A fascination with trees has influenced much of Susanna’s work in various forms throughout her artistic career.

The Chinese regard wood as the fifth element after air, fire, earth and water. The Norsemen believed the World was supported by a tree and in Christianity the wooden cross symbolises both death and rebirth and so it is no wonder that throughout the ages artists have drawn inspiration from the tree.

In this series of woodcuts and drawings she has tried to make her trees iconic.

The ideas behind the symbolism may differ or change but the tree remains a constant form in an ever-changing world.

Susanna hopes you will spare a few minutes to reflect on what the tree means to you.

Susanna studied Fine Art at WSCAD, Farnham and Printmaking at Wimbledon School of Art

Martin’s work begins with memories, his childhood, this is how his process starts, vivid recollections of whom he is and where he came from. A journey from the Past to the Present, Situations, Surroundings, the people he meets and the journey Martin’s life has taken so far.

Martin classes his work as Abstract Expressionism and explores printmaking and digital art techniques. Combining both methods together, Martin creates abstract compositions which are full of personal emotion, colour, shape and energy.

Martin has spent his career in education, Comprehensives in London, Teacher’s Colleges in Nigeria and Further Education in Weybridge.  During much of this time he has also written poetry, attending Wey Poets, Guildford, co-editing Weyfarers, getting poems into numerous magazines and publishing five short books.

After retirement, he has had more time to pursue art, describing his work at first as Collages, later simply as cut-outs.  He has shown his work in coffee-bars, Guildford Library, Guildford Institute and Godalming Museum.  He is especially pleased to be showing his work at Clyde & Co where, as previous visits have demonstrated the work is of a very high standard.

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.

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.

Fabiola Knowles is an artist-printmaker who creates original prints, individually by hand, using traditional tools and techniques. She uses a variety of methods including collagraph, silk screen, dry point, lino cut and mono printing. Her work is mostly figurative but she enjoys the exploration of abstraction that can be seen in her monotypes and collagraphs.

Fabiola has been exploring the texture and viscosity of inks to interpret the land and sea. She is interested in the effects light has on a subject and the patterns that are hidden in the world around us. Although she loves colour, her work often employs a limited palette. Fabiola draws inspiration mainly from plants and the open landscapes of the local area, however, more recently her work has seen a return to still life.

Fabiola does not seek to challenge the viewer but draw them in and share a sense of quiet enjoyment.

Surrey based artist and printmaker, Julie Hoyle has an experimental approach to printmaking. Works to date include 2D and 3D works on wood, light and shadow installations and works on paper in a variety of printmaking methods.

Artworks included in the Guildford Arts exhibition at Clyde & Co have been chosen from a number of series of works:

The ‘On the Go’ series of Collagraphs with Monoprints were inspired by photographs taken on the road from the car while travelling in Europe and contain some of the lyrics from the song “Hello Goodbye’, topically full of contradiction and split opinion.

The New York screen prints were inspired during a recent trip and include some of the street art and sites visited and reference a number of New York artists including Barbara Kruger, Keith Haring, Banksy, Warhol, Litchenstein and Pollack and a local artist who was selling screen-printed tourist attractions on cycling maps at a craft fair.

‘The Contemporary Tales’ screenprinted pots on wood are from an ongoing interest in a mixture of character composed of different elements and these pieces are inspired by traditional stories told with a contemporary twist.

After a career in nursing Jenny has concentrated on learning more about art, which has long been an interest and a means of expressing her ideas and feelings about the world around her.

Whilst working toward a B.A. Hons. In Fine Art at UCA, Farnham, gained in 2012, and since, her practice has referenced global warming leading to rising sea levels and coastal erosion; the interface between sea and land and the sense of wide open spaces.
Recent work has related to historic changes in the world around me. Jenny enjoys using printmaking processes to express this.

Chance and abstraction are what interest Pru. She says ‘A figure can either be the beginning of the work or can emerge during the process’.

Mary has been attending weekly classes at Putney School of Art for several years in drawing and painting, etching and printmaking. She paints mainly in oils, and likes to develop some images further into an etching. In other cases, she is inspired to create an etching directly.

Mary is very interested in how people connect with each other and with nature, for example, enjoying the autumn winds on Pewley Down, or playing together on the beach with the waves. In her etchings of a sunset, and a summer’s day by a pond, she aims to show how the interplay of light and dark resonates with us when experiencing beauty in nature. Her work can sometimes take on a dreamlike quality, as in the photo-etching, ‘Dreaming of Flying’.

In ‘Kite Fever at Pewley Down’ Mary explores changing the tonality in the image to give a sense of excitement, and to allow the colours to breathe in new ways.

‘Song of a Skylark’, is a response to the poem, ‘To a Skylark’, by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Mary uses the technique of impasto painting to convey the emotional intensity of the poem. The first four stanzas give a graphic description of what it is like to hear a skylark singing, and the mystery of hearing this beautiful sound when the bird is often hidden from view.

Excerpt from “To a Skylark” by Perce Bysshe Shelley

“Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!
Bird thou never wert,
That from Heaven, or near it
Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

Higher still and higher
From the earth thou springest
Like a cloud of fire:
The deep blue thou wingest,
And singest still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.

In the golden lightning
Of the sunken sun,
O’er which clouds are bright’ning,
Thou dost float and run;
Like an unbodied joy whose race has just began.

The pale purple even
Melts around thy flight;
Like a star of Heaven,
In the broad day-light
Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight...”