Born in Darjeeling in 1952, Gerry Dudgeon studied Fine Art at Camberwell School of Art, gaining a first class Honours degree in 1979, and then an MFA postgraduate degree from Reading University under the tutelage of Sir Terry Frost and the constructivist artist Adrian Heath. After a travelling scholarship to New York, he worked from studios in London before moving to West Dorset in 1987, where he lived and worked until his death in 2023.
Gerry travelled extensively through the desert villages of Rajasthan and the Atlas mountains of Morocco, absorbing atmosphere and culture, and above all, the quality of light, and recording his impressions through sketchbook drawings which he used as detailed reference points for his richly evocative semi abstract paintings back in the studio.
Close to home, Gerry’s Dorset paintings combined distant views of hills, sea and sky with a closer scrutiny of the etched and weathered surfaces of rocks and fossils. The most recent of his works saw his colour palette moving towards ethereal blues and creamy pinks, sometimes coinciding with the colours he used for Greek seascapes, and they became more about the sea, light and atmosphere. Traces of manmade objects can occasionally be seen; perhaps a fishing net, or the colours of scraped paintwork on the side of a boat, or a fishing buoy.
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Ancient Sea II
Gerry Dudgeon
£1,300.00
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Blue Atlas
Gerry Dudgeon
£4,200.00
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Coast Path II
Gerry Dudgeon
£3,800.00
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Coast Path III
Gerry Dudgeon
£3,800.00
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Date Palms in the Draa Valley II
Gerry Dudgeon
£1,180.00
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Desert Boundary
Gerry Dudgeon
£1,300.00
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Distant Dunes
Gerry Dudgeon
£3,800.00
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Edge of the Desert
Gerry Dudgeon
£4,200.00
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Fastigiate Hornbeams
Gerry Dudgeon
£1,300.00
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High Atlas Blues
Gerry Dudgeon
£4,200.00
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Kimmeridge Clays
Gerry Dudgeon
£1,380.00
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Limestone Layers
Gerry Dudgeon
£1,180.00
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Marrakech Blues
Gerry Dudgeon
£1,300.00
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Melting Snow
Gerry Dudgeon
£1,180.00
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Moroccan Journey
Gerry Dudgeon
£4,200.00
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Rain in the Atlas Mountains
Gerry Dudgeon
£3,800.00
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Sandstorm
Gerry Dudgeon
£1,180.00
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Snow Dusted Conifers
Gerry Dudgeon
£1,180.00
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The Pinks of the Atlas Mountains
Gerry Dudgeon
£3,800.00
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The Road to the Desert
Gerry Dudgeon
£4,200.00
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Valley of Kasbahs
Gerry Dudgeon
£4,200.00
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Winter Glow
Gerry Dudgeon
£3,800.00
My fascination with ceramics began at evening class where I learnt to throw and became familiar with the basics of working with clay and glazes. My move to Oxford coincided with a desire to explore new avenues and my interest changed to hand building, which is now my main focus.
I work in stoneware to hand build my pots, using either crank or black clays to create small, medium and large pieces, both functional and sculptural. These are then fired in an electric kiln. My work is frost resistant and is therefore suitable for use both indoors and outside. My pieces range from small vases and dishes to large ali baba and sculptural pots.
Handbuilding is a slow process and rarely results in perfect symmetry. Therefore no two pieces are exactly the same. Each piece is unique. In my studio I am constantly experimenting with different shapes, new glazes and glaze combinations. My glazes are composed of few ingredients, relying on the magic of kiln and chemistry.
I am very drawn to movement in my work, taking my inspiration from traditional classic forms as well as from the lines, tones and textures of nature. My ceramics and my skills are continually evolving and progressing, as I pursue my fascination with clay and its many possibilities.
I am an associate member of the Craft Potters Association and belong to London Potters, West Forest Potters and the From the Kiln ceramics collective.
I live in the Berkshire countryside. This setting is the inspiration for my work, which is primarily figurative oil paintings of animals close to my home.
From an early age I have enjoyed art and this prompted me to take a foundation course at Northbrook College in Horsham, West Sussex. During this course I experimented with a range of media and subject matter. I then moved on to the University of Plymouth (in Exeter) to study for a degree in Fine Art. During my time in Exeter I worked hard to develop my figurative painting skills, often against the advice of my tutors, who urged me to develop a more conceptual style. In 1996 I graduated with an honours degree.
I specialise in painting livestock, taking sketches and photographs and then working from them in my studio. I work in oils on thick boxed canvases which have several layers of gesso applied to them. When the gesso is dry, I carefully sand it until it develops a slightly shiny surface which provides the background to my work.
Recently I have enjoyed returning to painting still-life with bread, cheese and fish particularly as subjects. These are painted in oil on clayboard, with a looser feel. These paintings suit kitchens in particular and I am honoured to have some exhibited in the New York showroom of deVOL kitchens.
Lin Kerr explores and exploits oil paints in layers of scratching back and adding marks, using a variety of tools and often just fingers or a palette knife to manipulate the paint. She often works over a background of text which is physically integrated yet stylistically juxtaposed adding contemplation. All her landscapes, often understated and generic. originate from her observation, usually from Oxfordshire.
Lin’s background is deeply rooted in fine arts, and after many years in calligraphy and graphic design, she has recently returned to her first love of oil painting. Her graphic design / calligraphic teaching took her to all parts pf the UK, Belgium and South Africa. She is one of the better known British Calligraphers.
Helen Slater Stokes gained an M.A. from the Royal College of Art in 1996. Having set up her practice in 1999, exhibiting both nationally and internationally, she went back to the Royal College of Art in 2013 and completed a PhD by practice in 2020. Helen lectures and has presented research papers at numerous conferences, most recently the Glass Art Society (GAS) Conference 2019, in Florida. Her work has been selected to be shown at the British Glass Biennale 2017 and 2019, and is held in both public and private collections.
Helen uses the medical science of optical perception in conjunction with historic and contemporary illusionary image techniques. This work discusses our notion of ‘Space and Place’ and challenges our spatial perception. Pieces adopt traditional observational drawing techniques to capture perceived depth, in conjunction with contemporary lenticular image and lens technology. Her work asks questions about the observed three dimensional nature of an image and the possibility of fabricating a virtual space within glass.
Peter Keegan is a professional artist living and working in Buckinghamshire, UK. Trained at Cardiff School of Art and working in oils, he follows traditional techniques but uses them in a way to depict his subjects in a modern and original style. His aim in portraiture is to always create a painting or drawing that reflects the subject’s likeness and personality, as well as capturing those special elements which make the subject truly ‘them’. He also paints and exhibits figure paintings, local landscape and still life paintings. Peter is a member of the Visual Images Group, an honorary member of the Winslow & District Art Society and is an elected member of the Buckinghamshire art Society and the Oxford Art Society.
Peter co-presents the podcast ‘Ask an Artist’ – the podcast dedicated to offering free advice and guidance about the business side of being an artist. He is also a brand ambassador for Michael Harding Oil Paints and Rosemary & Co brushes.
From the beginning of 2020, Peter was made the first ever Artist in Residence at Aylesbury Waterside Theatre. To celebrate their 10th anniversary, he has been commissioned to paint a number of large scale canvases depicting life inside the theatre. The project will last for the next 2 years and any completed paintings will be displayed along the promenade inside the theatre. The exhibition is free to visit now the theatre has reopened.
Some of Peter’s work can be found in public collections as part of the Public Catalogue Foundation.
As a landscape painter I am always inspired by the beauty and forms of nature, but it is only I the last few years that I have developed a way to incorporate elements of the landscape within the canvas. Every day I walk across the fields and through the wood picking up natural materials and photographing the countryside as I go. I love the shapes and colours of the trees, grasses and leaves that create the landscape. Then the challenge is to take the natural materials and breathe new life into them, capturing the structural and textural elements and drawing them out with paint and medium.
I love the tactile, building up of texture and detail that brings the dead foliage back to life with a new beauty and purpose. These humble grasses and natural materials are dried and pressed before being immortalised within a hardening material so that they are embedded within the canvas in a layering process, built up with paint and metallic mica powders. My art practice is environmentally conscious with water-based environmentally friendly materials as I hope to illustrate the beauty of the landscape and what we have to lose by destroying it.
Nancy began her artistic endeavours at a young age but after taking an early art A Level at age 15, academic studies took over, leading to a 30 year career in the charity sector. She kept painting throughout and in 2019 was persuaded by artist friends to exhibit her work. Fast forward 2 years and Nancy has sold work globally, had worked selected for prestigious exhibitions and been invited to exhibit alongside doyennes of the art world including Antony Gormley, Grayson Perry and Maggi Hambling.
She says “I have been delighted that my paintings have received wide appreciation and now hang in homes as far afield as New York, Jerusalem and Melbourne.”
“I aim to capture an essence rather than a literal interpretation of each subject. I enjoy not just the colour but the textural quality of paint and I work with both to achieve the finished painting. With a dandelion, for instance, I paint with needles to capture their distinctive petals and for my poppy paintings I make my own ‘palette knives’ from recycled plastic.”
Nancy had work selected by the judges for the Royal West of England Open Exhibition 2020/21, Broadway Arts Festival 2021 and shortlisted for the Bath Society of Artists Open Exhibition (November 2021).
She says “I am excited to be working in partnership with select galleries across the UK such as Kingfisher Art in Chipping Norton as it means more people can see my work.”
The common thread in the subject matter is Nancy’s love of nature, and her contemporary floral still life paintings are inspired by species grown in her small city garden.
Alex’s paintings are poetic, process led responses to landscape. They come from a deep love of the world, and a sense of awe and wonder. She hopes they will remind you of places you have known or would like to know. Using remembered and translated experiences, source drawings and photographs, she describes embodied encounters with light, sky, journeys and the changing season. She is interested in the 3dimensionality of a painting, carving into and raising the surface through processes of construction, destruction and material play. Her paintings evolve through an intuitive and physical interaction with materials.
Alex’s process of a painting has several stages. She begins by walking, running, drawing and taking ‘fast photographs’ outside. This is a way of feeling the landscape at a cellular, and sensory level. In the studio she has prepared birch or poplar panels with layers of a traditional gesso ground. Alex then creates texture with a brush and palette knife or by sanding and carving back into the gesso. Thinking about the 3 dimensionality of the picture plane, she begins by using a high-quality light fast acrylic ink to reveal the textured surface and add base colour. She builds on this colour ground by adding, and removing, layers of acrylic mixed media. The painting gradually evolves through an intuitive and physical interaction with the materials. Alex aims for a sense of balance or charge between saturated areas of colour patina and stripped back areas without paint. She says, “I know they are finished when I feel a sense of “lining up”, when the painting and I have both said enough. Often, this is when the painting tells me its name.”
Alex has exhibited in the UK, United States and Romania. She has work in commercial and private collections in the United States, Japan, Norway, Germany, France, Holland and across the UK. She completed a five-year artist fellowship at Digswell Arts in 2016 and has held AIR positions with Middlesex University, Brent Museum and Archives, English National Ballet, Wizard Presents Production Company and Watford Museum.
I am a contemporary painter placed within the English landscape tradition, where I find excitement and inspiration from the beauty and elemental nature of landscape: the earth, the sea, the sky. I am particularly drawn to open landscapes, moor land, valleys, salt marshes and tidal mudflats – quiet, remote places which evoke a sense of contemplation and solitude.
My paintings convey the interplay of my emotional response to things seen and experienced within landscape through the physical activity of painting, a form of internal dialogue of remembering, visualizing and interpreting. Photographs and drawings are used only to act as a transitional reminder of a sense of place as the paintings are developed to produce a distillation of light, atmosphere and mood.
The activity of painting is immensely important to me. I paint intuitively, building up surfaces initially with my hands working directly into the oil paint to create a suggestion of space and depth. Subsequent layers of transparent and opaque paint are poured and splattered onto the canvas, scrubbed back, re-worked, drawn and scored into, using palette knives and brushes to create marks and texture until the essence of landscape has emerged.
I enjoy working on a variety of scales from more intimate portrayals to larger expressive works and I frequently work on several canvasses at a time. I am influenced by the magnificent works by Turner but I also love the work of many other painters including Rothko, Jacob van Ruisdael, Edward Seago and Joan Eardley.