Artist Biographies
Will Teather
British artist Will Teather graduated from Central St Martins College of Art and Design in 2003, and currently lives and works in Norwich. Teather originally made his name by exhibiting regularly in London with the art collective Project 142. His work has recently been featured in venues including Gallery No 9 in Marciac and ‘“The Cork Street Open Exhibition,” a juried exhibition of contemporary fine art in Mayfair. Forthcoming exhibitions include Oxfordshire’s Modern Artists Gallery.
Teather came to wider public attention in spring 2007 when he was selected from world-wide applications to spearhead the new artist-in-residence programme at Aberdeen Arts Centre. The artist's two month residency in Scotland was a high-profile public event which met with substantial interest and acclaim at a local and national level.
The narrative concepts which underpin his current series were nurtured whilst in Aberdeen through visits to The Elphinstone Institute, meeting local author Stanley Robertson and being shown around HM Theatre's archives by Edi Swan, in addition to watching the Arts Centre's own dance and theatre programme.
Teather has lectured on drawing courses at Leeds College of Art & Design and more recently Norwich University College of the Arts. In July he was awarded a College staff award, in recognition of his contribution to the College’s Drawing Workshop.
Berenice Abbott (1898-1991)
Born in Springfield, Ohio in 1898, Abbott undertook an extraordinary range of work in her remarkably productive career. She was first and foremost a photographer, best known for her portraits and documentary photographs of American life and society. But one can also think of her as an inventor, an archivist and a historian, as well as a writer and teacher.
After experimenting with sculpture in her early twenties, Abbott left America for Paris where she began her photographic career in 1923 as the apprentice to Man Ray. Abbott championed "straight" photography, that is, using no special effects. She argued that, by the very nature of its realistic image, photography was documentary and, as such, found its best expression in clearly focused, highly detailed images. Abbott maintained that this relatively new art form could never grow up if it imitated other media.
During Abbott's Paris years, she photographed many figures from the worlds of literature and the arts, including James Joyce, Foujita, Coco Chanel, and Max Ernst. She was also known for her vivid portraits of lesbians and bisexuals. Among these are the younger expatriate lesbian writers Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap, Sylvia Beach, Bryher, Janet Flanner and Flanner's lover Solita Solano, as well as the artist Gwen Le Gallienne.
Abbott was one of the few Americans who left Paris at the time of the German occupation; returning to New York City, she documented it's decline during the Great Depression through her photography.
When she returned to New York in 1929 Abbott was struck by an environment in transition. Her determination to document what she saw eventually resulted in the publication Changing New York (1939), funded by the Federal Art Project.
Karel Appel (1921-2006)
Born in Amsterdam in 1921, Appel studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Amsterdam. He was a founding member of the CoBrA group along with Asger Jorn (Copenhagen), Joseph Noiret and Christian Dotremont (Brussels) and Constant, Corneille (Amsterdam) in 1948. The CoBrA painters wanted to break new ground, preferring to work spontaneously and with the emphasis more on fantastic imagery. In 1951 the CoBrA movement was officially disbanded, yet during its short existence CoBrA rejuvenated Dutch modern art.
Appel moved to Paris with Corneille and Constant in 1950, his paintings soon becoming more thickly painted incorporating swirling forms with grotesque imagery of animals, monsters and the human figure. He was awarded the UNESCO prize at the 1954 Venice Biennale and the 1960 Guggenheim International Award. In 1957 he first visited New York where in 1968 Appel began to make relief paintings and sculptures in wood, polyester and aluminium.
Nora Auric (1900-1982)
Nora Auric was a French painter and wife of the famous composer Georges Auric. The couple were part of the avant-garde in 1930's Paris and as a young student at the Paris Conservatory, Georges Auric became part of Satie and Cocteau's famous group, Les Six. Auric's work, primarily portraits and abstract works with musical reference, appear at the major auction houses.
Jyoti Bhatt (b1934)
Jyoti Bhatt is from Gujarat, India. He completed his diploma in Painting with Graphic Arts and Post Diploma Specialisation in creative painting from M.S. University of Baroda. Jyoti Bhatt’s mission as a painter and a graphic artist is to preserve and to seek inspiration from the fast-disappearing folk art traditions of rural India. Since the Seventies, Bhatt, a member of the Group 1890, has been inspired by the colourful stylised motifs of cross-stitch embroidery, rangoli motifs and the use of traditional calligraphic ideograms from his native Saurashtra.
Arun Chatterjee (born 1971)
Born in Darbhanga, India, Chatterjee took his BFA the College of Fine Arts at Patna University. Under scholarship he then moved to Bejing in China where he obtained his MFA at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Bejing. Subsequent funding enabled Chatterjee to complete a residency programme in Tokyo, Japan.
The work on display at Art 18/21 is part of the series Expressions the title of Chatterjee's first solo show which opens at the Jehingir Gallery in Mumbai, India, May 7 – 11.
In Expressions Chatterjee portrays experiences, both his and others observed, through facial forms focused on expression. He explains,
"The source of the eye is the fish eye which is rooted in the Indian folk arts of Madhubani where the fish is is associated with 'auspiciousness' and 'hope'. The two parts of the eye are both Indian and Chinese, the pupil is like China the country which although large is focused inwards, self scrutinising. By contrast, the outer field is Indian in aspect always looking outwards. However, like vision itself there is a fantastic infusion of both aspects which can be observed in the eyes".
Arun Chatterjee 2008
Shiavax Chavda (1914-1990)
"The line is the life force of his work." H Goetz, critic
Shiavax Chavda was a masterful interpreter of ancient Indian art forms and his sympathy with its subjects, whether human, animal or architectural combined with his ability to enter their souls with a few deft strokes is considered the hallmark of his work.
Born in 1914 in Navsari Gujarat, Chavda joined the Sir J.J. School of Art, Mumbai in 1930. In 1935 he went to London where he studied at the Slade School. In 1937 he continued his studies at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere, Paris and it was in Paris that Chavda worked alongside Leon Bakst and Picasso in designing the sets for the Diaghelev Ballet. He travelled extensively through the length and breadth of India to understand his subjects. Indian temples, the ancient art traditions, rural life, the sacredness of art, all formed the basis for his unique style. His images of Indian dancers are captured with a minimum use of line, tone and colour. Chavda's style evolved from the early realistic portrayals to depiction of the personality and character of his subjects but his work is always optimistic and vibrant, though never dramatic
Andy Crouch
Andy was born in 1959 and graduated from Anglia Polytechnic University in 2002 where he studied photography. Since then he has worked for the Sainsbury Centre of Visual Arts, The Norfolk and Norwich Festival, and East Publishing.
The New York photo series was taken the week before 9/11.
For more information please see www.andycrouch.co.uk
Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979)
Delaunay, a Ukrainian-French artist along with her husband Robert Delaunay and others cofounded the Orphism art movement, noted for its use of strong colours and geometric shapes. Her work extends to painting, textile design and stage set design.
During the 1920s, Delaunay focused upon bringing this new artistic lyricism into the world of high fashion, transforming fabrics for fashion into a moveable visual feast. In the 1930s she returned to a renewed focus on painting, joining the Abstraction-Creation group in seeking to create an art based upon non-representational elements which were often geometrical and focused on colour as central to painting. After her husband's death in 1941 she continued to work as a painter and designer and turned to printmaking. In 1963 she donated 58 of her own works and 40 of her husband's to the Musee National d'Art Moderne in Paris and became the first woman ever to be exhibited at the Louvre during her lifetime. Since her death, her importance in the development of abstract art can be seen in the number of major retrospectives and publications on her work.
Edward Julius Detmold (1883-1957)
English engraver, water-colourist and illustrator Detmold was born in London in 1883, along with his twin brother Charles Maurice. They worked together making sketches at the Zoological Gardens in Regent’s Park and exhibited together from the age of thirteen at the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours. Edward became one of the finest Edwardian animal illustrators, known for his subtle placement of animals within their natural environment and the decorative composition of his works.
He expressed artistic versatility and published a number of books of fine fantasy drawings in the 1920s. These images portrayed a vivid imagination and he utilised warm colouring, which suited the period.
Detmold is famous for his illustrations of Kipling’s Jungle Book and The Fables of Aesop.
Erte (Romain de Tirtoff) (1892-1990)
The Russian-born painter Romain de Tirtoff, who called himself Erté after the French pronunciation of his initials, was one of the leading fashion and stage designers of the early twentieth century. Erté is perhaps most famous for his elegant fashion designs which capture the art deco period in which he worked. His delicate figures and sophisticated, glamorous designs are instantly recognizable and his ideas and art influenced fashion into the 21st century.
Erté continued working throughout his life designing revues, ballets and operas. He branched out into the realm of limited edition prints, bronzes and art to wear. Museums around the world purchased dozens of his paintings for their collections.
In 1980 Erté designed the costumes and sets for “Der Rosenkavalier” at the Glyndebourne opera-house. The farbserigraphs of the costumes can be seen here along with two mirrors from the original stage set, inspired by the hearts on his original costume designs.
Eric Fischl (born 1948)
Born in New York City in 1948, Fischl grew up in the suburbs of Long Island. Against a backdrop of alcoholism and a country club culture obsessed with image over content, Fischl became focussed on the rift between what was experienced and what could not be said. Until the late 70's, suburbia was not considered a legitimate genre for art. With his first New York show at the Edward Thorp Gallery, epithets like "psycho-sexual suburban dramas" became linked to his disturbing images of dysfunctional family life.
He received his BFA in 1972 at the recently opened California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California. After graduation he moved to Chicago where he worked as a guard at the Museum of Contemporary Art. It was in Chicago that Fischl was exposed to the non-mainstream art of the Hairy Who. "The underbelly, carnie world of Ed Paschke and the hilarious sexual vulgarity of Jim Nutt were revelatory experiences for me.", Fischl has said. In 1974, he got a job teaching painting at the highly touted Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. It is there that he met his future wife, the painter, April Gornik. In 1978 they moved to New York City where they continue to live and work.
Dame Elizabeth Frink (1930-1993)
Dame Elisabeth Frink was born in Thurlow, Suffolk, in 1930. She studied at Guildford School of Art (1947-49) and Chelsea School of Art, London (1949-53) under Bernard Meadows and Willi Soukop. She taught at Chelsea School of Art (1953-61), St Martin's School of Art (1954-62) and was visiting lecturer at the Royal College of Art (1965-67).
Men, dogs, horses and birds were constant subject-matter throughout Frink's career. She modelled, cast in plaster and then carved the plaster, much as Henry Moore had done, to achieve a tougher surface when the plaster was cast in bronze. Unlike Moore, however, she rarely worked with the female form: "I have focused on the male because to me he is a subtle combination of sensuality and strength with vulnerability", (Elisabeth Frink: Sculpture, Harpvale, 1984).
Frink's drawing and graphic work followed the same themes as her 3-dimensional work, executed with a similar economy of means and feeling for surface texture.
As one of Britain's leading sculptors, Frink was awarded Honorary Doctorates by the University of Surrey (1977), Open University (1983), University of Warwick (1983), University of Cambridge (1988), University of Exeter (1988), University of Oxford (1989) and University of Keele (1989).
Frink received official recognition for her work, being awarded the CBE in 1969 and in 1982 she was created Dame of the British Empire.
Sheela Gowda (born 1957)
Born in Karnataka, India, Gowda gained a diploma in painting from the Ken School of Art, Bangalore in 1979. She studied at M.S. University, Baroda and later at Shantiniketan, West Bengal. Her early oils with pensive girls in nature were influenced by her mentor K.G. Subramanyan and later by Nalini Malani towards a somewhat expressionistic direction depicting middle class chaos and tensions underplayed by coarse eroticism. Subsequent compositions had eerie and sensual female presence in the organic world permeated by a sense of instinctual cruelty. After her Inlaks scholarship for an M.A. in painting at the Royal College of Art, London (1984-86) and a stint at the Cite International des Arts, Paris, she taught for a while at Chamarajendra Academy of Visual Arts (CAVA), Mysore.
Gowda’s earlier work shows a fondness for a subtle interplay of emotional states between the portrayed characters. Her drawing has always been important, appearing as a female means of structuring figures and objects, giving them vitality and life without weighing them onto a flat ground. More recently Gowda has moved towards a new language of representation, seeking new options of expressing her urge for authenticity and immediacy through the use of different materials and installation.
Louis Haghe (1806-1885)
Louis Haghe was a Belgian litographer and water colour artist. His father and grandfather had both practised as architects. He trained in watercolour painting but later found work in the relatively new art of lithography when the first press was set up in Tournai. He visited England to find work, and settled there permanently in 1823. Together with William Day (1797 - 1845), around 1830 he formed the partnership Day & Haghe, which became the most famous early Victorian firm of lithographic printing in London.
Day and Haghe printed lithographs dealing with a wide range of subjects, such as hunting scenes, topographical views and genre depictions.
From one of his frequent travels to continental Europe he came back with a rich collection of architectural sketches and drawings. He later published them from 1840 to 1850 in three series entitled "Sketches in Belgium and Germany".
Brian Harland Rees (born 1930)
Harland Rees, a painter, graphic artist and printmaker was born in Neath, Glamorgan.
He attended Swansea School of Art 1947-9 and 1951-54, with a year at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts. He worked for several publishers and received a large number of commissions, including a book-jacket for Dylan Thomas' “Under Milk Wood”, for J M Dent in 1958, as well and graphic work for British Railways, Shell, Melody Maker and others.
Garry Hobbs
Although perceiving his own works as quite disparate and unconnected thematically, there is an underlying oeuvre to Garry’s work that unites animal and human forms in visually perplexing ways. He is overly self-critical and tests himself constantly, depicting nudes continuously in an effort to portray them convincingly. As he acknowledges, his placement of images is sometimes random, but anchors them with an image that serves to provide a narrative. He clearly has a penchant for odd and tense contexts, and combined with an inclination for narrative and often flippant engagement with language, his artworks result in an exploration of visual and intelligible realities. On two occasions, Garry has include himself in his works, referencing his own dream-like and Freudian fears of appearing nude in public.
William Hogarth (1697 - 1764)
Hogarth was a major English painter, printmaker, pictorial satirist, social critic and editorial cartoonist who has been credited with pioneering western sequential art. His work ranged from excellent realistic portraiture to comic strip-like series of pictures called “modern moral subjects”. Much of his work, though at times vicious, poked fun at contemporary politics and customs. Illustrations in such style are often referred to as Hogarthian.
John Hoyland RA (born 1934)
An English born painter and printmaker, Hoyland trained at Sheffield College of Art from 1950 and the Royal Academy Schools from 1956. Under the influence of Nicholas de Staël he began to paint Sheffield landscapes and abstractions from still-life subjects. His devotion to colour began with experiments at a Scarborough summer school in 1957. At the Situation exhibitions of 1960–61 he showed some of his earliest fully abstract paintings in which he used bands of colour to explore perceptual effects such as the relationship of image to background or to create the illusion of buckling the picture-plane. This geometric character soon gave way to sinuous lines enclosing discs of colour, and eventually to a freer and more fluid application of paint.
Hoyland's paintings were included in the successful exhibition The New Generation in 1964. Travelling to New York, Hoyland met and visited the studios of Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman and Rothko. He also met the critic Clement Greenberg and the young painters Greenberg was championing at the time: Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski.
Elements from these American developments, especially post-painterly abstraction, feature prominently in subsequent canvases by Hoyland such as 1.11.68 (1968; London, Tate) in the use of staining techniques and acrylic paint, the interaction of unmixed colours, and an emphasis on the material weight of paint. Despite these influences, however, Hoyland came to reject the American tendency to reductivism, concentrating in later paintings on the approach exemplified by Hofmann and de Staël, with varied and tactile paint surfaces and a disposition of blocks of different colours to create sensations of advancing and receding space. From the late 1960s Hoyland applied these methods to screen prints, lithographs and later to etchings and monotypes.
Bhagwan Kapoor (born 1935)
Born in 1935 in India, Kapoor was educated at the J.J School of Art and Design in Mumbai. He then moved to Paris where he studied under a French Government Scholarship at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts.
Kapoor’s style combines decorative and folk idioms in a modern style. References are made to modernity during this formative period in the history of the sub-continent. He now lives and works in New York.
Sudhir Ranjan Khastgir (1907-1974)
Sudhir Khastgir was one of the prominent artists emerging from Santiniketan in the early 20th century. He worked alongside Abanindranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose and Mukel Dey.
Born in Chittagong, India, Khastgir studied at Shantiniketan and graduated under Nandalal Bose in 1929. He began his career as an art teacher at the Scindia School, Gwalior (1933) and two years later joined Doon School where he taught for 20 years. He was principal of GCAC, Lucknow form 1956-62. Khastgir had his first solo exhibition in India House, London (1939) and many more thereafter including at Cama Oriental Institute Hall, Bombay (1945), Imperial Institute, South Kensington (1947), India Museum, Calcutta (1953) and Burnpore, West Bengal (1954). He received a travelling Fellowship by the Deutsch Academy of Munich in 1937 and was awarded the Padma Shri by the Indian Government in 1958. Sudhir Khastgir died in 1974.
This beautiful watercolour shows Krishna playing his flute at night in the forest to one of the gopis and is almost certainly one of Khastgir's earlier paintings, demonstrating influences from Santiniketan and particularly Abanindranath Tagore. Tagore believed in the traditional Indian techniques of painting. His philosophy existed in rejecting the materialistic art of the west and coming back to the Indian traditional art forms. He was very much influenced by the Mughal School of painting as well as Whistler's Aestheticism. In his later works, Abanindranath started integrating Chinese and Japanese calligraphic traditions into his style. The intention behind this move was to construct an amalgamation of the modern pan-Asian artistic tradition and the common aspects of Eastern spiritual and artistic culture.
Torii Kiyonaga (1752-1815)
Although ukiyo-e never declined in its apparent charms, in the 1770’s it was clearly waiting for some bold master to lead it to new heights. Kiyonaga, an artist perhaps more important as an innovator and consolidator than a maker, provided the necessary creative effort.
Son of Edo, a bookseller, Kiyonaga was a leading pupil of Kiyomitsu, last of the great figures in the traditional Torii line. Kiyonaga succeeded his master as head of the Torii family, and much of his work was thus devoted to depicting kabuki (a form of traditional Japanese theatre). Kiyonaga disregarded the graceful exaggeration and idealism of the earlier artists and strove above all for naturalism in his designs.
Fernand Leger (1881-1955)
Léger became a student at the École des Arts Décortifs, Paris in 1903. His early work was influenced by Impressionism but a new emphasis on drawing and geometry appeared in Léger's work after he saw the Cézanne retrospective at the Salon d'Automne in 1907. In 1909 he moved to Montparnasse and met members of the avant-garde; Archipenko, Lipchitz, Chagall, and Robert Delaunay. In his major painting of this period Nudes in the Forest (1909-10), Léger displayed a personal form of Cubism which his critics called "Tubism" for its emphasis on cylindrical forms unlike the collage technique pioneered by Braque and Picasso.
In 1910 he joined with several other artists including Delaunay, Jacques Villon, Henri Le Fauconnier, Albert Gleizes, Francis Picabia, and Marie Laurencin to form an offshoot of the Cubist movement, the Puteaux Group - also known as Section d'Or (The Golden Section). Léger was influenced during this time by Italian Futurism, and until 1914 his paintings became increasingly abstract. The vocabulary of tubular, conical, and cubed forms are laconically rendered in rough patches of primary colours plus green, black and white.
During the Second World War, Leger lived in the USA where he taught at Yale, returning to Paris in 1945, where he opened an academy. His large paintings celebrating the people (featuring acrobats, cyclists and builders) thickly contoured and painted in clear, flat colours, reflected his political interest in the working class, and his attempt to create accessible art. In 1950 he founded a ceramics studio at Biot, which, in 1957 became the Léger Museum. Léger was one of the giants of 20th c French painting, whose influence has been almost as great as his reputation.
Ruthli Losh-Atkinson
She was born in Middlesex, and spent most of her childhood and early adulthood in Hertfordshire. Ruthli was a full time student at Watford School of Art with emphasis on graphic art. She became a commercial artist and has exhibited in Britain, France, Serbia and Switzerland.
She has taught in secondary and adult education for over 23 years. In Ruthli’s work she pays particular attention to the form of the human body.
‘The human body with all its shapes and moods is of unending fascination and has been throughout many cultures and for thousands of years. More immediately, the relationship between model and artist is full of subtleties which the latter must interpret in some way and this is what interests me. To have the means of depiction in hand and endeavour to convert it to a two dimensional image is a problem that has to be solved with each drawing and is, for me, both challenging and enjoyable’
Mortimer Menpes (1855-1938)
Australian born artist, Mortimer Menpes, arrived in London in 1875. Together with Walter Sickert, Menpes was tutored and influenced by James McNeill Whistler, the American born artist whose controversial work rocked late-19th-century London sensibilities. Menpes first came into contact with Whistler just after the latter had returned from Venice. During the 1880's Menpes shared a flat with Whistler at Cheyene Walk in London where Whistler taught him the art of etching. At the outbreak of the Boer War in 1900 Menpes was sent as a war artist to South Africa. In 1902 he travelled widely around the East including China, Burma, India and Egypt where the images for these dry-point etchings were made. Consistently of high quality Menpes’ gritty realism and precise view points both separate and draw the viewer to the scenes he depicts.
William Leigh Ridgewell (1881-1937)
Graduating from the Brighton School of Art, Ridgewell worked as a lithographer, illustrator and comic strip cartoonist. Before the First World War he produced adverts, posters and postcards, his first drawings being published as postcards when he was just 17.
Stationed in India during World War I he drew posters for the Indian War loan and contributed cartoons and sketches to The Looker-On and Indian Ink. Upon his return to Britain, Ridgewell worked for Tit-Bits, Bystander and Passing Show.
From 1920-1937 he contributed to Punch, influenced greatly by Fougasse and Bateman who said he brought in a new fresh spontaneous style to Punch.
David Roberts RA (1776-1864)
In the late 18th century romantic notions of Napoleon’s 1798 invasion of Egypt and Lord Byron’s travels, memorialized in his poetry, produced a fascination for the Near East. It was the appetite of the Victorian book-buying public for views of the mysterious east, still relatively unseen by western eyes, that was to set Scottish artist David Roberts on the course that would determine his longevity.
Louis Hague, promoter of the new illustration technique of lithography, oversaw the publication in six extraordinary books in which all 248 lithographs were hand-finished. The first three volumes depicted Egypt and Nubia and the second three, the Holy Land. The set which was sold by subscription was an immediate success. Roberts was admitted to the Royal Academy and he continued to travel and paint until his death in 1864.
After more than 150 years his paintings are still the most sought after illustrations of Egypt and the Holy Land.
Luigi Rossini (1790-1857)
Luigi Rossini was a great Italian artist of the 19th century. Born in Ravenna in 1790, Rossini graduated as an artist from the Academy of Bologna. He began working in Bologna, where he studied with Antonio Giuseppe Basoli (1744-1843), and at the same time he took an interest in attending architectural lectures, thanks to which he won a prize in 1813 which led him to Rome. Rossini studied in Rome between 1817 - 1824, where he engraved many large plates of ancient architecture of that city. The richly stimulating artistic ambience of Rome enabled him to compose his main work in etchings, revising Piranesi's tradition of the depiction of views into his own eighteenth century manner, and his first Vedute was published in 1814.
His record of temples, public baths, basilicas and other monuments commemorate the strength and beauty of Roman masonry, and were accurate enough to be used by practising architects, as well as other serious students of classical antiquity. Indeed, several views recorded ancient monuments which would disappear within a short period, leaving only Rossini's records of the 19th century excavations
Safavid style
The Safavid School of miniature style painting originated in the Persian capital of Esfahan. The painters during this period were inclined towards naturalism and miniatures created under the Safavi School were not exclusively made for adorning and illustrating books. The Safavi style is softer in form than other contemporary styles. Themes depicted included life in the royal court and the associated landscapes.
Peter Sek (born 1978)
A Ugandan born artist, Peter Sek now lives and works in the UK. He graduated from Machabeng Art College in 2001 and went on to have many successful exhibitions in Southern Africa before moving to the UK in 2003.
In 2006 he was artist-in-residence at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts throughout Black History Month. Whilst there, a series of paintings were commissioned including The Exhibition, portraying the Francis Bacon exhibition.
He works in various media on both large and small scale paintings, drawings and prints. In addition to these pieces he uses reclaimed materials to produce 3D work which include the musical masks displayed in the gallery.
Andrew Shunney (born 1921)
Born in Attleboro, Massachusetts, Shunney studied at the Rhode Island School of Design until moving to New York where he worked with Kuniyoshi at the Art Students League. He first formulated his own style during summers visiting Cape Cod and Nantucket.
In 1946 Shunney travelled to Mexico where he worked with Diego Rivera who gave him “master criticism” because Rivera disliked the term pupil and wanted no disciples. After four years in Mexico Shunney went to Paris where he hoped to find a new, richer inspiration in the content of French Impressionism. During his time here he painted landscapes of Honfleur and Cannes and the streets of Paris. He progressed to painting seascapes, still lives of flowers, birds and gardens - subjects which still dominate his work. Before leaving France in 1950 he received an invitation to exhibit in the infamous Salon d’Automne.
Helen l'ami Skinner
Helen’s practice has evolved out of investigating aspects of her personal / identity in relation to her position as a female contemporary black artist.
This current work has developed out of, and relates directly to her past experience as a life model. The use of mirrors as a chosen object and device in her work represents the reflection of time spent as a living sculpture and its correlation to her position as an artist. It is a universal symbol which functions both as vanity and as an inner reflection/ contemplation of time and life.
In her role as a life model her aim/function is to be still in time and so the logical conclusion was to instigate a role for herself as a way to consolidate content and context
Through her background in art history she has made these images with painting in mind and using symbols such as the skeleton. The aim was to extract some ideas which would be universal.
The artifice and dressing up and the type of costumes she has extracted from contemporary culture are very much related to the female domain.
The connection and analogy she has arrived at is simply relating to journeys, and the shoes which I have worn represent this and increasingly she views Time as the theme.
François Balthazar Solvyns (1760-1824)
Born in Belgium, Solvyns studied under A.B. Quartenmont at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp before leaving for Paris in 1778 where he was trained by the French Neo-classical painter, François-André Vincent. He worked as a marine painter until political unrest in Europe forced him to seek his fortune in India, arriving in Calcutta in 1791.
He began work in 1794 on 'A Collection of Two Hundred and Fifty Coloured Etchings: Descriptive of the Manners, Customs and Dresses of the Hindoos', which was published in Calcutta in 1796, and reprinted in 1799. He approached his task as an ethnographer, drawing his subjects from life and with more concern for accuracy than aesthetics. He portrayed servants, costumes, means of transportation (carts, palanquins and boats), modes of smoking, musical instruments and festivals.
The prints in themselves are of importance in a tradition reaching back to the early 17th century, and even earlier. As an artist, Solvyns provides a prototype for the genre of 'Company School' paintings of occupations, done by Indian artists for the British in the early 19th century.
Aya Takano (born 1976)
Born 1976 in Saitama, Japan Takano is a Japanese pop artist often associated with the Superflat movement. Influenced by both manga and American Science Fiction, her art typically depicts large eyed female heroines, often partially or completely nude in a unique style that is both playful and subtly erotic. Known for mostly her drawings and paintings, she usually works in ink and acrylics
Perhaps more than any other Kaikai Kiki artist, Takano’s work is the exemplification of Japan’s post-war cultural affluence, and its overwhelmingly diverse, yet aesthetic unification of information.
With inspirations varying from 14th Century Italian religious painting to alien evidence to MTV, Takano’s worlds are shiny and futuristic, yet soft and full of traditional and sensual imagery. Her drawings and paintings in which lively, female characters float and contort their waiflike bodies, convey a passionate drive toward creation.
In Japan, Takano is prolific as a manga artist, illustrator, and science fiction essayist. She has several serialized publications, and is regularly featured in subculture articles. In the art markets of Europe and America, her paintings and drawings are enthusiastically received.
Feliks Topolski (1907-1989)
Feliks Topolski, was born in Warsaw in 1907. He studied art at the Warsaw Academy. Arriving in London, via Paris in 1935 to record George V's Silver Jubilee. He became a London figure and friend of George Bernard Shaw whom he painted often. As an official war artist, 1940-45, he produced a prolific record both on the home front and across three continents. After the war, he was invited to India by Nehru to record the end of British rule in India. His work then took him to China and Malaysia. Whilst in India he completed The East which is held in the National Collection of India in New Delhi.
On returning to Britain Topolski became a British subject in 1947 and shortly afterwards produced one of his major works for the Coronation of Elizabeth II, which now hangs in Buckingham Palace in a corridor leading to the State Rooms. He later spent time in America where amongst other commissions he produced images showing the U.S.A Presidential elections in Chicago and San Francisco, 1956. He returned to Britain, completing the Memoir of the Century, a 600 feet long mural on London’s South Bank.
Julian Trevelyan (1910-1988)
Julian Trevelyan was born in Surrey in 1910. A renowned artist and printmaker, he initially gained recognition for his 1930s Surrealist prints and later his rural and industrial landscapes.
It wasn’t until 1931 when he joined S.W.Hayter’s famous print workshop in Montparnasse, Paris, that Trevelyan had any formal training. Whilst under the guidance of Hayter, Trevelyan developed a keen understanding for printmaking and etching. During the early 1930s the artist worked alongside Ernst, Kokoschka, Miró, Masson and Picasso. In this period his work was experimental and he began to develop his own unique style, incorporating everyday objects and portraying them with dreamlike qualities.
In early 1934 Trevelyan returned to England but continued to rely on technical advice from Hayter. In 1935 he set up his etching studio at Durham Wharf in Hammersmith, where he remained until his death in 1988. It was here that he continued with the methods of etching learnt from Hayter, and developed a certain intimacy with the medium, constantly pushing it in new directions.
From 1955-63, Trevelyan worked at the Royal College of Art and became Head of the Etching Department. Because of his enthusiasm in his work and the desire to share it with others, Trevelyan was an influential teacher, his students include David Hockney, Ron Kitaj and Norman Ackroyd. He was an important leader of modern print techniques and is regarded as a silent driving force behind the etching revolution of the 1960s.
Noboru Tsurutani
Noboru Tsurutani is a 20th century Japanese printmaker. Very little is known about this artist but his work, primarily small edition limited prints, does show up at auction from time to time. Following recent interest in art work from the east, like that of China and India, collectors are actively seeking out modern and contemporary Japanese work. The sucess of the artists emerging from the Murakami studio has priced many collectors out of this 21st century market and many are now looking to the work like that of Tsurutani, produced in the mid to late 20th century.
Larry Zox (1937-2006)
An American abstract painter, Zox was born in Iowa. Following his time at university he went on to study at the Des Moines Art Centre under the mentorship of George Grosz, a figurative artist who nevertheless encouraged the young abstract painter.
Zox moved to New York in 1958 and became part of the downtown art scene. He is one of the principal representatives of the generation of young painters following the era of the Abstract Expressionists. His earliest works, completed in 1959-62, were painted collages consisting of painted pieces of paper stapled onto joined sheets of plywood. Afterwards, he made pictures similar in appearance to the collages, but entirely painted and with straight as well as ragged edges. In the mid-60s, his large geometric paintings were appearing at prestigious galleries.
By 2005, (after his first New York solo show in more than two decades) his style had mellowed from the hard-edged geometry of the 1960s and 70s. His lines had become more fluid and his surfaces more painterly, but his concern with colour and shape remained unabated. His works conform to the modern idea that art must be done with fluidity, acceleration, and rapidity of execution.