Liz Seward has been painting and drawing all her life. After an early career in scientific illustration and raising a family she qualified as an Adult Education lecturer and taught drawing, watercolours and mixed media for 25 years. She retired in 2003 to concentrate on her own work and freelance teaching and a busy schedule demonstrating to Art Societies throughout the country. Although she retired from teaching in 2014, she still visits Dedham Hall three times a year to teach courses there.

She exhibits widely in many galleries and in London, both at the Mall and Westminster Galleries. Her work has been reproduced as greeting cards by many organisations and she has won a number of prestigious awards. Liz has contributed to several books including ‘Watercolour Plus’, ‘The Artists’ Sketchbook’ and ‘Dynamic Acrylics’ and is a regular contributor to ‘The Artist’ magazine. She was elected to The Society of Women Artists in 1993.

Her still life paints have a light, colour and texture as well as a narrative quality in them that is enhanced by collage. Her landscapes are inspired by the countryside around her home in Lightwater, Surrey.

Brad specialise in portraiture and figurative representation, he has always been fascinated and inspired by an artist’s ability to capture the human condition. He finds himself deeply attracted to the Expressionist characteristics of strong, even lurid, colours, abstraction/distortion, alienation and social exclusion, exploring human emotions, instincts, identity, character and narrative. Each painting is a challenge bringing a journey of anxiety, mistakes, hesitations and frustrations and involves his instinctive physical/emotional/imaginative style. Brad favours strong brush strokes and often incorporate the unpredictable nature of chaos, including gestural splashes and dripping and nonrepresentational colours that come together in form and composition.

As a dyslexic artist self-portraiture provides for him a private diary and public autobiography. He finds that painting and drawing is a language for him that is not easily written or verbally expressed; it is a way of communicating and interpreting. He identified with contemporary artist, Antony Micallef, (UK, 1975), who stated ‘I am terribly dyslexic, so painting and drawing became a way of expressing myself’.
Brad prefers the medium of oil paint, however he often works with acrylic, watercolour, pen, charcoal, ink and pencil. He has been fortunate to be able to show many of his paintings and have achieved sales in Europe and the USA. Brad aspires to be able to present his paintings to as wide an audience as possible. He is satisfied with a completed painting if he feels that is has challenged him and evokes intended and unintended interpretations and provoke reactions.

There is always a relationship between an artist and his or her subject. In the case of the portrait/figurative painter, Brad believes, the ability and technique to apply the tactile medium of oil paint and create form coexists alongside a unique ability to explore and evoke a reaction through representation of intimacy, expression, individuality, emotion and identity.

The integrity of representation can sometimes be interrupted by the relationship and requirements of the sitter. So far in his career, to explore authenticity of the individual, he has at times, indulged in a consideration of his contemporary self/identity through self-portraiture.
In these paintings he portrays himself as an intensely single minded subject focused on unease and contemplation; this is intended to represent a societal angst, particularly among his own mid 20s age group, of life, love, health, political uncertainty and for the individual, isolation and loneliness. He relies on his own subjective sense of society and personal relationships and his own range of health and emotional experiences to promote authenticity of representation in my paintings.

Sue was a graphic designer and art teacher in her professional life, working freelance for many educational bodies including English Heritage and the National Trust. She then worked as Publicity and Promotions Manager for West Sussex Library Service for 19 years and returned to painting and printmaking after taking early retirement.

The physicality of painting excites her. It is in the process, the materials, the 'doing it' rather than a purely intellectual response, although her subject matter and approach is changing. Similarly with printmaking, she finds a different discipline leads to a cross pollination of ideas which feeds all strands of her work.

Responding to the landscape and her environment is inevitable. 'Nature' in all its aspects inspires her and particularly where things meet, the edge of things. Her landscape/seascape paintings are often heavily layered, reflecting not only what may appear on the surface, but what lies beneath. The images usually develop a narrative of their own.

Walking through and being in the landscape is vital to her practice. Playing with scale, shape and colour is key in developing images from drawings done in situ, from photos, from found objects and from the memories of those experiences.

Sue works on many drawings back in the studio before even attempting a finished piece and then work on several canvases or prints at the same time.

painting in oils. He has a passion for painting en plein air which has shaped his style of work because of the need to paint quickly when on location. His landscapes, many of which are urban, demonstrate minimal brush strokes with a lightness of touch to produce realistic images.

Rodney states ‘I now paint the vast majority of my work with the subject in front of me. Inspiration comes from everyday life – people, buildings, streets, skies – and the challenge of translating three-dimensional subjects into a convincing two dimensional oil painting.

In 2017 Rodney competed in Sky Arts Landscape Artist of the Year with the judges short listing him to the final three of his heat and praising his work describing his entry as ‘a jewel of a painting’. Rodney was also a prize winner in the 2017 The Artist magazine’s open art competition with a self-portrait and he has also had two paintings selected for this year’s exhibition at Patching’s Art Centre, Nottinghamshire.

Rodney is a self-taught painter who works in his spare time alongside his graphic design work in publishing.

Based in South West London, Rodney has exhibited locally, nationally and at the Guildford Arts Yvonne Arnaud exhibition this summer.

Rob’s paintings explore his connection to the British landscape, particularly the area of Surrey in which he lives, and Hampshire where he grew up. A large proportion of his work originates from time spent in the Surrey Hills in particular. Some recent work has also been inspired by trips to other parts of the UK, including Cornwall, the Lake District and the Yorkshire Dales.

He produces rapid sketches whilst in the landscape, as well as taking photos. Other pieces have been based purely on strong memories of a particular encounter with the landscape.

These references give him a fixed starting point, but he is always keen to allow the paintings to evolve naturally and intuitively, so that they often depart from the topographical specifics of the place in question.

The paintings rely equally on observation and memory; they involve an element of abstraction and are more interested in evoking the sensory experience and emotional impact of the landscape than directly reproducing what he has seen. Rob is influenced as much by Abstract Expressionism, as he is by recent developments in landscape painting.

Rob embraces a wide variety of media in each piece, from oils and acrylics through to house paints, pastels, inks, enamel spray paint, charcoal and coloured pencil. Nothing is off limits, and he will often make decisions spontaneously as he seeks to express his memories of an encounter with the landscape.

The happy accidents that occur when these various media combine are essential to his work. His paintings are as much about the act of mark-making as they are about depicting a particular landscape or location. He wants the process of painting to show through, and for each painting to maintain the spontaneity and energy with which he has produced it.

Jan is a design-led painter and printmaker. As an artist she explores boundaries - the boundaries between word and image, between poetry and painting and the boundaries between representation and abstraction.
Her work reflects her emotional response to both the environment and to poetry. The two responses work in parallel – the environment reminds her of specific poems and certain poems capture, for her, the essence of the environment.
Her interest in poetry stems from her first degree in English Language and Literature. This was followed by a career in design and communications before getting a further BA and MA in Fine Art and becoming a full-time professional artist and tutor.
She regularly exhibits and has had numerous one woman shows with work in collections throughout Europe and Australasia.

Virginia is interested in how a landscape has evolved and continues to evolve through natural and human processes. Referencing her own and found photographs and incorporating materials gathered from the landscape itself, Virginia seeks to create an interwoven layering of local history and memory, using the texture and colour of the landscape of her concern.

Virginia has an MA in Fine Art and works as a freelance artist in education including the Art for All programme at the Watts Gallery. Her work has been exhibited in galleries in Surrey, Norfolk, London, Yorkshire and Ibiza.

Tamara Williams is a contemporary British printmaker, painter and designer, working with mixed media and plaster to create semi abstract, textured painting and prints. Her design background influences all her work, from a focus on texture and mark-making to her love of letterpress and mono printing.

The landscape around her studio near The Thames is an especially strong influence. The river bank and surrounding fields, filled with their tangle of wild flowers and graphic shapes, are deconstructed into abstract layers of texture.

Further afield, the Cornwall and Norfolk coastlines are also represented in her recent work.

Tamara works from her studio in Surrey, selling her work through galleries, events and open studios.

Sinclair is influenced by the forms and colours of early Twentieth Century Flemish and German Expressionists. Most of his work features people and animals in landscapes with which he has become attached, some arise out of his religious beliefs and his interest in animals began when living in East Africa as a child, and sought to catch the essence of the animals he saw every day, rather than represent them realistically. Others arise out of every day encounters in his mother’s home landscape of West Flanders and the other half of his heritage, eastern Highlands. He has also come to know North Yorkshire through his son.

Sinclair’s emotional imagery is stocked by all these places and having grown up with intense tropical light slamming down colours as well as evanescent tones he is always conscious of the way he can play with colour in his pictures, grading or contrasting them as the occasion demands. These days he has begun to play with the way the colours can be varied by the texture of the brushstrokes with which they are set down, for example, using a large area of flat colour but give it life through texture.

If you tell people you paint, one of those difficult questions you get asked is “what sort of thing do you paint? Is it abstract? Portraits? Landscapes? “ The answer is all of the above. He paints people, animals and landscapes he has seen and which for some reason or the other struck him as being memorable, the image cutting itself out of the continuum of visual impressions. All art is a matter of abstraction. The story line in a novel does not contain all the crossing threads of real life. The subject matter of a picture depends on what has moved him. Not in some deep emotional way, but what has struck him as being visually significant. Sinclair never carries around a sketchbook but tries to memorise an event or a landscape and then set it down later. All his pictures start with something he has seen and wishes to memorialise. So you could say that he is doing that thing of recollecting emotion in tranquillity.

Sinclair uses commercially prepared canvases, which do not come in the same formats as the drawings, so when he decides to make a painting out of one of the sketches they get transformed again by the new boundaries of their setting. It sounds corny but there is a dialogue in his head as he asks the image how it wants to be and this can change the emphasis.