Artists

Austrian artist Ditz paints house pets and farm animals, often in domestic settings or grouped together. Her distinctive style has evolved over time to include highly detailed, quirky, small-scale images.

As far back as he can remember Hashim always painted, encouraged as a child by parents who nurtured creative thinking. Having left art college, Hashim pounded the streets of London with his portfolio, he found an illustration agency to represent his work and started producing artwork for magazines, book publishers and design firms. Hashim won various awards for his paintings and exhibited at London's Mall Galleries, with the Royal Institute of Oil Painters, and the Society of Marine Artists. His approach to painting has changed over the years from extremely detailed work to a much bolder, freer, impressionistic style. His first book on acrylic painting, published by Search Press, entitled 'Vibrant Acrylics' was published in 2012. He is represented by various galleries nationally.

John Aldridge was a British painter, draftsman, wallpaper designer, and art teacher. After attending Uppingham School in Rutland, Aldridge studied at Oxford University and graduated in 1928. After finishing university, Aldridge settled in London, taught himself to paint and first exhibited his work in 1931. In 1933, he presented his first one man-show at the Leicester Galleries in London and in 1934 he exhibited at the Venice Biennale. In 1933, at age 28, Aldridge moved to Great Bardfield in the Essex countryside. He quickly became a friend of his neighbour, Edward Bawden. In 1941, Aldridge joined the British Intelligence Corps. After leaving the army in 1945, Aldridge returned to landscape painting of the Essex countryside as well as scenes from his many visits to Italy and Mallorca. In 1949, Aldridge began teaching at the Slade School for Fine Arts of University College London. The early 1960s saw the Bardfield art community fragment but Aldridge would remain for the rest of his life. In 1980, on Aldridge's 75th birthday, London's New Grafton Gallery held a retrospective on his work.

Douglas Anderson was born in 1934, and having shown a keen interest in the paintbrush at the age of 3, he sold his first painting to a London gallery at 12 years old. In 1955 Douglas moved to Italy and studied portraiture with Pietro Annigoni in Florence. At the age of 27 he became the youngest member of The Royal Society of Portrait Painters. He has travelled extensively painting portraits around the world. In 1979 he held his first exhibition of wildlife paintings at The Tryon Gallery, London, followed by numerous exhibitions at Oscar & Peter Johnson, Ackermann & Johnson London, as well as exhibitions in Edinburgh, Stockholm, Gothenburg, Florence, Munich and Dublin. He continues to paint portraits and wildlife in alternate years, and his works are held in collections worldwide.

Edward Ardizzone was a British painter, printmaker and war artist, and the author and illustrator of books, many of them for children. After leaving school Ardizzone spent several years working as an office clerk in London, where he took evening classes at the Westminster School of Art. Then he gave up his office job to concentrate on establishing himself as a professional, freelance artist. In 1936 Little Tim and the Brave Sea Captain was published. This was the first in the Tim series that were written and illustrated by Ardizzone. During the Second World War, after a short spell serving in an anti-aircraft unit, Ardizzone was posted overseas as a full-time official war artist. After the War, Ardizzone resumed his freelance career. He continued writing and illustrating The Tim books is until 1972 with Tim’s Last Voyage. During his life Ardizzone held a number of teaching posts, working as an instructor in graphic design at Camberwell School of Art and as a visiting tutor at the Royal College of Art. In 1960 he retired from his teaching posts and began spending more time in Kent before moving there permanently in 1972.

Edward Bawden was a successful and prolific English printmaker, graphic designer, illustrator and painter. He studied at the School of Art in Cambridge (1919-22) and at the Design School of the Royal College of Art (1922-6), where he was a contemporary of Eric Ravilious and was taught by Paul Nash.

Vanessa Bell was an English painter, member of the Bloomsbury Group and the sister of Virginia Woolf. In 1904, Vanessa and her siblings moved to Bloomsbury, where they met and began socialising with the artists, writers and intellectuals who would become known as the Bloomsbury Group. In 1907, she married fellow Bloomsbury member Clive Bell. Vanessa, Clive, the painter Duncan Grant and the writer David Garnett moved to the Sussex countryside shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, and settled at Charleston Farmhouse near Firle. In 1912, alongside Picasso and Matisse, Bell exhibited her work in the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition at the Grafton Galleries, London.

Dame Elizabeth Blackadder is a Scottish painter and printmaker. She is the first woman to be elected to both the Royal Scottish Academy and the Royal Academy. She studied at Edinburgh College of Art and then in 1962 began teaching there and continued until her retirement in 1986. Blackadder works in a variety of media such as oil paints, watercolour, drawing and printmaking. She paints portraits and landscapes but her later work contains mainly flowers and her cats. Regular trips abroad, particularly to Japan, helped stimulate her interest in colour and pattern. Her work can be seen at the Tate Gallery, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and has appeared on a series of Royal Mail stamps.

Daniel Cacouault is an illustrator, painter, concept artist, and artistic director. Daniel lives between Nantes and Paris. He has worked in the fields of comics, illustration, cartoons, cinema and video games for more than thirty years. A disciple of illustrator Neil Ross, he is a regular collaborator of director Pete Candeland (Gorillaz, Beatles Rock Band), and has worked as a concept artist for Dreamworks, Disney, and recently for the Netflix series Love, Death and Robots.

Gustave Caillebotte was a French painter who was a member of the Impressionist group of artists. In 1870 Caillebotte was drafted to fight in the Franco-Prussian war. After the war, Caillebotte enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts. Shortly after he met and befriended Edgar Degas, and attended (but did not participate in) the first Impressionist exhibition. Caillebotte made his debut in the second Impressionist exhibition in 1876, showing eight paintings, including Les raboteurs de parquet (The Floor Scrapers) (1875), his earliest masterpiece. In 1881, Caillebotte acquired a property at Petit-Gennevilliers, on the banks of the Seine near Argenteuil, and he moved there permanently in 1888. He ceased showing his work at age 34 and devoted himself to gardening and to building and racing yachts. Auguste Renoir often came to stay. Caillebotte was a model for Renoir's 1881 painting, Luncheon of the Boating Party.

Thomas Churchyard was born in Suffolk, England. After leaving school he joined a firm of solicitors. During this time Thomas developed his interest in painting. In 1829, Churchyard exhibited four paintings at the Norwich Society of Artists, and the following year at the Society of British Artists in London. On the strength of his public appearances as a landscape painter, he was determined that his true vocation lay not in law, but in art. In 1832, he decided to leave Suffolk and move to London. However, Churchyard failed to get any of his pictures into the Royal Academy exhibition and within eighteen months was back in Suffolk and resumed his legal practice. His London experience had a long-term effect, for it was to be eighteen years before he contributed again to a public exhibition, when he exhibited at the Suffolk Fine Arts Association in August 1850. Although his success was modest during his lifetime his work is now to be found in many major public and private collections including: the Tate Gallery, London; the British Museum; the V & A Museum, the Ashmolean, Oxford and the Fitzwilliam, Cambridge.

Sonia Coode-Adams studied at the Byam Shaw School of Art and has worked as an artist off and on ever since. She has exhibited in numerous mixed exhibitions and had a one-woman exhibition with Baskett and Day in 1983. She also exhibited in “Pandora’s Box”, a touring exhibition in 1984.Her own garden at Feeringbury Manor provided the inspiration for a series of 20 paintings that chronicles her exploration of the garden during the imposed COVID-19 lockdown, charting the garden’s transition from spring to summer 2020. A return to painting after a hiatus of many years, lockdown enabled a discovery of a new painterly language to translate the blossoms, the shapes, the colours of the garden to reveal a joy of colour for colour’s sake. The series of paintings was shown in the exhibition ‘Lockdown Garden’ at Firstsite in Colchester in the summer of 2020.

Raoul Dufy was a French Fauvist painter best known for scences of open-air social events. He was also a draftsman, printmaker, book illustrator, scenic designer, and a designer of furniture. In 1900 he attended the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. His early work was influenced by the impressionists. However, in 1905 he began to use the broader brushstrokes and bright colours associated with the Fauves. In the early 1920’s Dufy painted scenes of recreation including horse races, regattas, parades, and concerts. He spent much of his time on the French Riviera and produced a series of paintings of Nice. Dufy’s colorful, decorative style became fashionable for ceramic and textile design.

Stanhope Alexander Forbes was a British painter and a founding member of the influential Newlyn school of painters. He was often called 'the father of the Newlyn School'. Between 1874 and 1878 Forbes attended the Royal Academy. He moved to Paris in 1880 to complete his training. Whilst in France he adopted plein-air painting. Having completed his studies in France, Forbes returned to London and showed works he made in Brittany at the 1883 Royal Academy and Royal Hibernian Academy shows. In 1884 he moved to Newlyn in Cornwall, and soon became a leading figure in the growing colony of artists. He remained in Newlyn for the rest of his life.

Renowned British Contemporary Painter Hugo Grenville first exhibited in London at the Chelsea Arts Society at the age of 15. With 20 one-man shows under his belt at major galleries in London, New York and Palm Beach, Hugo has forged an enviable reputation as one of the country’s leading colourist painters. Grenville’s fluid brush strokes marry colour and pattern in a style not unlike that of Henri Matisse. A feeling of intimacy in his work connects him to Les Nabis, Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard. His paintings are an unashamed and joyous celebration of life, steeped in the English Romantic tradition.

Katherine Hamilton, once a professional dancer, is now a full time artist who lives close to Southwold, the town which she has so often celebrated in her art. After having her interest in dance aroused when she was a pupil at Dartington Hall School, she gradually became more interested in painting. In 1971, aged 17,sshe went to Florence to study for a year with Nerina Simi. Simi was a teacher of Annigoni, famous for his rigorously classical portrait of Queen Elizabeth Il. 'It was another way of looking,' she recalls, 'but when I left it was necessary to throw off her technique, otherwise it imprisoned you.' After an unstructured year at the Byam Shaw School of Art in London, she was drawn back to the stricter discipline and immediacy of dance and she worked for some six years as a dancer and choreographer, moving between Amsterdam, New York and Ethiopia. After this she returned to painting. She moved to Suffolk in 1992, but has continued to travel as far afield as Guatemala and Kerala to paint everything from beach football matches to bull fights. More recently she has found inspiration nearer home at Yarmouth's Hippodrome Circus. Among her many admirers is PD. James, who has written of her skill at capturing movement, tension and mood through colour and form and of how the truthfulness of her vision 'draws us so powerfully to her art'.

Heywood Hardy was a British painter. Born in Chichester, Sussex. He studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Upon returning to England, Hardy’s work became popular and he received many commissions from the estates of his wealthy patrons. He went on to become a member of The Royal Society of Painters and Etchers, The Royal Institute of Oil Painters, and The Royal Society of Portrait Painters. He also worked as an illustrator for several publications, including The Illustrated London News and The Graphic Magazine. In the last years of his life, Hardy made a controversial shift from sensitive animal subjects to biblical scenes of Christ walking in the Sussex countryside. Today, his works are in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Manchester City Art Gallery, and the Bury Art Museum, among others.

Andrew Haslen was born in Essex in 1953. He is a painter and printmaker of animal subjects. He was elected a member of The Society of Wildlife Artists in 1988 the same year he opened The Wildlife Art Gallery in Lavenham. In 2010 a book on his work was published titled The Winter Hare. During his career Andrew has won several awards, these include; Winner of the Royal Society for Nature Conservation 'Natural World' Art Award in 1992 and 1997, and Runner- up in 1993. He was also the winner of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds Art Award in 1996 and 1999.

Edward Hopper was born in Nyack, New York. After leaving high school he studied at the New York School of Art. In 1906 he visited Paris and became influenced by the impressionists. In 1910 Hopper returned to New York and in the following years painted some of his most recognisable paintings. In 1923 he married Josephine. Although they lived in New York they spent much of their time and most of their summers in Massachusetts where he painted the architecture and the landscapes in and around Cape Cod.

Hilary Jones, born 1939, is a self taught artist who began painting in mid-life after a journalistic career as a fashion writer and women’s page editor. She works mainly in acrylics and papier mache. Hilary lives in North London with her husband and two ‘rescued’ cats.

Peder Severin Krøyer was a Danish artist best known for the landscape and figurative paintings he produced at the summer beach resort of Skagen, Denmark. At the age of 14 Krøyer was already taking painting classes in the Danish Art Academy. In 1877 he travelled to France, Spain and Italy to study art. In 1882 he returned to Denmark and visited Skagen for the first time. Krøyer fell in love with the place and joined the local group of artists. Krøyer divided his time between rented houses in Skagen during the summer and during the winters lived in an apartment in Copenhagen where he worked on his large commissioned portraits.

John Minton was an English painter, illustrator, stage designer, and teacher. Minton was born in Cambridgeshire. He studied art at St John's Wood School of Art from 1935 to 1938. He then spent eight months studying in France and returned from Paris when the Second World War began. After studying in France, he became a teacher in London at the Camberwell College of Arts, and from 1946 to 1948 he was in charge of drawing and illustration at the Central School of Art and Design. At the same time he maintained a considerable output of works. Between 1945 and 1956 he had seven solo exhibitions at the Lefevre Gallery. In addition to landscapes, portraits and other paintings, some of them on an unusually large scale, he built up a reputation as an illustrator of books, designer of textiles and wallpapers and he also produced posters for London Transport and Ealing Studios.

Claude Monet was a French painter and founder of impressionist painting. Monet studied at the Académie Suisse where he was a classmate of Auguste Renoir. He exhibited in most of the Impressionist exhibitions, beginning in 1874, where the title of one of his paintings led to the naming of the movement. In 1883 he acquired a property at Giverny, north-west of Paris. Thereafter Monet concentrated on the production of the famous series showing a single subject in different lighting conditions, including poplars, haystacks, Rouen Cathedral, and his own garden at Giverny. Frequently exhibited and successful during his lifetime, Monet's fame and popularity soared in the second half of the 20th century when he became one of the world's most famous painters.

Cedric Morris was a British artist, art teacher and plantsman. He was born in Swansea in South Wales, but worked mainly in East Anglia. Cedric grew up in Sketty, South Wales. On leaving school he spent his younger years intermittently abroad, regularly travelling across Europe and North Africa, whilst renting studios in Cornwall, Paris and London. In the 1930s, Cedric and his partner, the artist Arthur Lett-Haines made Suffolk their permanent base, moving to Pound Farm in Higham where his garden became much admired. Morris developed a post-Impressionist style for portraits, landscapes and highly decorative style for still-life.

Angela Newberry is an artist printmaker and graduate of the Royal College of Art. She established her printmaking studio in 1984 and now shares her time between studios in the UK and in Australia. Her imagery is inspired by the Australian landscape and she works in linocuts, reliefprints and screenprints. More recently she has designed a collection of exclusive designer rugs.

Winifred Nicholson painted prolifically throughout her long life, usually flowers in a pot or vase on a windowsill with a view behind, and also some portraits and abstracts, but always with an interest in light and colour. Based in Cumbria she travelled extensively painting in France, Ireland, the Hebrides and Greece. Winifred Nicholson’s works are held in many UK Museums, notably the Tate and Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge.

John Northcote Nash was the younger brother of surrealist landscape artist Paul Nash. Nash never received any formal art training. However, his elder brother Paul, who had studied at the Slade School of Art, encouraged him to develop his skills. A joint exhibition with Paul in 1913 was successful, and John was invited to become a founder-member of the London Group in 1914. From 1916 to 1918, Nash volunteered with the Artists Rifles in the First World War. At his brother’s recommendation, he became an official war artist. After the war He became a teacher, taking a position at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford from 1924 to 1929. In 1929, he bought a summer cottage in Essex, where he would turn his efforts to painting picturesque East Anglian landscapes.

Camille Pissarro was born on the island of St. Thomas in the Danish West Indies (present-day US Virgin Islands). At the age of 12 he was sent to school in France. Returning to St. Thomas at 17, he attempted to join his father’s business while also continuing to draw and paint. However, he returned to Paris in 1855, and enrolled in the studio of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, and later attended the Académie Suisse where he befriended Paul Cézanne. During the Franco-Prussian War he fled to London, where he met Claude Monet and was influenced by the works of John Constable and J. M. W. Turner he saw in museums. Upon returning to France, Pissarro helped organize the first show dedicated to Impressionist works, marking a pivotal moment in European art. Today, his works are held in the collections of the National Gallery in London, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, among others.

Eric Ravilious was an artist, illustrator and designer specialising in watercolour paintings of the British countryside, most famously of Sussex. Ravilious had a special connection to the area, as he grew up there and studied at the Eastbourne School of Art. He went on to study at the Royal College of Art and later became one of the most popular artists of the 1930s.

Tirzah was born in Gillingham, Kent. After finishing school she attended the Eastbourne School of Art from 1925-1928. It was here that she met Eric Ravilious. In 1928 she moved to London and studied at the Central School of Art. Tirzah was a skilled wood engraver; She was commissioned to produce woodcuts for Kynoch Press and the BBC. Tirzah and Eric married in 1930. In 1931 they left London and moved to rural Essex where they started a family. She gave up her art to raise their children and to support Eric with his career. Thankfully Tirzah’s work is now starting to get the recognition it deserves.

Linda Richardson is an Essex born artist-printmaker who has now made her home on the beautiful Shetland Islands. After a 2 year foundation course, Linda studied printmaking at the Colchester School of Art, 1976-1979. She still has close ties with East Anglia but now finds inspiration from the wildlife and varied landscape that Shetland provides. Her printmaking encompasses both linocuts and etching. As a painter she works in acrylic, watercolour or mixed media.

Joseph Southall was born in Nottingham in 1861. His father, a grocer, died a little over a year later, and the young Southall and his mother moved to Edgbaston, Birmingham to live with his mother's family. After an education in York, Southall returned to Birmingham in 1878 and trained with the leading local architects' practice Martin & Chamberlain, while studying painting part- time at the Birmingham School of Art. Southall became frustrated by his architectural training, feeling that an architect should have a broader understanding of craft disciplines such as painting and carving. With this in mind he undertook several tours in Europe. The following year he left Martin & Chamberlain. Southall painted a variety of subjects during his career, including mythological, romantic, and religious subjects, portraits and landscapes. He was known for his mastery of the colour red, the clean and clear light in his works, and for his paintings on the theme of Beauty and the Beast.

Algernon Talmage was an impressionist painter of plein-air pastoral landscapes and equestrian subjects. Talmage was born in Fifield Oxfordshire. He studied at the Herkomer School of art in Bushey. From there he moved to St Ives, Cornwall, where he joined the St Ives School. During his time there Talmage founded an artists club which was greatly influenced by the Cornish coastline. Talmage’s time in Cornwall was significant in establishing his characteristic mellow palette and enchanting use of light.

Glynn Thomas was born in Cambridge in 1946. He studied at the Cambridge School of Art and then, for some twelve years, taught printmaking at the Ipswich School of Art. He is now a full time artist living in Suffolk. Glynn is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers and his work has been exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the country. Perhaps the most striking feature of his style is his impatient eagerness to embrace every feature of his subject even if this means defying visual convention. As Nicholas Butler has written, 'The perspective is cockeyed, note a few of the buildings are lying on their sides in their eagerness to be included, but there, in a single, friendly print, is the essence of the place.'