, I do not understand it, except perhaps obliquely in the sense that it is this that has given me creative permission to look for cohesion amongst a lack of meaning in the mess of process. To not always require a rational explanation for the way a picture seems to want to be. In this context I recognise the paintings and am recognised by them.

Julian’s recent work focuses on the contemporary figure, exploring the meeting up of grouped people in bar and café society. Painted with characteristically long limbs and angular torsos Julian’s economic use of paint brings out the essential relationships of youthful figures. He also enjoys painting figures, coastal landscapes and still life in his favourite haunts in Corfu and all over the West Country.

Julian works mainly in oil and gouache. He also makes smaller studies on his trips to London, Bath and the West Country with his conte pencils. On returning to the studio he will work these drawings up with gouache into smaller paintings. Some of these images Julian will turn into oil paintings in his studio. Julian has been painting almost every day for about thirty years now, and has developed a very concise style, characterised by his ‘drawing in paint’ approach. This leads to very clean and clear colour, painted with considerable impasto, but separated by scraped back patches. The scraping back allows each mark to ‘stand alone’ and the colour to sing out.

Sophie describes her work as ‘loosely impressionistic’, encompassing landscape, still life and figurative subjects as well as urban and industrial landscapes. She works in a variety of media often combined with collage – adding contrast and texture. Drawing on her strong visual memory, she introduces remembered colour combinations. Recently she has returned to working with oils and is excited by the possibilities this presents for the future.

Studied art history at the Courtauld Institute and later worked in restoration of Dutch master paintings in London before moving to North Wales.  Her paintings are a visceral response to her environment, which she paints almost exclusively in oils. She loves to play with luminosity and depth of colour; the quality of light is of tremendous importance to her, influenced by her years of working on Dutch master paintings where the light is incandescent. She is married, and has two children who are a further source of inspiration. Latterly she focused on the strong mother- infant bond that characterises all mammals and has explored this in her paintings of sheep and lambs.  In her paintings of animals she seeks to better understand and portray their subjective world of emotions. 

“Some people talk to animals. Not many listen though.  That’s the problem.”  AA Milne.

Born in Hereford in 1946, Carolyn took up painting at the age of ten, at Saturday classes in the old College of Art in Hereford. She attended full-time at Hereford College of Art as a mature student, and then studied with Welsh artist Roger Cecil, who remained her mentor until his death in 2015. 

Carolyn works at home in her studio amidst the gathered relics of flotsam & jetsam of her walks and travels. Her mainly abstract work is inspired by and concerned with landscape and the elements, geological faults, ley lines, chalk markings and ancient sites, always attempting to create connections between the organic, the archaeological and the spiritual. Paintings/drawings emerge through a process of layering paint and graphite, scratching and sanding until the traces of time and memory are transformed into a rich and resonant image.

Helen won the prestigious Pollock Krasner award for painting in 2012 and has exhibited internationally. She studied painting at Wimbledon School of Art graduating in 1989 and she moved to Wales in 1996.

She creates abstracts that are often monochromatic on both the small and large scale. She has a very emotional and intuitive response to her chosen materials, the sticky viscosity and watery oils vying for attention as she strives to capture Beauty.

Bob has always painted what excites him and this is what makes him get out his brushes. Maybe this excitement is contagious and the buyer will sense that too and it will strike a chord with them. He believes that people like the vitality or energy in a painting.

As much as possible, Bob likes to paint on the spot, and he often uses a sketchbook. He uses his pochade box a great deal, particularly when travelling. This is a small, portable studio for painting in oil, in which he can carry up to a dozen panels. He finds it essential to have a stool. He works up some of the studies in the studio where appropriate, and may decide to enlarge or develop them in some other way. He likes to work on groups of pictures at the same time, and to have them about him, so they ‘talk’ to him and to each other.

Bob loves structures, facades, buildings, people, water, trees and huge skies. But patterns of light and colour are what he loves to paint. The sun reorders the world throughout the day, and gives different images, depending where the light and shadows fall.

As a member of the New English Art Club since 1964, Bob has held numerous successful exhibitions in England, Wales, Greece and the USA. His work hangs on the walls of boardrooms, embassies and cultural institutions, as well as in private collections and homes all over the world.

Kate is inspired by the landscape of the Welsh borders where she lives. Her paintings do not set out to be precise representations, but a response to the changing rhythm and colours of the landscape.
Kate draws outside with charcoal, pencil and pastel, then back in the studio, she paints in oils, sometimes adding blocks of flat colour collage or newsprint to a composition. She also paints still life and flowers from her garden. 

Before becoming a full time painter Kate was a journalist and worked on Vogue before moving to Wales after her marriage. Gradually the painting became all-consuming and she began selling her work in the gallery on Tresco where the family went every summer with their 3 children . 

“I’ve lived in mid Wales for over 35 years and know the surroundings seep into my subconscious when I paint. There seems to be a deep-rooted composition in my memory that invariably emerges in a painting.  I often walk to a favourite place to revisit a group of buildings or the steep dip of skyline over the hills; I unashamedly edit the view to make a picture work, taking out anything that confuses the composition. I love emptiness in a landscape, where the space is dissected by a grid of hedges or vertical marks of buildings, telegraph poles, church spires.”

Simon was born into a farming family near Bewdley in Worcestershire in 1961. He attended an Arts Foundation Course at Hereford College of Art before taking a degree at Maidstone College of Art from where he graduated in 1984. He first exhibited in London at the age of twenty, since then he has exhibited annually, with one-man shows in New York, Zurich, London and the provinces. He has exhibited, annually, at Glyndebourne Festival Opera since 1998.

He is the art editor of HORTUS, the gardening journal, and has illustrated numerous books including the Penguin Book of Garden Writing and Peter Conradi's 'At the Bright Hem of God'.

He is also a designer of buildings, gardens and landscapes, most notably at Hampton Court. Bryan's Ground, his own garden near Presteigne, has been described by the Royal Horticultural Society as 'One of the most important and enchanting of modern gardens'. It is open regularly to the public in the summer months.

Shân was born in 1948 and she trained at the Byam Shaw School of Art 1966-70. Since then she has exhibited regularly in the UK including the Royal Academy, New English Art Club, West of England Academy, Pastel Society, Wildlife Society and London Contemporary Art Fair.

Shân lives and works on the Welsh Borders near Hay-on-Wye, dividing her time between her own studio work and teaching.

Edmund was born in1945. He studied Printmaking at City and Guilds then Painting at the Royal Academy 1963-1970. 

‘The season of the year and the time of day have provided my chief source of inspiration since moving back to the country in the mid 1970's. Most of my painting is done on site in order to continue a painting in the 'light' in which it was started.

However I commence with an idea that might have come about from going for a walk in the country or from pottering about indoors, but which doesn't surface immediately but is somewhere 'in my head' and which takes time to tease out. Having committed to a particular time and place for this idea it is then and there that I have to stay until it is realised’.

Alex was born in London in 1975. After a Foundation Course at Chelsea and a Degree in Art History at Edinburgh University Alex studied painting at Heatherley’s School of Fine Art in London, where he was awarded the Heatherleys Prize. In 2004 he was elected a member of The New English Art Club, one of the country’s foremost exhibiting societies, with whom he exhibits every year. He paints Still Lifes, Landscapes and Portraits predominately in oils, but in a sense it is the experience of looking which is the actual subject of his work, whether he be working on a large Still Life Painting in the relative calm of the studio or out in the streets of a foreign town all the senses honed for the excitement of whatever visual encounter is around the next corner

Christopher trained at the Slade School of Art in the early 1950s, and has continued to paint over the years in the style he developed for himself in those years. As a full time painter he has supported his family of 3 sons, taking time out in 1967 to serve as the Mayor of Newbury in Berkshire. Moreover, he is a member of the Royal Society of British Artists and the Royal Cambrian Society. He has paintings in the collections of the Museum of London, the National Library of Wales, the National Museum of Wales, the Ashmolean and several other regional public galleries.

Tony trained at the pottery village of La Borne France in the 1970's, and then developed his career at Whichford Pottery and is well known as one of the UK’s leading big ware throwers for terracotta garden pots.

Tony combined this skill and knowledge with his abiding interest in Ash glazed stoneware. Tony blends his own materials; the ash is made from wood cuttings from the hedgerows, and he makes his own glazes.

The forms are elemental and austere, the decoration part of the body with glaze caught by indentations in the clay. Through a process of reduction and simplification his forms reference historic archetypes.

In 2014 Tony won The Society of Portrait Sculptors prize at the Sladmore Gallery.

Alan completed a BA Hons in Fine Art Painting followed by a Masters Degree in Art & Design at Gray’s School of Art in his home town of Aberdeen. Painting from life, Alan was selected for The Garrick Milne Painting Prize and went on to produce figurative work for a number of solo exhibitions.

 Alan relocated to the county of Herefordshire to take up a painting residency at Hereford College of Arts and with a clear passion for observational drawing and painting, Alan secured a role of drawing tutor whilst continuing his studio practice and exhibiting nationally.  In 2007 Alan gained a further BA Hons degree in Graphic Design, using his skills in drawing to communicate on a new level to an alternative audience.

 However, the activity and catharsis of observing, drawing and recording is the fuel for Alan’s creative practice and empathising with The Glasgow Boys, moving away from highly finished and academic painting, Alan began to explore more gestural and painterly marks with oils.

 Influenced in part by The Scottish Colourists, Peploe, Hunter, Cadell & Fergusson, Alan employs expressive loose brushwork with accents of intense colour when recording his subject matter from life.  

Drawing every day, Alan documents the lives of those around him, always from life.   This series of new works are a move away from the figurative with a focus on still life and domestic interior, capturing the colour, chaos and occasional moments of solitude and calm in family life.

 Alan continues to share his knowledge and passion for drawing and painting with his students.  He lives with his family in Herefordshire, returning to the north east of Scotland each year to study the intense and unique light and record it in paint.

Claerwen lives near Rhayader where she was born and her family have lived and farmed for generations.

She went to the Byam Shaw Art School in London when Maurice de Sausmarez was Principal. He gave her the Principal’s Prize at one of their Exhibitions and she won a David Murray Landscape Scholarship given by the Royal Academy and passed NDD in Fine Arts.

She has exhibited many times in England and Wales and has been with the Thackeray Gallery in London since the early 1990’s.

Lois studied Fine Art at The University of Newcastle Upon Tyne 1982 - 86 winning the South West Open Young Artists Award in 1986. She then went out to work for twenty years beginning with Textile Conservation at Hampton Court Palace and ending up on the set of a Harry Potter film. She gained an MA in Screen Design from the NFTS in 2002.

Since moving to Wales she has settled in Knucklas with her partner the potter, Tony Hall, and their twins, where they have established Castle Hill Arts and run a small flock of sheep.

"I love sketching and turn the small pen drawings that I make on walks into big landscape works. Small images are projected onto paper, ply and gesso and worked up into painted drawings in the studio. The landscape, the hill farms, the odd geometry of the shapes of fields and the weather all inform the paintings which I make in the studio".

In 2010 Lois won the ING Drawing prize at the Mall Galleries.

Charles trained at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts (Dip. AD) and Brighton Polytechnic (Art Teachers' Certificate).  After a period of teaching and working as an auxiliary nurse, he was awarded a major bursary by Southern Arts which enabled him to paint full time.

Initially painting landscape, he gradually abandoned this in order to paint more intimate subjects in a domestic setting.  Through still lifes and interiors he tries to evoke in paint both the objects and the atmosphere of his everyday surroundings.  Working slowly with muted tones and simplified compositions, stillness and calm predominate.

In 1986 he moved to Herefordshire where as well as exhibiting regularly he has curated a number of religiously themed exhibitions.  He also exhibits in London with the Piers Feetham Gallery.   In 2015 he was given a solo exhibition in Louisville, Kentucky as part of the Thomas Merton centenary celebrations.

Daniel (1986) graduated from Sussex University with a BA in History in 2008 and the Royal Drawing School in 2012. He lives in Presteigne, Powys but is currently studying in London on the TURPS painting programme, which along with recent shows in London and Milan have all been suspended by the Corona virus Pandemic. His work is concerned with allegory, the collapse of civilisations, entropy and the enduring indifference of nature, themes which stem from his study of History as an undergraduate. His practice is also influenced by coming from many generations of artists and painters on his father’s side. This is his first two-man show with his father Charles MacCarthy.

Born in Glasgow, Stewart graduated in 1977 from Glasgow School of Art in sculpture.

He studied for an MA in European Fine Art in the Barcelona Studios of the Winchester School of Art graduating in 1994.

He lives and works in Hay.

“Some time ago I read the poet Kathleen Jamie’s book “Sightlines” in which she describes sitting on a Greenland shore and experiencing what she described as a “radiant silence”. I found that this phrase perfectly encapsulated the quality I had been pursuing in my work and which I have continued to pursue in the work you see here”

Helen studied at Kingston achieving a BA in fashion. She then worked as a freelance designer before opening a small children's shop in Cranleigh. Bringing up her family of three children never stifled her creativity. She retired from running Cranleigh Prep art department after fifteen years this summer.

Driftwood angels appeared after a trip to Italy where some pieces of wood from the beach, once back at home, happened to make the shape of the first angel. She has continued to make them ever since, holding twenty six Christmas Angel sales with her charity Have a Heart. Every penny raised goes to support around sixty different charities; the sale of one large driftwood angel brings fresh water to a village.

"The stimulus for a still life is often an arrangement of colours, shapes or rhythms that simply have to be painted, subtlety against strength, and outdoors; the chance that a sudden change in the lightmight dramatically alter the arrangement but somehow give it a new stability. I have painted chairs like these on many an occasion; objects with a sense of history or the human touch, either personal or unknown, fascinate me."

Selected biography: one man shows in Scotland, Lancashire, Lincolnshire, Kent, Surrey, West Sussex, London. Exhibited portraits with National Portrait Gallery (BP Award) on 5 occasions, commended 1991. Portraits in Imperial War Museum and Royal Collection Windsor.

Still lives exhibited with Royal Academy, (Summer Exhibition), New English Art Club, Sunday Times Watercolour competition. In1986 awarded French Government Scholarship to Paris at the Cite International des Arts returning in 2003 and 2011. Continues to undertake private and corporate commissions.

Lives and works in a converted barn in Surrey.

from the writings of TONY BIRKS HAY (1973 - 2014)

“Bill Mills was a big man. He gave the impression of strength and power. He lived life to the full, and left behind, at his death in 1997, a great body of vigorous work.

Nothing in his art was weak or mean. Every piece of work I have ever seen by Bill Mills, from the largest towering canvas to the simplest Hiltonesque linear cartoon, has a strength and spirit, showing a love of life inspirational to colleagues and pupils. He should take his place amongst the best British expressive painters of the 20th Century, like Frank Auerbach, Ivon Hitchens, Patrick Heron and Roger Hilton.

His work is on a main artery of modern painting, an artery which maintains the brain-hand-eye connection missing in so much conceptual art.

Born in Portsmouth ...(he) went in 1945 to Goldsmiths College in London, and studied painting there with colleagues such as Brigit Riley and Albert Irvin. He was part of an iconoclastic cell, and must have been aware of David Bomberg’s teaching at the nearby Borough Polytechnic, asBomberg was an important influence on his work.

He lived a full and furious life, but he shunned the artistic establishment, and ploughed his own furrow. He had no time for artists who painted with an eye to preferment or who chased fashionable trends. He was too busy struggling with the old problem: painting itself.

Bill Mills skill as a draughtsman was considerable. Economical line drawings of the nude and atmospheric charcoal drawings of rocks and trees and landscapes are a formidable legacy in themselves. But it was painting that he regarded as the highest art form. He could and would talk about painting as no one else did, with a sureness of view, but no arrogance or conceit.

He wrote: “One has to burrow underneath appearances...I prefer artists that move paint about in an organic fashion... artists like Bomberg, Manet, Titian, Turner, Auerbach, Rembrandt.” He certainly did this himself.

Though his work was widely exhibited, with twelve one-man shows in the 1990s, and is now disseminated in private collections, he still waits for his reputation to rise, and to take his due place in twentieth-century British art.”

extracts taken from the catalogue for a Commemorative Exhibition 10 June – 30 July 2000 Brecknock Museum & Art Gallery, Powys, Wales& William Mills’ Obituary: The Guardian 1997

I was born and grew up in Ireland. I now live in Presteigne, Wales. I studied Fine Art at Winchester and then at Leeds College of Art. More recently I took a postgraduate course in Art Psychotherapy at Goldsmiths College. I exhibit regularly in England, Ireland and Wales.

I am interested in the detail of natural objects. I usually start a sculpture by making carved or modelled studies. I then combine and juxtapose these elements to build an amalgamated structure.

I am primarily a stone carver, but also use wood, wax, bronze, peat, wire, and clay in my work – sometimes combining these materials.

Arthur was born in 1951. He attended Camberwell School of Art where he did painting and printmaking. He lives and works in Deal, close to the sea, and is a member of the New English Art Club.

Arthur works somewhere between a figurative and a semi-abstract world.

He engages with the formal problems that arise in the process of looking, in its broad sense, to attempt to make something that is a coherent painting. Arthur’s method of working is prolonged, procrastinated messy chaos, occasionally organised chaos.

He is a regular exhibitor at the RA summer shows and NEAC annual exhibitions otherwise he has shown at Lynne Strover Gallery, Linden Hall Studio Gallery and Cadogan Contemporary.

‘The model sits, the model drinks tea or talks, maybe we listen to music - she drifts, here and there perhaps thinking of her trip to Mexico. It has been a long time since a person has sat for me, a new motif alongside other works, a wealth of new directions and a new found enthusiasm.’

Arthur Neal  August 2013

‘I like this because over the years the Royal Academy’s Summer Show has had an awful of of artist’s studios and gardens - and has been slightly mocked for it. But this is done, obviously, in an abstract style, though you can still make out the shapes of the lawns and buildings, and roughly what’s going on outside.

I think it’s a very civilised and harmonious painting. The balance of shapes, it has a lovely composition - edges pushing against one another, and then pushing out. It has a beautiful sense of harmony and balance, and I think it’s a lovely painting, really.’

Sebastian Faulks  1990 Summer Exhibition 

‘As a young man in 1970, Arthur Neal chose to go to Camberwell Art School, indicating his desire to work from nature. Although Camberwell had a reputation for teaching drawing, and figurative painting, it would not have been a fashionable choice. This reveals Arthur’s attitude towards his work, and his dedication to making images.

His paintings are compelling. He has an obsessiveness for the truth of the world around us. Not a superficial quest for detail, but more a sort of spiritual, and emotional truth. For me the great strength of his work is that his paintings unfold, that is, they improve the more one familiarises oneself with them. This is truly one of the most difficult qualities to achieve, which makes them compelling paintings.

He works on series of motifs, like his back garden, or sea cliffs, because he is searching for the ultimate, which for him, is to be found in his next painting.’

Ben Levene RA 1991

1982-1985  City and Guilds of London Art school, studying conservation of sculpture in wood and stone.

1986-1989 Worked in conservation of stone on Canterbury Cathedral and then for The National Trust statuary workshop at Cliveden. I worked in some amazing places, I spent a summer working on St Michael’s Mount and at Mount Stewart in Northern Ireland.

1989-1990  Back to college at Weymouth tech, to do masonry and carving. Enjoyed living by the sea.

1991 Then worked for Cliveden Conservation doing restoration carving. This included a few Rysbrack noses at Stowe landscape gardens and replacement Ionic capitals on Queen Carolines monument. Also some new beasts for Sharingtons tower at Lacock Abbey, one of my favourite places.

1994   Moved to Knucklas and set up business with Will doing a mix of work while having children. Mainly memorials but other things included the front end of a 4 tonne lobster and a series of heads for a bar in Singapore.

2017  I now work from Knucklas on my own and love it.  I enjoy doing a range of stone related things. I still carve memorials where Will still designs the lettering, I carve pieces for exhibitions, these have included Canwood, Discoed church Lent exhibition and Abbeydore. I am commissioned for carving work and I also run weekend carving courses and Tuesday mornings for locals and occasionally I am back up the scaffolding!!

Born Manchester 1958, studied at Bristol Polytechnic 1979-81, Royal College of Art 1982-84.

Living in London 1999 to present, teaching drawing at Southampton Solent University.

Paul’s current work builds on a lifetime of Life Drawing and observation drawing, of people and landscapes on location, as well as the principles that he teaches in the drawing class. Body language and the subtle expression between figures standing and sitting, in an attempt to convey both stillness and movement. How to simplify or refine the figure down to its essence, and to still have a sense of presence and life. He has always admired early Renaissance art and Japanese prints, as well as the work of Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, and he is attempting to capture something that has a similar sense of timelessness. 

As Kurt Koffka said, “ A work of art is not an idle play of the emotions, but a means of helping us find our place in the world “.

I trained in the early sixties at Bath Academy Corsham and the Slade School of Art, followed by a year studying Woodblock Printing in Japan. 

My childhood was spent on a farm in Pembrokeshire. Moving to Presteigne in 2011, Radnorshire felt immediately familiar. Making numerous sketches outdoors, I am especially drawn to the curves and zig zagging lines of hedgerows, the deeply etched ploughlines.

More recently I did an MA in Textile Design at Bath where silk screen printing brought me full circle back to early Japanese prints with their simplified shapes, rhythmic line and exquisite decorative detail.

Working in watercolour and gouache I exploit the contrast between transparency and more opaque areas. I sponge back the colour on tough cotton rag paper which gives greater flexibility and enables me to push the image as far as possible.

As well as having exhibited in the U.K at the Curwen and Cadogan Galleries in London and the Beaux Arts in Bath, I’ve also had solo exhibitions in the U.S, Canada, Australia, Holland and Italy.

My work is in numerous private and public collections including the British Museum, London University. The Government Art Collection, Montreal Visual Arts Centre, The Contemporary Arts Society for Wales and Y Tabernacle at Machynlleth.

Co-Founder of the Bristol Drawing School and patron of Royal West of England Academy, Carol Peace is an internationally collected figurative sculptor. She originally studied sculpture at Winchester School of Art and then completed the drawing year at The Royal Drawing School. Four life-size bronzes have just been installed in Barbados; her work is collected in New York, Hong Kong and Singapore, as well as the United States and Canada. Closer to home, she shows mostly in London but also Stockholm, Frankfurt, with solo shows in The Netherlands, France, Marbella, Athens and Zurich. She has a permanent collection of sculpture at the Dorchester, and many public art commissions across the UK including a large piece at Glyndebourne.

Described in a recent article as ‘enduringly popular’ Carol could not work without drawing. ‘It's all about trying to see, drawing enables that’ . The sculptures are then made in clay, which like charcoal is quick to make marks with. Once finished it is cast into bronze, those fluid marks of the making are then fixed forever.

‘The work is about the every person, the you, the me. It’s about everyday life, in its minutiae, the pain and the joy…the sheer fantasticness of it all.’

Charles was born in Kirkwall, Orkney, in 1956 and studied at Gray’s School  of Art, Aberdeen and at the Royal College of Art, London, specialising there in Illustration. Since graduating in 1983 he has balanced terms of teaching at  numerous art schools with work on personal projects. His primary interest is in landscape and in particular those places and spaces that nature has reclaimed. This is an ongoing theme. Charles makes regular visits to Southern Ireland in his search for material, plotting his routes from ruin to ruin. Those once great mansions remain, ivy clad and ravaged by near a century of weathering, all in glorious neglect. Industrial spoil heaps and edge of town brown field sites also attract by their transience, their hoardings, pylons, stagnant pools and rutted tracks. 

His interest in Printmaking that began at art school is his principal studio and teaching practice. It is here that ideas and project work can be developed through processes that have been modified by years of personal experience and experimentation.

Everything begins and is developed through drawing, this is fundamental to what he does so the sketchbook has become an ongoing depository for working ideas and developments as well as visually documenting his day to day observations and the journeys he makes about the land.  

Katherine trained as a textile designer in London and NYC before going on to live and work internationally as a lingerie designer. That career, creating the most intimate and yet universal of garments for women, fostered a deep curiosity about ideas and ideals of womanhood - what we conceal and reveal, consciously or otherwise, of our bodies and our selves. It is these themes she now explores as an artist. Moving far away from the mechanised world of mass manufacture, she hand-stitches paper using vintage threads gathered from world travels, or upcycled silk, cotton and linen, naturally dyed using berries and lichen foraged from local hedgerows and mountains. These slow, considered practices represent a return to the values of story, meaning and heritage. She now lives in Talgarth with her husband and daughters.

Richard is a painter of invented figurative paintings … ‘people doing things’. His distinctive pictures are reinventions of reality, based on a lifetime of drawing and painting and looking at life. For some years he worked mainly as a landscape, portrait and still life painter, and as a painter of aerial views, mainly of grand houses.

He was President of the Royal Watercolour Society from 2006-9, and is also a member of the New English Art Club, the Royal Society of British Artists and the Art Workers Guild. He has had many solo and group shows in Britain and the USA. His work is represented in the V&A Museum, Museum of London and the collection of the National Trust, and in many private collections.

Richard lives with his wife Sue in the far west of Cornwall.

"My subject matter is wide-ranging, sometimes becoming abstract or semi abstract, always built on drawing and often memory. I just enjoy the conversation and the struggle with whatever medium I have chosen. I never have an end in mind, I just stop when the work feels right."

Anthea trained at the Ruskin School of Drawing at Oxford University and for 25 years taught art at Harrow School.

‘Though I never find it easy, or perhaps even appropriate, to write about my own work, I can safely say after half a century of making images that it’s main thematic impulse has always been driven by a keen interest in and love of the natural world: its beauty, its precarious existence and future, and its relationship with mankind. The subject matter has included many kinds of wildlife, some real (even if now extinct), others fantastic; but birds have undoubtedly provided the main motif. This exhibition is no exception, though there are some land/seascapes and a few figures too.

It occurs to me that the two most recent shows, this one and ‘Exotica’ (Abbott and Holder May 2018), are more celebratory of what survives than darkly foreboding. Certainly there is more colour, and in some of the more dramatically conceived compositions some intended irony/humour.

More specifically, this show combines a number of studies (they tend to be relatively realistic in treatment) with compositions more formally designed, some quite abstract, others with a deliberate dramatic content. Not much should be read into the titles - they are really only intended as an easy means of identification.

And lastly - perhaps, especially, at a time when man ironically seems to be at the mercy of nature rather than the other way round, I very much hope that all viewers/visitors to the show will be able to find there something that provides succour as well as enjoyment.’

Peter's work is concerned primarily with the natural world, embracing its history and precarious future, as well as man's place in that world. Though a full time teacher of English and Classics at Harrow School (1971-2004 ) he has always drawn and painted and began contributing to mixed shows, notably at the New Grafton Gallery and The Bloomsbury Workshop in London, in the 1990s. Since 2003 he has shown mainly with Abbott and Holder Ltd, London.

Michael grew up in Winchester. He studied librarianship and realised early on that he didn't want to be a librarian. Going to life-drawing classes cheered him up; and drawing his flatmates. One told him to do a degree in Fine Art. He drew on the South Bank under the Queen Elizabeth Hall, stark, retro and futuristic, like the set from a '70s sci-fi series. Afterwards he studied portraiture at Lavender Hill Studios. He came back to Winchester to paint in a shared studio not far from the water meadows. Natural light from a window to the right. He set up a piece of garlic next to a blue cup and painted it over and over. Then lemons and pears. Satsumas. Milk bottle and a coffee packet. Occasionally a jar of marmite.

He says, “I still paint the blue cup. After a while you get into it. Bonnard said, let it be felt that the painter was here. You feel the painters standing next to you, peering at the colours, leaving some of the canvas unpainted. I like serious painters, de Stael, Rothko, Sargy Mann. Today's painters - Daniel Shadbolt, Dawn Sidoli, Martin Yeoman, tonal painters in the continuing tradition of the New English Art Club.
Since 2012 he has had work accepted for the annual exhibitions of the New English Art Club and the Royal Institute of Oil Painters. In 2014 he was a drawing scholar with the New English Art Club. In 2015 he won both the Winsor & Newton Award and the Le Clerc Fowle Medal for an outstanding group of paintings.

He teaches painting at the Mill Studio in Arundel and the Colour Factory in Winchester. He says, “We draw and paint in a traditional style from life. I encourage slowing down, working big to small, finding the big colour shapes. It's a slightly abstract way into the painting. It's how I work.”

Marika was born in London in 1958 to Hungarian and British parents. She studied dance at The Royal Academy of Dancing, Arts Educational Schools and The Mime Centre London with Adam Darius. She toured with various fringe dance companies throughout the UK and the Far East. She appeared in the BBC series on Raphael as his muse. This role played into real life as Marika became an artist's model working for many years as Ken Howard's muse. She was a regular model at The Royal Academy of Art Schools. Marika studied drawing and painting with Jason Bowyer, Francis Bowyer and Paul Heywood. She has had work in The Hunting Prize, The Royal Society of Portrait Painters and Karen Taylor Contemporary Art. Her work is in private collections throughout the world. The freedom and emotional quality of Joan Eardley and Frank Auerbach along with the compositional values of Vuillard were a strong influence in her early work. Marika's ongoing involvement in movement (tai chi, yoga, swimming) feeds into her fascination with the human form and the changing forms of objects as they become personalised within space.

‘There is a mystery that happens in the small space between looking at something and the brush touching the canvas. A world within worlds occurs in that short time. Timeless. Colours, shapes, faces, bodies, stories, memories, textures, scents, feelings. As they appear and disappear something of them remains in the marks made.

I am searching for myself in my art.

I do not KNOW who I am. I need to FEEL who I am. Like a dancer using muscle memory.

I do not want to be measured, to have my words laid down in concrete. I just want to be. I would say the same for my paintings.

I don't know what they are. They just are.

They will change as I do.

Someone once said,

"Your paintings do not make me think, but they make me feel"

If that happens...it is enough.

(I feel)’

"I still find painting a very difficult activity. Its unpredictable. At the start of each day I am not sure that anything good will result and I have given up on achieving a style. Whatever develops, happens. There is no clear idea or vision of how a picture will look."

Michael was born on 6th June 1938 in London and he attended Harrow School Of Art. He uses oil or watercolours for painting and pastels and charcoal to draw. He has a very traditional way of working. He often works on 6 or more paintings at a time and he draws regularly and works from paintings. Drawings can be around for years before he thinks of using them in a painting.

In 1985 he was elected a member of the New English Art Club.

Sophie grew up in a family of artists and musicians in the English countryside. She studied at The Byam Shaw and The Chelsea School of Art in London.

She has worked as an illustrator of children's books for many years. She lives in Herefordshire with her husband the Film director and Screen writer Bruce Robinson, with whom she has collaborated on two picture books, 'The Obvious Elephant' and 'Harold and the Duck'.

Her work is inspired by her love of animals and the countryside she lives in.

As well as illustrating books Sophie does large watercolours and acrylic paintings. Her work is in private collections in America, Australia, Venezuela and Europe.

Martin was born in 1953. He trained from 1975-1979 at the Royal Academy Schools, London. Among his commissions to date are Her Majesty The Queen's grandchildren, Sir Alan Hodgkin OM, Sir Brinsley Ford and the former Bishop of Birmingham Hugh Montefiori. Winner of the 2002 Ondaatje Portrait Prize, his work is both painterly and poetic. He is considered by many to be one of the finest draughtsmen working today and is sought after by artists and collectors alike. He has accompanied HRH The Prince of Wales on official overseas tours to India, Hong Kong and the Gulf States.

'In the 20 years that I have known Martin, he has produced consistently good work, which is not surprising for an artist described by the renowned connoisseur, Sir Brinsley Ford, as the best draughtsman in England. Martin's skill at painting light is in the true tradition of his main influences, Sickert and the Camden Town School, and more recently Peter Greenham. This, together with his subtle use of colour, makes Martin one of the best figurative artists in Britain today.'

Henry Wyndham, Chairman Europe, Sotheby's

Daniel Backhouse

Julian Bailey

Sophie Bartlett

Karen Birkin

Carolyn Blake

Helen Booth

Bob Brown NEAC

Kate Corbett Winder

Simon Dorrell

Shân Egerton

Edmund Fairfax-Lucy

Alex Fowler NEAC

Christopher Hall

Tony Hall

Alan Harrold

Claerwen Holland

Lois Hopwood

Charles MacCarthy

Daniel MacCarthy

Stewart Macindoe

Helen McNiven

Peter McNiven

William Mills

Tania Mosse

Arthur Neal

Lottie O’Leary

Paul Osborne

Josh Partridge

Carol Peace

Charles Shearer

Katherine Sheers

Richard Sorrell

Anthea Stilwell

Peter Stilwell

Michael Weller

Marika Wenman

Michael Whittlesea NEAC

Sophie Windham

Martin Yeoman NEAC