PAINTING H - P

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As a child my brother and I were bundled into the sidecar of my Dads motor bike and whisked off to a magical place called the seaside. This began my life-long love of the British seaside holiday and all the fun and joy that comes with it.

For years I have had to satisfy myself with photography until Christmas 2012 when I thought now or never and picked up a paint brush and had a go. To my surprise I found that I had so many ideas floating about in my head that I just had to get them out.

My paintings are all about bright colour and life.

I hope you enjoy looking at them as much as I enjoyed painting them and maybe have a little chuckle.

Over the past two years, I have moved away from traditional painting and joined the abstract movement using a method best known as the Acrylic Fluid Pouring Technique. I thoroughly enjoy this method and have grown to appreciate the process as being as important, if not more important, as the outcome. My growing love for the unpredictability of fluid pouring has fuelled my perseverance with this method and encouraged me to explore the more contemporary use of paint. Focusing originally on perfecting my pour outcomes and attempting to predict how an outcome could look aesthetically, it soon became apparent that due to the nature of the method and mixtures of paint I am using (paint conditioner and silicone oil), this idea of complete control was not possible when a huge factor of my works is left to the impact of chance throughout the process. 

I was brought up in a very creative 'Bohemian' household. My father was an artist, who established a highly successful business, sculpting and manufacturing model soldiers. Under his guidance, I learned about handling paint, colour mixing and attention to detail at a very early age. 

Having painted on canvas for many years, I discovered working on wood around six years ago and have not looked back. Each piece is a ready-made landscape. I take the wood, see the landscape presented and paint what I feel is appropriate for the wood. A habitat for a wild and beautiful animal.

Whilst many of the creatures I paint are British, I am increasingly inspired by the Arctic and by Norse legends.

Peter was born in Somerset, and studied at the West of England College of Art. Throughout his working life in design and advertising agencies he still continued to paint in his spare time. He paints mainly landscapes and seascapes in oils. His work has been exhibited in the home counties, London, Europe, America and on many charitable occasions.

In 2005, his work was selected from 10,000 artists worldwide to be one of the launching artists for a new gallery in the USA.

John has painted with watercolours since childhood. He studied Fine Art at Hammersmith College in London and later Graphic Design at Reigate College of Art.

Relocating to the West Country in the late eighties, he taught at Millfield Summer School, The Blue School, and Strode College. John now lives in Wookey Hole, nr Wells, He mainly paints in the evocative Somerset Levels and Mendip Hills, preferring a direct plein-air approach and aiming to capture a sense of immediacy and place.

John has been a very successful artist exhibiting in solo, group and open exhibitions. John has received national recognition by winning first prize in the Sunday Times watercolour competition.

Born in Birmingham in 1964, I graduated from Birmingham School of Art in 1987. Initially I worked as a wildlife illustrator, then went into teaching, slowly moving further away from what I trained for…

 In 2007 I moved with my family to New Zealand, an adventure that gifted me the time and courage to paint again, which is where the interest in seascapes developed. Here I exhibited in solo and group shows, with works now held in private collections. 

On returning to the Uk,  and now living in Lympstone, Devon, my focus has shifted to British Wildlife, and the conservation status of our iconic species.

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I do seem to have the best job in the world. Go to nice places, sit down for an hour, and enjoy the warmth. It’s a good life. Even if I do have to balance on a precarious three-legged stool. Lucky for you I can’t intellectualise about my work, I don’t have complex reasons for doing it, and I often don’t know why I draw a certain subject. And do you know what? That doesn’t bother me. I just like the colours, the overlay of man-made structures, the accidents of architecture over time.

But, I do like my paints, and the papers I use, and the pens, all chosen carefully after years of blots and scratches and nib bending.

The experience of laying down paint with little thought, just allowing the impulse to take over, didn't intially come naturally to me but once started is difficult to stop. Putting on layers of paint, sometimes collage, mark making, sanding and scraping back to reveal lower layers all add to the process of giving the piece a history and to the joy of creating.The enjoyment of letting the painting evolve without too much planning is a very freeing experience but once I do decide to stop then the contemplation of where the image goes next becomes a much quieter, more tentative approach. It's like taking a conscious breath.

Graduating with a degree in fine art from Nottingham Trent University, Alii has exhibited in Nottingham, London and Oslo.

Having taken time off from painting to bring up a busy family, a cat and a sausage dog, Alii now has time to concentrate on her art practice.

Alii is based in the Cotswolds but  spends a large proportion of her time in the wilds of the far north of the Highlands. To find material for her paintings she explores the profound essence of rejuvenation, tranquility and a new perspective  from the  connection with nature you get when alone  in a vast landscape.

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‘Through my paintings, I seek to evoke the overwhelming  tranquility of being alone in the wilderness, where the only life around you is  the natural habitat. Being miles from civilisation, time seems to stand still and suddenly you, as a person, are in the minority and you slowly become at one with the land. The response of the mind and body to these feelings of solitude leave behind the somewhat chaos and noise of today's world and helps to rebalance the distractions of modern life with a overwhelming sense of peace,  calm and renewal

Tiffany graduated from Brunel University in 1993 with a honours degree in Textile Design and Surface Pattern.

Having spent many years working as a textile designer, she has always enjoyed creating art and wanted to share her passion.

In 2003 she completed a postgraduate certificate in education and became a teacher of art in a leading independant school until 2015.

She now works as a professional artist and is a mum of two children on the autistic spectrum. She produces her painting from her studio at her home, a 17th century Somerset farmhouse in the beautiful Chew Valley. 

Her paintings like her garden reflect a sense of fun and broad spectrum of colour. Radiating in happiness the appreciation of the simple details of life.

I am a visual artist based in somerset. I have recently moved from the North East coast of Scotland where I lived for the past 20 years, working in the Arts as a professional artist and teaching creative workshops, alongside being a parent and foster carer.

The process of making Art is as much an internal one as it is technical. On my quest to evolve the freedom of expression in my work and connect to the creative force to birth that which matters to me, there has been adversity to traverse and much that life has revealed.

 Working in close connection to nature, inspired by the stars, the sun, the oceans and mountains, the forests and the flowers and all that gives rise to the incredible elemental life on earth, I have been discovering the beauty of life.

David lives near Bath. He is a landscape painter, working with Watercolours and water-based media. He was elected a member of The Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours in 2011 and won the Neil Meacher RI sketchbook award in 2012.

“I am passionate about watercolour, with its fluidity and uncontrollable nature; finding how the medium can be used to express and convey a feeling for the moods and atmosphere of my local landscape. The Mendip Hills and Wetlands, near to my home in Somerset, are the inspiration for the vast majority of my work and painting outdoors most of the time allows me to connect to it as I strive to achieve a feeling for the sense of place.”

Kaye Parmenter is a British Artist who works with both watercolour and acrylic mediums and her work is collected internationally. Kaye’s style of painting is spontaneous and has an ethereal quality. She aims to capture life, energy and atmosphere in her work, by use of light, colour and energetic brush strokes. Choice of subject matter is purely down to what inspires her at a particular

moment in time.

Kaye was born in Hertfordshire and has always had a creative nature and a love of art. Following a later move to Somerset and a subsequent art course at Constable Country’s Flatford Mill in Suffolk, Kaye’s art career has grown beyond her dreams.k. This was the first of over a dozen solo shows, and at the same time, she was also submitting miniatures to various major art exhibitions in the UK and abroad, with significant success.

“What made you decide to paint miniatures?” is a common question, which may produce different answers from any miniature artist.

I like little things and from a very early age used a number of 2″x 3″ booklets for crayon drawing. One of these somehow survived, turning up a few years ago. I had no memory until then of these little notepads and was interested to realise that I had been using the same dimensions for my paintings many years later.

My grandfather was a sign writer and calligrapher and a few surviving examples sent to my father prompted me to paint miniature pictures on letters to friends, having no skill for calligraphy.