New work by Emma Holliday and Andrew Morris which celebrates the great British seaside.
Newcastle-based artist, Emma Holliday’s vibrant paintings capture the light and colour of the much loved Yorkshire and North-Eastern coastline.
Andrew Morris, originally from Harrogate and now based in Brighton, has an eye for the features, design and typography of the traditional English seafront. His paintings focus on details which have a striking, cinematic quality.
Thank you to everyone who came along to our preview evening on Thursday 5th August.
Exhibition
5 - 27 March 2021
Janine Baldwin
Forest and Moor
Friday 5th to Saturday 27th March 2021
Our first exhibition of 2021 was Forest and Moor, a solo exhibition by award-winning artist, Janine Baldwin PS (Pastel Society UK).
Exhibition
2 - 30 April 2021
Jill Campbell
Fell Light
This latest solo exhibition by Jill Campbell predominantly features many of the paintings she completed throughout 2020. During that year Jill studied the light on the fell landscape near her home in County Durham, particularly at sunrise.
The idea of a new day representing a new beginning, a hopeful emotional moment, was the common thread linking these abstract expressionist paintings. This searching for hope was undoubtedly a subconscious response to an extraordinary year. The year began with January Sunrise and fittingly ended with the beginning of a series of small paintings, Fell Lights 1 and 2. The exhibition also contains some small mixed media studies on paper made before 2020 in which can be seen the beginning of ideas that were developed in some of the later paintings.
Jill exhibits in galleries throughout the UK and has had paintings selected for many prestigious open exhibitions, including the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists Prize Exhibition, the Ferens Open and the New Light Art Prize.
Art & Contemporary Art
Pascale Rentsch
Pascale Rentsch RSW is based in the East Lothian region of Scotland where she makes the most of the surrounding hills and coastal landscape. She draws and paints outdoors, directly from nature in all weather conditions. This is a technique called en plein air painting. She works instinctively and spontaneously to capture nature and the elements.
Talking about her painting Pascale says, “My language is paint and like a conductor guiding an orchestra, I enjoy working outside with my materials, exploring mark-making and connecting with my surroundings, reacting to what I see, feel and hear. I love the fact that whenever I am in nature, I know I will always find something beautiful, something that touches me however small and insignificant it might appear“.
Originally from Switzerland Pascale trained in Scotland where she graduated with a BA in Drawing and Painting at Edinburgh College of Art in 1999. In October 2022 she was awarded full membership of The Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour (RSW).
Pascale will be exhibiting in a solo show at Watermark Gallery in March 2023. Her previous exhibition in 2022 alongside Michele Bianco in Off The Beaten Track was a resounding success and we are looking forward to seeing new work in the forthcoming exhibition.
To see Pascale in action please watch her video on this website (below) called “This is my voice”.
Art & Contemporary Art
Jason Hicklin
Jason Hicklin captures the feel of the weather and light and its effect on the landscape. All of Jason’s work is begun outdoors. Carrying the minimum of equipment, he will walk and climb the desired area for days and sometimes nights, often in extreme weather. He describes working outdoors in these tense and exciting conditions as a tremendously connecting experience – feeling a part of the land itself.
The result is a striking record of the elemental collisions between earth, sea and weather. He conveys the bleak essence of driving rain, when the mist closes down, and masters the polarities of bright skies and shadowed rocks. His work is charged with an atmosphere born of an intimate knowledge of the landscape and a direct physical experience of its changing moods.
Jason Hicklin was born in Wolverhampton in 1966 and studied at St. Martins College of Art, where he was a student of renowned printmaker Norman Ackroyd. After completing a postgraduate course at the Central School of Art in 1991, Jason combined working as Ackroyd’s studio assistant and editioner with producing his own work and teaching printmaking at City and Guilds of London Art School.
Jason is currently Head of Printmaking at City and Guilds. He was elected a member of the Royal Society of Painting and Printmakers in 1993 and has had numerous solo and joint exhibitions in the UK and abroad.
Art, Ceramics & Contemporary Art
Louise McNiff
Louise McNiff is inspired by vast open moorland and the steep rocky edges that look down onto deep sweeping valleys. Dark patches of tree belt, stone walls and hedges fragment the land. The landscape of The Peak District, is the place that inspires Louise’s work.
Louise McNiff creates prints and produces hand-built ceramics in her studio, situated on the edge of the Derbyshire Peak District. Using techniques which draw on her background as a Printmaker, Louise ‘etches’ sgraffito lines into the leather hard clay with handmade tools. Coloured slips are monoprinted, painted and stencilled to build layers of drawing, mark making and colour. She works intuitively, until Louise feels that she has reached a balance of colour, shape, line and the experience of the landscape has been conveyed. The vessels are then taken to stoneware temperature in an electric kiln.
Art & Contemporary Art
Rob Moore
Rob Moore is a full time professional artist and was formerly Dean at Hull School of Art and Design. Educated at Sheffield College of Art and Design, Rob has been committed to his practice as a painter and printmaker since being awarded the prestigious Granada Fellowship in Fine Art at The Institute of Advanced Studies at Manchester Polytechnic. Rob Moore has an impressive track record of exhibitions across the UK with many works in public and private collections. His work is highly sought after and collected.
Rob’s work does not fit neatly into a category and he continually modifies and explores his ideas and processes free of fashionable consideration. His work demonstrates a sensibility and craft that results in images that are sensitive and memorable. In recent years after a long interest in the abstract his work started to show the influences of his rural location and many visits to high places in Europe and further afield with a sense of landscape shimmering through obsessive exploration of marks and surfaces.
Art & Contemporary Art
Colin Black
My work is primarily mixed-media and landscape based. My most recent series focusses on the monasteries and priories of Yorkshire. It’s their juxtaposition of architectural geometry and irregularity of decay that holds my attention. Even though it is their physical locations that inspire me it is back in my studio that a piece will take emotional shape, and the spirit of the place is realised. I love colour and express this through a variety of materials that includes oil, acrylic and water-based paint, oil pastel, collaged imagery, particularly maps, I will add and take away until its required “rightness” is achieved, through the creative process of distillation.
I studied at the Royal College of Art and the Chelsea School of Art in London. I worked as a graphic designer and taught art and design for many years. I spent twenty-five years living in Scotland, and now live in York with my wife Sallie, where we run Seek Art School. I work and teach in Seek Studio.
I have had work exhibited in solo and annual group exhibitions for the Royal Scottish Academy, the Royal Scottish Society of Watercolours and Visual Art Scotland. I have also been accepted for York Open Studios for the last two years.
Art & Contemporary Art
Kirsty Whyatt
Kirsty Whyatt was born in Saddleworth, Greater Manchester but is now based in Leeds, West Yorkshire. Kirsty gained a degree in Exhibition Design at Humberside University (now the University of Lincoln) before embarking on a career as a freelance photographic stylist, which she has done for over twenty years.
Kirsty began her artist career in 2017 when she took the plunge and converted half of her garage into a studio. For Kirsty the light in a painting is the most important thing, it brings atmosphere “like nothing else”.
