Watercolourist, wood engraver, book illustrator, lithographer and mural decorator, Ravilious was born in Acton but grew up in Eastbourne, Sussex, where he studied until he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art in London. Ravilious was taught by Paul Nash and became friends, and sometime work companion, with Edward Bawden. They were both part of the generation that included Henry Moore, described by Nash as "an outbreak of talent". Both painters were part of a tradition of English topographical watercolourists, their art influenced by a lightness of technique and their design work.
In 1930 Ravilious married the artist Tirzah Garwood and befriended Sussex based artist Peggy Angus. It is from her home, Furlongs, near Firle on the Sussex Downs just outside of Brighton, that Ravilious began to paint his Downland subjects. He went on to become one of the best-known artists of the 1930s, also designing graphics for London Transport and ceramic designs for Wedgwood. From 1940 he was an Official War Artist, painting memorable pictures of ships, aircraft and coastal defences, until his tragic death in a flying accident off Iceland in 1942 when he became one of the few official war artists to die on active service.
Edward Bawden
[1903-1989]
Edward Bawden, born in 1903 in Braintree, Essex, was a prolific painter, illustrator and graphic artist. From 1922-25, he studied in London at the Royal College of Art [RCA] under Paul Nash, along with his contemporary and friend Eric Ravilious. He illustrated books, designing patterned paper and borders, for Curwen Press during the 20s. He was famous for his prints, book covers and posters.
As an official war artist during the Second World War, Bawden was sent on a number of expeditions to the Middle East. His evocative watercolour paintings in Iraq captured the unique life of the Marsh Arabs and their reed dwellings. He illustrated many books, including Aesop's Fables, The Hound of the Baskervilles, Tales of Troy and Life in an English Village.
Bawden was a skilful printmaker, using several techniques including woodcuts, line drawing, linocutting and copper engraving. Kew Gardens, Brighton, Liverpool Street Station, London Markets and London Monuments were subjects that attracted Bawden's printmaking, He also painted a number of successful murals, designed wallpaper and ceramic wall tiles. His commercial work included illustrations and poster design for London Transport, Westminster Bank and Twinings, and for Fortnum & Mason and Imperial Airways in the 1930s. The artist was awarded a CBE in 1946, and his work can be seen in many major galleries such as the Tate Gallery in London.
Sir Terry Frost
[1915-2003]
Awarded an OBE in 1998 for his contribution to British art and art education, abstract painter Sir Terry Frost is one of the most important British artists of the 20th century. Through his use of bold colours and simplified geometric forms, Frost evoked moments and events that had produced profound reactions in him.
Although he attended evening art classes at 16, Frost only started painting while a prisoner of war in Germany during World War II when he was in his 30s. On his return to England he studied at Camberwell School of Art where he came into contact with the work of the St Ives group [Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, Peter Lanyon and Roger Hilton, among others], which influenced his abstract style. He also experimented with collages and constructions, although printmaking always played a key role in his work.
Frost's first one-man show was in London at the Leicester Galleries in 1952. By the late 1950s he had become established as a leading abstract painter exhibiting regularly in London. His first solo exhibition was at the Bertha Schaeffer Gallery in New York in 1961. His career included teaching at the Bath Academy of Art [1952], Gregory Fellow at Leeds College of Art [1956-59], and artist in residence and professor of painting at the Fine Art Department at the University of Reading. He was elected to the Royal Academy in 1992 and knighted in 1998.
Storm Thorgerson
Born in Potters Barn in 1944, Thorgerson's career took off in 1968 when he formed graphic design studio, Hipgnosis, specialising in creative photography mainly for album covers. His designs include those for Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Genesis, 10CC, Yes, Peter Gabriel, Black Sabbath, and The Cranberries, with Thorgerson's design for Dark Side of the Moon named as one of the greatest album covers of all time. His work is surreal, often placing objects out of their traditional contexts in vast landscapes, this awkwardness serving to highlight their beauty.
The artist likes photography because it is a reality medium, unlike drawing, which is unreal. "I like to mess with reality...to bend reality. Some of my works beg the question of is it real or not. I use real elements in unreal ways. Is the man really on fire? Why would he just be standing there? Who put the beds on the beach? Why? Why is there a cow on the cover? It doesn't have anything to do with the album, or does it?" In an age of digital technology, it is hard to believe that the metal heads featured on Division Bell were physically produced and not computer generated, or that the man in Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here was actually set alight.
Thorgerson describes what he does as performance art akin to the musicians he aspires to represent. He visualizes his concept, creates the imaginative scene, and then captures it through the use of photography, although once this 'temporary installation' is caught on camera it is gone, leaving behind a photograph as the only evidence of its occurrence.
Anna Marrow
Anna Marrow is an illustrator, painter and screen printer who studied art at Bristol specialising in printmaking, as well as Communication Design at St Martin's in London. She works mainly with silkscreen, enjoying the limitless variety of marks that can be manipulated and personalised from bold splashes of colour to delicate drawn lines, scraps of text to photographic images, built up in colourful layers.
Anna combines elements of drawing text and collage to convey the excitement and confusion of city life. She tries to capture the chaos and diversity of modern urban living in her prints. Anna's most recent works have focused on ideas about the accelerated pace of our lives, the random messages and commands we are bombarded with and the characters and creatures we encounter daily.
Her work is also infused by visits to Kuala Lumpur, Saigon and Singapore. The Jazz series pictures the energy, movement and passion of the musicians and give the images a hint of fifties style, in keeping with the subject matter. Her work has been commissioned and bought by Heals, Selfridges and the BBC, and she has exhibited in the Contemporary Print Show [2000, 1998] at the Barbican in London.
Cyril Edward Power
[1872 - 1951]
Power was born in London, the eldest son of an architect. The family encouraged his creative abilities both in music and drawing, and Power went on to study architecture before joining his father's practice. In 1900 he won the Sloan Medallion awarded by the Royal Institute of Architecture [RIBA] for his design for an art school. During this time he also wrote the History of Medieval Architecture, which included his own illustrations and was published in three volumes. Power married Dorothy Nunn in 1904 and they had four children.
During his only absence from London, a brief time spent in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, Power met and began a lifelong collaboration with friend and fellow artist Sybil Andrews. Back in London in 1925, they founded the Grosvenor School of Modern Art in Warwick Square, alongwith Claude Flight and Iain McNab. Power was the principle lecturer, teaching structure and form in buildings, historical ornament and architectural style. It was during this time that he began to study lino cutting under Claude Flight. The work that resulted attracted worldwide interest in the Grosvenor School.
The 'First Exhibition of British Lino Cuts' was held at the Redfern Gallery in June 1929. A series of subsequent annual exhibitions was held at both the Redfern and Ward galleries, generating considerable interest and commissions from the London Tourist Board for a series of Prints on the theme 'sporting venues reached by the Underground'. These prints were all signed 'Andrew Power'.
Power's subjects continued to focus on elements of architecture, but with commissioned work on sporting venues, themes of speed and movement in the urban environment became prevalent. All these elements are combined in his best works, The Sunshine Roof and Tube Station.
Power continued to teach and to paint, principally in oils, producing 92 paintings in the last year of his life. He died in London aged 79. His works are held in a number of permanent collections including: The British Museum, London, the London Transport Museum and The Museum of Modern Art in New York.
John Nash R.A C.B.E
[1893-1977]
Younger brother to Paul Nash, John Nash was also born in London, but the family soon moved out of the city and John Nash was brought up in the rolling countryside of Buckinghamshire. This gentle childhood greatly informed and influenced his vocabulary as an artist, his preoccupation with nature with botany and accurate depiction of form.
After his education at Wellington College, he was dissuaded from formal artistic education by his brother, who had been to the Slade, instead Paul Nash encouraged him in his skills as a draughtsman. Early work by John Nash was mostly in watercolour, under the influence of Harold Gilman who's mastery of the use of oils gave John Nash the neccesary tools to produce his finest landscapes such as The Cornfield [1918 now at the Tate], the first oil without a war subject, it perfectly characterises the strong style and geometric order of the artist. John nash said that as War artists he and his brother would only paint for their own pleasure after six o'clock so the long shadows form a characteristic theme.
The most well known painting by John Nash is Over The Top [1918 hanging in the Imperial War Museum]. It records the heroic and horrific attack by Artists Rifles near Cambrai, Nash was one of only twelve men from eighty spared, he painted from memory, three months later.
After the war he painted mainly landscapes still moodily haunted by emotions from his experience in the trenches, choosing darkly atmospheric scenes of nature which comment of his personal view of mans place within it. He taught first at the Ruskin School 1924 - 1929, and then at the Royal College of Art 1934 -1957, where he became friends with Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden, with whom he enjoyed frequent painting trips. With both these artists there are strong similarities in style and structure, subtle and yet powerful use of colour, pattern and choice of theme.
Nash was also greatly acclaimed for his skill as a wood engraver and an accomplished printmaker. His lifelong love of botanical subjects can be seen in his illustrations for Galthorne-Hardy's Wild Flowers in Britain 1938 and his engravings for Poisonous Plants- Deadly Dangerous and Suspect 1927, for which he and the publishers the Haslewood Press would be highly acclaimed.
John Nash was elected Royal Academician in 1951 and was awarded CBE in 1964.
Nash died in 1977.
John Nash's work is to be found in permanent collections worldwide, including the Tate Gallery, The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, The Imperial War Museum and the Victoria Art Gallery Bath.
SANDRA BLOW RA
[1925-2006]
Sandra Blow was born in London on September 14th 1925. She spent her childhood in Kent and enrolled at St Martin's School of Art when she was only fifteen years old. She went on to study at the Royal Academy Schools, and from there on to Rome, to the Accademia di Belle Arti. It was in Rome that Blow spent a formative year in the company of the great Italian artist Alberto Burri, looking at frescoes, paintings, rundown churches and palazzi and absorbing the natural beauty of the landscape, at a time when the country was visably suffering the aftermath of the war.
Influence of this wealth of texture, colour and light had an immense impact on the young artist. Blow returned to London to allow herself to balance her personal experience with the enormous influence of Italy and of Burri, and therefore to allow herself to paint.
She clearly uses similar materials as Burri, sand, sacking, concrete, sawdust, but applies less emotion to them, rather than raising their status she revels in the beauty they have in their haphazard arrangement for their own sake.
Between 1950 and 1975 she became a tutor at the Royal College of Art, it was a time of great change and Blow has without any doubt played a very large part in the development of post-war abstract art in Britain, Blow became a regular visitor to St Ives in Cornwall and was in touch with the new generation of St Ives artists, Roger Hilton, Patrick Heron Terry Frost and Barbara Hepworth.
Blow was elected an Accociate to Royal Academy of Art in 1971, and in 1978 a Royal Academician. She continued to push the bounderies of scale and proportion in her paintings and she has shown her work worldwide throughout her career, including solo shows at the Royal Academy 1994, the New Millenium Gallery St Ives 1997, and the Tate St Ives 2001.
Blow finally relocated from London to St Ives in 1994 and established her studio complex, from where she continued to work with characteristic energy and vigour untill her death in 2006.
Blow has worked in numerous collections including the Tate London and St Ives, The Victoria and Albert Museum, The Guggenheim Museum, The Arts Council of Great Britain and the Museum of Modern Art New York.
Vanessa Bell
[1879-1961]
Vanessa Stephen [later Bell] was born in May 1879 in Hyde Park Gate, in London. She was the eldest of four siblings born to the eminent writer and critic, Leslie Stephen and his second wife Julia Duckworth.
She was the eldest of four siblings born to the eminent writer and critic, Leslie Stephen and his second wife Julia Duckworth.
The Stephen children, Vanessa, Thoby, Adrian and Virginia [later Woolf]. were educated at home in true Victorian style, although they were all encouraged in their individual talents, Vanessa began to have drawing lessons. After her mothers death in 1895, Vanessa's time became divided between her interests and studies and the role of housekeeper for her demanding father and siblings, so it was quite an acheivement that in 1899 she was accepted into the Royal Academy Schools. Five years later on the death of her Father she was released from the constraints and responsibities of the formal family home, which was sold and the Stephen's siblings moved to 46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, to begin a new life for themselves and an important chapter in artistic thinking in Britain.
In response to her brother Thoby's regular Thursday gatherings of his University friends at their home, Vanessa began a Friday Club which developed in a climate of great artistic change into the hugely influential Bloomsbury Group.
In 1907 Vanessa married Clive Bell, a university friend of her brother Thoby's, whom she had rejected twice, but after the sudden death of Thoby from Typhoid she changed her mind and accepted him. Their two sons Julian and Quentin were born in 1908 and 1910 and during this time she became quite remote from her husband. In 1911 she began an affair with Roger Fry, one of the Bloomsbury Group, after he had nursed her through an illness while they were all on holiday together in Greece and Turkey. Clive and Vanessa remained close through all their lives, he continued to support her financially, but their private lives took different paths.
Duncan Grant had met the Bells through the Bloomsbury Group, Vanessa admired his work and he took Fry's place in her affections, despite being a promiscuous homosexual they lived together and remained devoted to each other for the rest of her life.
Vanessa Bell moved with her children to Charleston Farmhouse in Firle, near Lewes in 1916, where Duncan Grant and his current lover David 'Bunny' Garnett followed to work as farm labourers, and to avoid conscription as conscientious objectors.
Bell and Grant established their studios at Charleston Farmhouse, and their work soon transformed the entire house, decorating walls, door panels, fireplaces and furnature, all harmonising with the Omega ceramics and fabrics that had been born out of the collaborations of the Bloomsbury Group.
In 1918 their daughter Angelica was born, suprisingly, despite shunning the traditional morals of the time, they pretended that Angelica was Clive's child, not telling her the truth until she was nineteen.
Vanessa Bell fullfilled an ambition in 1925 by running courses for children at Charleston with Marjorie Strachey, Clive's cousin, including drama productions for parents and friends. Returning full time to Charleston during the Second World War, Bell remained there untill her death in 1961. The house is now renovated and maintained by the Charleston Trust and is open to the Public, continuing to host exhibitions of work by current Artists in the spirit of its previous occupants.
Edward Ardizzone R.A C.B.E
[1900-1979]
Edward Ardizzone who was universally known as Ted, was born to his Algerian born, of Italian descent father, and his English mother who had been born in India, on October 16th in Haiphong, Tonkin Province in French Indo-China. His Mother brought him and his sisters Betty and Tetta to England to be largely brought up by her parents who lived in Ipswich. He spent time as a boy exploring Ipswich docks, and the sailors and characters that he remembered from this time later appeared in his Little Tim books.
Ardizzone was sent to Claysmore school in Dorset where although he didn't relish his studies he was encouraged in his artistic abilities, he continued to take evening classes in art while at Reading University.
On leaving University he gained a clerks position at his fathers firm, the Eastern Extension Telegraph Company (now Cable and Wireless PLC), of his time there in his own words he ''doodled a lot on his blotter''. He continued to attend evening classes at Westminster School of Art. This was his only formal art training.
In 1927 Ardizzone left his office job and commited to becoming a full time artist, also setting off on the first of his lifetime of travels.
He was married in 1929 to Catherine Anderson and together they had three children, Christianna, Philip [later to be the model for Little Tim] and Nicholas.
Ardizzone had several solo exhibitions at the Bloomsbury Gallery and at the Leger Gallery, and was commisioned to produce illustrations for Guiness and for book illustrations. Just before the outbreak of the second World war, 1936 saw the publication of Little Tim and The Brave Sea Captain, the first of the Little Tim books, and the begining of the critical acclaim his work now enjoys.
In 1939 he was called up to the 54th AA Regiment T. A. Royal Artillary.The following year he was appointed Official War Artist at the behest of Sir Kenneth Clark to record the British expeditionary Force. On leave in London in in 1941 he was arrested as a spy for sketching in the East end of London the confusion arrisng over his complicated nationality. In his War Artist capacaty his travels took him to North Africa, Sicily and Italy, and he was also to record in his drawing the Normandy Landings, and later Germany. Ardizzone was discharged from the Army and began again to take up commisions for advertising, to begin his contributions to the Strand Magazine. accepting a post on the teaching staff at Camberwell College of Art in 1948.
The following years see four solo exhibitions of recent drawings and watercolours at Liecester Art Gallery, and continued to produce his beautiful series of Little Tim books.
Ardizzone was commisioned to illustrate several Punch covers, to travel to India to teach for UNESCO and returned to London to paint a commisioned watercolour of the Queen's Coronation.
Between 1953 and 1961 he was tutor in etching at the Royal College of Art, and commissioned to produce a portrait of Sir Winston Churchill to be presented to him on his retirement.
The publication of Tim All Alone won him the Kate Greenaway medal for the most distinguished work in book illustration.
In 1970 Ardizzone was elected to the Royal Academy of the Arts and in 1971 he was awarded the CBE.
1973-1974 saw the Edward Ardizzone - A Retrospective Exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Ardizzone continued to exhibit and produce illustration right up to his death in 1979 at his home.
Edward Ardizzone works are held in public collection including the V & A, the Tate Gallery and the British Museum.
Paul Nash
[1889-1946]
Paul Nash was the son of a succesful lawyer, and was born in London on 11th May 1889. He was educated at St Paul's School and went on to study art at the Slade. It was there he met contempories, Stanley Spencer, Dora Carrington, Christopher Nevinson and Ben Nicholson amongst others. Having had a deeply troubled childhood, (his mother suffered terribly from depression and was frequently hospitalised), he was a very sensative character prone to dark moods and preoccupied with his own mortality from childhood.
It follows that Paul Nash was drawn to the works of the Pre Rapheallites who dealt with deep themes with great romanticism. He was looking beyond the subect depicted, for greater meaning, he drew much from the poetry and paintings of William Blake and of Dante Gabriel Rosseti and particularly the paintings by Samual Palmer who shared Nash's enormous love and connection with English landscape.
The subjects and locations of his works very often loaded with spirituality and connections of afterlife, but despite his atraction to melancholy an overlying greater feeling of beauty above and beyond the immeadiate subject.
Paul Nash enlisted in the Artist's Rifles at the outbreak of World War One, drawings produced from his front line sketches were well recieved at his exhibition at the Goupil Gallery in 1917. As a result he was recruited as an official war artist, he returned to the western front and the sketches resulted in his first oil paintings and some of the most searing and iconic images of war ever painted. He was, unsuprisingly profoundly affected and saw it as his role to act as ¨a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on for ever, Feeble, inarticulate will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth and may it burn their lousy souls.¨
Nash has great importance also for his part in pioneering Modernism in British Art. He was one of the founders of the short lived, but widely influential Unit One with fellow Modernists Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, between the wars it helped to inject energy into a depressed artistic scene. During this time he travelled to Italy and to Paris and came to be influenced by contempory artists Matisse and Picasso and by Georgio de Chirico whose work futher encouraged his interests in Surrealism and the symbolism in his own work.
Nash was again employed as official War artist during the Second World War, more familiar with articulating the images of death and entirely unapologetic about doing so, and he produced paintings such as The Battle of Britain and the famous Totes Meer [Dead Sea].
Nash continued to paint despite knowing that the asthma that had threatened him so long was overtaking him. His final Sunflower series symbolizing his coming to terms with the cycle of nature.
Paul Nash died on July 11th 1946.
Dan Baldwin
Baldwin was born in Manchester and now resides in West Sussex. He graduated in illustration/communication media in 1995 with commendation from Maidstone school of art, before this he was at Eastbourne College of Art where he was awarded best student in 1990.
He has exhibited worldwide alongside Banksy, Anthony Micallef, Jamie Hewlett, Peter Blake, Nick Walker & Vic reeves, amongst many others.
His work deals with topics such as innocence, life-death, vanitas, love, politics, symbolism, beauty, innocence and decay; everything coming under the topic of life.
The collecting of 'real' elements has always been an important part of the layering process, and in the past we have seen Baldwin use real Iraq and U.S. currency, vintage crucifixes and real bullets, stag horns, guns and vintage war memorabilia in his work. Currently he is using razor blades. Although primarily a painter, Baldwin produces ceramics, and in the past has been commissioned to create book covers and album covers for Overlook Publishers and Wall of Sound.
The paintings are never planned, but take on an organic spontaneous journey. This way of working is based more on feeling and a train of thought process. Recently he has incorporated screen-printing alongside the layering of household paints and spraypaint.
Sir Alan Sugar named him as one of the top 5 artists in the country.
Patrick Heron
[1920-1999]
Heron was born in Headingley in Leeds. His work is devoted to analyses of natural forms and colours. In his abstract works, particularly those made up of horizontal or vertical stripes to his softer-edged shapes, he regularly uses colour to express the pleasure of sight as one of the most important human senses.
Working for Cresta Silks in 1934, Heron designed his first silkscreen. Then in 1937 he became a part-time student at the Slade School of Fine Art in London for two years. In 1940 he worked as an agricultural labourer in Cambridge and Welwyn Garden City for four years before becoming an assistant at Bernard Leach's Pottery in St Ives in Cornwall and finally, in 1945, moving to Holland Park after marrying Delia Reiss.
He was art critic for the New English Weekly for two years before having his first one-man exhibition in 1947. His early work included many figurative studies such as 'The Gas Stove' [1946] but the painting 'The Boats and the Iron Ladder' [1947] showed the direction he was moving towards with its complex patterning and unusual use of colours. Influenced by Georges Braque and Henri Matisse during his early days as an artist, in 1956 he saw, and praised highly the American Abstract Expressionists at the Tate Gallery. He was inspired by this group of eight painters, their confidence and the large scale and flatness further influencing his abstract style, examples of this can be seen in 'Red Layers with Blue and Yellow' [1957]. After working as art critic on The New Statesman and Nation he started a teaching job at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London in 1953 and in 1956 moved to Cornwall settling at Eagle's Nest in Zennor until his death in 1999.
Winifred Nicholson
[1893-1981]
Winifred Nicholson was an English painter, a colourist who developed a personalised impressionistic style that concentrated on domestic subjects and landscapes. In her work, the two motifs are often combined in a view out of a window, featuring flowers in a vase or a jug.
Nicholson was born in Oxford as Winifred Roberts. Her parents were Charles Roberts, a Liberal Party politician, ex-academic and [through his wife] landowner, and Lady Cecilia, daughter of George Howard, 9th Earl of Carlisle. From an early age Winifred Nicholson was encouraged to paint. George Howard was an accomplished painter as well as a friend and patron of many distinguished painters, including the Pre-Raphaelites and members of the Etruscan school. Nicholson began painting with Howard around age 11. She attended the Byam Shaw Art School.
Nicholson married the artist Ben Nicholson in 1920. There were three children of the marriage; Kate Nicholson also became an artist. In the 1920s Winifred became a Christian Scientist, an allegiance that lasted for the rest of her life. Although it is sometimes said incorrectly that with Ben, Winifred formed part of the artist colony at St Ives, Cornwall, she was never permanently living there. Although she painted less in the abstract style than in the representational, she did experiment with her own form of abstraction in the 1930s. Influences between her and Ben were mutual, Ben often admitting he learnt much about colour from his first wife. After they separated, she lived half of each year during the 1930s in Paris.
After her divorce from Ben Nicholson in 1938, she spent most of the rest of her long life in Cumberland, at Boothby where her father lived, and at Bankshead, both near Lanercost. She painted prolifically throughout her life, largely at home but also on trips to Greece and Scotland, among other places. Many of her works are still in private collections, but a number are in Kettle's Yard art gallery in Cambridge, and several key works belong to the Tate. One painting is believed to have hung at 10 Downing Street. She had a lifelong fascination for rainbow and spectrum colours and in the 1970s she made particularly strong, innovative use of such colours in many of her paintings. She left some written accounts of her thoughts on colour. She died in Cumbria in 1981.
Mark Hearld
Mark Hearld was born in York in 1974. He studied illustration at Glasgow School of Art and then following his lifelong fascination with the wildlife of Britain, he took an M.A. in Natural History Illustration at the Royal College of Art.
Hearld's distinctive, bold energetic style takes huge inspiration from the work of Picasso and British Artists of the 30's and 40's in particular Edward Bawden, Eric Ravilious and John Piper.
He works usind a variety of media - painting, collage, lithographic and linocut printing and hand painted ceramics.
Mark Hearld is currently exhibiting at Scarborough Art Gallery, offering a contempory take on a celebration of the influential collaboration of Bawden and Ravilious.
Chris Smedley
Designed by Chris Smedley of the Lewes Pound design team. Gorgeous Things Ltd are proud to announce the arrival of a fantastic Tom Paine Print in the style of the Sex Pistols God Save The Queen image.
A strong and bold graphic print designed and printed in Lewes, in celebration of the Tom Paine Festival that opens in Lewes on Friday 3rd July, with a series of events to celebrate 200 years since the death of the writer and revolutionary Tom Paine, who lived in Lewes, whose ideas have contributed to the shaping of the modern world and whose words seem particularly poignant today in a time of massive change and reshaping of priorities. He was even quoted by Obama in his inauguration speech.
The inspiration for the image is use of the Sex Pistols crude punk poster style, which at the time shocked and challenged existing behaviour. In using this style motif the artist gives us a twist on our image of Tom Paine, underlining the point that it is in the power of all people to challenge established systems and from grass roots level rebuild our lifestyles in a truely radical way in a very changing world.
It is a hand pulled silkscreen printed on 310gsm 100% rag Fabriano paper available in three colour ways; flouro green, flouro yellow and pink or in grey scale, in an edition of 100 of each colour.
The price is £100 with 20% of which going to support the Lewes Pound Initative, which supports local trade as part of the Transition Town Movement.
The use of the image of Tom Paine is reproduced with kind permision of Kenneth Burchell, of the Tom Paine Society, and was also used on the first Lewes Pound notes.
Alfred Wallis
[1855-1942]
Wallis was a Cornish fisherman and artist. Shortly after he was born in Devon his parents moved back to Penzance where they had originally been from. On leaving school Alfred became an apprentice basket maker before becoming a mariner in the merchant service by the early 1870s. This work involved sailing schooners across the North Atlantic between Penzance and Newfoundland.
Alfred married Susan Ward at St. Mary's church in Penzance in 1876, when he was 20 and his wife was 41 and became stepfather to her five children. He continued his life as a deep-sea fisherman on the Newfoundland run in the early days of his marriage allowing him to earn a good wage until the death of his two infant children when Alfred switched to local fishing and labouring in Penzance.
The family moved to St. Ives, Cornwall, in 1890 where he established himself as a marine stores dealer, buying scrap iron, sails, rope and other items. In 1912, his business, "Wallis, Alfred, Marine Stores Dealer" closed for business and Alfred kept himself busy with odd jobs and worked for a local antiques dealer Mr Armour which provided some insight into the world of objets d'art.
Following his wife's death in 1922, Wallis took up painting, as he later told Jim Ede, "for company".
His paintings are an excellent example of naïve art; perspective is ignored and an object's scale is often based on its relative importance in the scene. This gives many of his paintings a map-like quality. Wallis painted his seascapes from memory, in large part because steamships were replacing the world of sail he knew. As he himself put it, his subjects were "what use To Bee out of my memery what we may never see again..." Having little money, Wallis improvised with materials, mostly painting on cardboard ripped from packing boxes using a limited palette of paint brought from ships chandlers.
In many ways, Wallis' timing was excellent. In 1928, a few years after he had started painting, Ben Nicholson and Kit Wood came to St. Ives and established an artist colony. They were delighted to find Wallis and celebrated his direct approach to image making. [Nicholson commented later "to Wallis, his paintings were never paintings but actual events, something that has grown out of the Cornish seas and earth and which will endure'']. Wallis was propelled into a circle of the some of most progressive artists working in Britain in the 1930s. The influence, however, was all one-way; Wallis continued to paint as he always had.
Through Nicholson and Wood, Wallis was introduced to Jim Ede who promoted his work in London. Despite this attention, Wallis sold few of his paintings and continued to live in poverty until he died in the Madron Workhouse in Penzance. He is buried in Barnoon cemetery, overlooking St. Ives' Porthmeor beach and the Tate St Ives gallery. An elaborate gravestone, depicting a tiny mariner at the foot of a huge lighthouse – a popular motif in Wallis' paintings – was made from tiles by the potter Bernard Leach and now covers Wallis' tomb.
Damien Hirst
Installation artist, sculptor, painter and printmaker, Hirst was a leading figure in the group of ‘Young British Artists', the name given to a group of artists based in the United Kingdom, most [though not all] of whom attended Goldsmiths College in London during the late 80s. In 1988 Hirst curated the exhibition Freeze. His works are explicitly concerned with the fundamental dilemmas of human existence; his constant themes have included the fragility of life, society's reluctance to confront death, and the nature of love and desire, often clothed in titles which exist somewhere between the naive and the disingenuous.
Dead animals are frequently used in Hirst's installations, forcing viewers to consider their own and society's attitudes to death. Containers such as aquariums and vitrines are used as devices to impose control on the fragile subject matter contained within them and as barriers between the viewer and the viewed. The animals are preserved as in life, but at the same time are emphatically dead, with their entrails and flesh exposed.
Hirst's paintings can be seen as a foil to his sculptural work, though they are similarly inconclusive. The ‘spot' paintings are named after pharmaceutical stimulants and narcotics, the chemical enhancers of human emotion, and yet take the form of mechanical and unemotional Minimalist paintings. Their detachment is further emphasised by the exploitation of procedures that can be simply carried out by assistants under his instruction. The ‘Butterfly Paintings’, tableaux of actual butterflies suspended in paint, or in Amazing Revelations [2003], for instance, he arranged thousands of butterfly wings in a mandala-like pattern. His butterfly print series that followed are effortlessly beautiful. Hirst has returned to the "most direct form of production, with all the attendant artistic consequences: facing the canvas, the individual painterly act, the creative process, the artist’s emotional balance – alone; being at the mercy of issues raised by the picture, at the mercy of the creator, of oneself…"
He was awarded the Turner Prize in 1995.
Barbara Hepworth
[1903-1975]
Barbara Hepworth was primarily a sculptor whose work met with great success. Born in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, she attended Wakefield Girls High School, and won a scholarship and studied at the Leeds School of Art from 1920, it was here that she met Henry Moore. Hepworth went on to win a County scholarship to the Royal College of Art and studied there from 1921 until she was awarded the diploma of the Royal College of Art in 1924.
Her first marriage was to the sculptor John Skeaping in 1929, her second to the painter Ben Nicholson in 1938. Together, Hepworth and Nicholson made up the nucleus of the St Ives group in Cornwall. In 1933 they visited Paris where they were introduced to Picasso and Braque but also, more importantly for her, Jean Arp and Brancusi and it was the work of these two artists, and Nicholson, which had the most influence on her.
In 1968 and 1970 she drew two groups of lithographs at the Curwen Studio, one of the UK’s most influential printmaking studios, which broke new ground for her. In concept they were sculptural but as prints they became important examples of abstract art in Britain at the time. Lithography best suited her feeling for the creation of shapes with graphic lines. These lithographs have become increasingly more scarce and sought after. Her work exemplifies Modernism and along with her contemporaries in England such as Henry Moore and Ben Nicholson she helped to develop modern art [sculpture in particular] immeasurably.
Mary Fedden
Mary Fedden was born in 1915 and studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, London from 1932 to 1936. She went on to teach Painting at the Royal College of Art from 1958 to 1964, the first woman tutor to teach in the Painting School, and subsequently taught at the Yehudi Menuhin School from 1965 to 1970.
Fedden's life-long preoccupation has been the still life with a view beyond. A staple of modern British painting, it is the motif of innumerable works by Ben Nicholson, Christopher Wood, Paul Nash, Winifred Nicholson, and John Piper, all of whom loved its juxtaposition of the near and the far, the interior and the landscape, and the object clearly observed and the distant view. There is less of a regard for the rules of perspective and more of a delight in pictorial choreography and in pure colour. "More a world of imagination than actual fact." President of the Royal West of England Academy from 1984 to 1988, Fedden went on to be elected as a Royal Academician in the Senior Order in 1992. She received an OBE and a Doctor of Literature, Bath University in the 1990s. She continues to work and live in London.
Victor Pasmore
[1908-1998]
Pasmore was born in Chelsam, Surrey, where he spent his childhood and studied at Harrow. In 1927 he moved to London where he soon became a member of the 'avant-garde' art world, while working in local government. In 1932 he was elected a member of the London Artists Association and later the London group and exhibited at the Zwemmer Gallery. In 1937 he joined Claude Rogers and William Coldstream in starting an art school. The following year, with the support of Kenneth Clark he was able to devote himself entirely to painting and held his first important one-man show at the Wildenstein Gallery in 1940.
His paintings were mostly Whistlerian landscapes and portraits but in 1948 he started to experiment with pure abstract forms and surprised the public with a one-man show of abstract paintings at the Redfern Gallery. Pasmore was appointed Director of Painting at the University of Newcastle in 1954 and began a project that was to last over 20 years designing the layout and architecture of the new town of Peterlee in County Durham. From 1960 on he held a series of retrospective exhibitions, held in some of the most important international museums. In 1964 he was awarded the Carnegie Prize and showed at the Tate Gallery, London and the Sao Paolo Biennial. In 1966 he moved to Malta and began intensive experimentation with making prints at the 2RC print shop in Rome.
Printmaking became a major part of his oeuvre and he worked with Curwen Press, Kelpra Studio, White Ink and other print studios. Since his death the popularity of his prints has grown immensely and the earlier work is becoming more scarce.
Sonia Delaunay
[1885-1979]
Sonia Terk Delaunay was born in Ukraine. She came to Paris in 1906 after studying at St.Petersburg and Karlsruhe in Germany. In 1909 she married the critic Wilhelm Uhde [a friend of Picasso's], but divorced him to marry, in the next year, the painter Robert Delaunay. With him she founded the Orphism movement and they did many of the set and costume designs for Diaghilev's Ballet Russe.
Her interests extended beyond abstract art to decorative arts and design. Delaunay ignored the traditional idea that applied art was inferior, and believed that fashion and household objects offered problems as interesting and important as those of painting. At the beginning of the 20th century devices like collage and construction posed new questions about the world by creating tensions between the function of a picture or object and its purely formal qualities. The world and its objects were entering into pictures in a more complex way, and in this development Sonia saw a revitalised dialogue between art and life, one familiar to her from the traditions of her native Ukraine. She was awarded many prizes throughout her life time and her work can be seen in many galleries worldwide.
Simultaneous design occurs when one design, when placed next to another, affects both; this is similar to the theory of colours [Pointillism, as used by e.g. Georges Seurat] in which primary colour dots placed next to each other are "mixed" by the eye and affect each other.
Sybil Andrews
[1898-1992]
Sybil Andrews’ work has met with wide critical acclaim and increasing popularity. Her colour linocuts were featured extensively in the 2008 Fine Arts, Boston / Metropolitan, New York British Prints From the Machine Age - Rhythms of Modern Life 1914-1939 exhibition, and her work is held in major collections around the world.
Sybil Andrews’s interest in art began whilst working as an oxyacetylene airline welder in the First World War. During this time she took John Hassall’s art correspondent course that introduced her to a number of different artistic media. [Hassall was the father of Joan Hassall, the renowned printmaker].
After the War she returned to her birthplace, Bury St. Edmunds, in Suffolk. Here she met Cyril Power who would influence her work, and with whom she would share a workshop for much of her early working life. They would also later collaborate on commissions from The London Passenger Transport Board, jointly signed with the pseudonym ‘Andrew Power’.
Wishing to pursue her interests in art Andrews enrolled at Heatherley’s School of Fine Art, London. But it was not until she became school secretary and attended Claude Flight’s linocut classes at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art that Andrews really found her métier, and she quickly became another acolyte of Flight’s enthusiasm for the colour linocut.
Whilst Andrews’ works evidence this assimilation of Flight’s formal language, they often depart from a depiction of the kinds of subjects – the dynamism of the modern world, its concern with speed and with technological advances – that Flight encouraged. Instead, Andrews more often sought to capture the rhythms and living movements of the human figure. She explored various sporting activities to this end, including football, horseback riding and motorcycle racing, as also activities associated with men’s physical work.
During the Second World War Andrews worked in a shipyard where she met her husband, and soon after [1947] the couple emigrated to the remote logging town of Campbell River on Vancouver Island, Canada. Here she achieved a large following that lasted well into the 1950’s. In the ‘60’s she fell into obscurity, but was rediscovered in the 1970’s. She died in 1992 leaving a body of work totalling almost 80 linocuts.
John Simpson
John Simpson was born in Gloucestershire in 1975. He first studied at the University of Gloucestershire and then later at The Cambridge School of Art. Originally making an impact with illustrations for clothing brand Carhartt and collaborations with fashion designer Wale Adeyemi, Simpson had a sell out first show in 2007 and has since exhibited in London, New York and Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Drawing has always formed the basis John Simpson’s work. Frequently referencing the world of folk tale and myth, Simpson explores the relationship and behavioural patterns between human and animal forms; the result being powerful, poetic imagery that sits somewhere in between childhood imagination and adult reasoning.
Stylistically, Simpson refers to artists such as Goya and Munch and his ability to delicately capture the physical and psychological nature of the creatures that feature in his work can equally disturb and enchant. Almost always working with a simple monochrome pallet, Simpson occasionally interjects a sharp red into a piece in order to draw attention to something, possibly suggesting violence, power or danger.
Simpson’s preferred medium is Monotype, a process often recognised as the most direct and painterly form of printmaking. Working in this way, he believes, extends the possibilities of traditional drawing due to the sensitivity of a marks made by anything that applies pressure to the surface in which the print is made from, including hands if a direct approach is needed.
Henrik Simonsen
Born in Denmark in 1974, Simonsen studied art in his native country before spending two years studying in New York and then at Exeter College of Art and Design. He has exhibited his work in group shows throughout the UK, in America and in his native Denmark, and has shown his work alongside Dan Baldwin and Antony Micallef, who he once shared a studio with in Brighton after they studied their degree course together in Exeter.
Henrik Simonsen uses nature as a central theme throughout his work, which he puts down to his Scandinavian roots due to the region’s long standing tradition for art, design and architecture inspired by natural forms.
Freehand drawing forms the basis of Simonsen’s working practice, although the finished works are highly-finished paintings on canvas. His recent body of work is inspired by ‘Rococo’, a style of 18th century French art and interior design which saw elegant and ornate furniture, ornamental mirrors and tapestry that took its basic themes from the natural world, celebrating the organic and the sensuous.
Simonsen is fascinated by the style’s lack of structure, and the way it embraces the bizarre and the beauty of natural phenomena to create a fairytale-like world.
For Simonsen, creating the work is an organic process; the elements and materials used are allowed to ‘grow’ onto the canvas, each mark made leading to the next until the work is completed. Layers of paint and marks are built up on top of each other, nothing is erased; the history of a piece is important to Simonsen, as he feels it gives the painting a sense of having occupied a period in time.
Colour has played a more significant part in Simonsen’s work more recently and he is interested in how paint interacts with the drawn graphite lines, giving them an important contrast.
He has shown with such modern masters as Bridget Riley, Victor Pasmore, Stephen Conroy and Frank Auerbach.
His work is in numerous private and corporate collections. His solo show at the Royal Opera House in 2006 was very well received. His work has been selected for international exhibitions in NYC and LA as well as in the UK.
Simonsen was recently invited to create a piece for a museum in Belgium’s permanent collection. Other artists invited included Carl Andre, George Baselitz, Derek Boshier, Anthony Gormley, Claes Oldenburg and Gerard Richter.
Bridget Riley
Bridget Riley was born in London, England in 1931 and spent her childhood in Cornwall and Lincolnshire. She is one of Britain’s best-known artists. Since the mid-1960s she has been celebrated for her distinctive, optically vibrant paintings which actively engage the viewer’s sensations and perceptions, producing visual experiences that are complex and challenging, subtle and arresting.
Riley’s paintings exist on their own terms. Her subject matter is restricted to a simple vocabulary of colours and abstract shapes. These form her starting point and from them she develops formal progressions, colour relationships and repetitive structures. The effect is to generate sensations of movement, light and space: visual experiences which also have a strong emotional and even visceral resonance.
Though her work is abstract, such experiences seem surprisingly familiar. During her childhood, when she lived in Cornwall, she formed an acute responsiveness to natural phenomena. In particular, the effects of light and colour in the landscape made a deep impression. Though her mature work does not proceed from observation, it is nevertheless connected with the experience of nature. Of her paintings, she has commented: ‘the eye can travel over the surface in a way parallel to the way it moves over nature. It should feel caressed and soothed, experience frictions and ruptures, glide and drift…One moment there will be nothing to look at and the next second the canvas seems to refill, to be crowded with visual events.’ This parallel relation between Riley’s art and nature has underpinned the development of her work, colouring the way it forms both an exploration and a celebration of a fundamental human experience: sight.
Riley’s work falls into phases or groups in which it is possible to see certain formal ideas being worked through. At the same time, however, her work has not followed a single, straightforward line of development. Rather, its course resembles a kind of musical progression in which different themes are stated, explored, combined with other ideas, and progressively transformed. The exhibition is therefore arranged in a broadly chronological order, and according to phases or families of related paintings. Within these groups internal connections can be discovered and ideas stated earlier can be seen reappearing in later works.
