Lloyd Durling is a British artist working in London. His practice is painting-based and he has exhibited widely throughout Europe, U.S.A and Asia. In 2017 he was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant. Works are held in both public and private collections worldwide.

Central to these new paintings by Lloyd is an intense engagement with oil stick and graphite on paper that explore the interface between painting, drawing and collage. There is a balance between expressive play and tight control and with this comes an expanse of associations that push beyond simple categorisations of abstraction or scale. The information in each painting, given by gesture or mark, is reduced to a fleeting register on the surface, as if each mark has to count.

The idea of topography is of central importance and is explored through continuing walking projects. These serve as opportunities to gather diverse source material through physical and emotional interactions with whichever environment chosen to traverse. It amounts to a kind of urban and rural wandering where the information gathered is reinterpreted or reimagined feeding into a deep connection with landscape, arrangements of ancient monuments, light, shadow and forgotten histories - all of these elements find a way into the work.

Louisa Longstaff-Scales is a landscape painter living and working in Norfolk, England. She is a graduate of Winchester School of Art where she studied Fine Art. Her work is held in private collections across the UK and abroad.

Louisa's paintings explore experienced moments and finding refuge in the landscape. Moving through the landscape is a time for Louisa to immerse herself in her inner world, taking these golden moments to daydream, resolve and exist as her own entity. There is a freedom to be found there and it is where her paintings are born.

Louisa's own thoughts and the matters she is resolving through painting makes her work largely autobiographical. Strong mark-making and gesture, combined with deeply personal titles of each painting presents a strong narrative to the viewer, who is also invited to bring their own thoughts to each piece.

Emma Davis (born 1971, Sussex) is an Oxford-based artist who has her studio in the two-storey Victorian paint shop at the end of her garden, an inspiring place with beautiful coloured stained glass and a real sense of history. Emma studied Fine Art at Liverpool John Moores and Wolverhampton Universities, and spent several years working with CCA galleries in London before taking a break to raise her two children. She worked as a greetings card designer for twenty years and during this time, with an enlightened boss who gave her free reign, she successfully combined her paintings into cards. Emma has most recently shown with Blue Shop Cottage in their online Works on Paper 4 exhibition, and in the Town House Open exhibition in Spitalfields, and she has just had two pieces selected for the Oxford Art Society’s forthcoming Open Exhibition.

“My work has always been about colour, shape, and form. Texture plays a big part too, and just recently I have started to work almost entirely with painted papers and vintage books. I paint up my papers in a very loose and free way, these then become the palette for my pieces on board and paper which I like to combine with faded cloth covers and the fragile yellowing papers of the old books I rescue! Currently neon paint has become almost an essential element in each piece I make, I love the way it interacts or becomes slightly discordant with the colours around it.

My practice has moved away from purely painting for the time being, to explore the possibilities of combining printed materials with coloured and sometimes heavily textured papers I create; however with my love of paint and mark-making I foresee paint always being the dominant factor in what I do.”

Max Naylor’s practice is concerned with constructing an alternate universe; each painting made is another glimpse into this other realm. Familiar yet exotic, these paintings resemble the age of the anthropocene seen through the filter of personal consciousness.

Max thinks of these works as mindscapes, reoccurring motifs that well up from the subconscious and spill onto the paper or canvas. The painting process is instinctive and ongoing, working from memory that’s being constantly added to through travel and experience. His aim is to continue to develop and expand this body of work, enlarging and illuminating his personal microcosm.

Max lives and works in Bristol.

Nadine James started off as an illustrator, graduating from the Royal College of Art with an MA in Communication Art and Design. Since moving back to Stroud in the Cotswolds where she grew up, she has been gradually branching out into painting the landscape.

Her work is still illustrative but now with a painterly quality. She endeavours to find her own language of the landscape through pattern and often heightened colour, stitching these together with brushstrokes, to express an emotional response to what she sees around her: blissful, nostalgic, and a bit eerie.

Gemma Petrie is an artist living and working near the small village of Portmahomack on the Tarbatness Peninsula, in the north east of the Highlands.

She studied at Edinburgh College of Art, specialising in Drawing and Painting.

Her paintings, for the most part, are about memories. She uses natural form, landscape as a basis for her work. Within this space she creates a pathway to memories. Sometimes creating a quiet space and other times trying to follow a thread of memory to recall other details. Creating this space is a reaction to the overwhelming noise of everyday life. The small hidden worlds in nature, for example the mini ecosystems found within rock pools and forests, allow me to portray a representation of protection, to describe the need to protect our families, ourselves and our environment.

Holly Loader is a mixed media artist and painter living and working in Brighton, UK. She received her BA (Hons) in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins in 2003. Having established a career with the arts and entertainment she returned to her solo practice in 2020 with a series of mercurial landscapes titled ‘Changes in the Instant’.

Sourcing and collecting components including lapis lazuli, wood ash, ultramarine and chalk, she mixes the paint by hand and takes an experimental approach to the ancient practice of tempera painting.

Each work embodies the reaction and flaws arising from the unpredictable nature of the medium, evolving through a fluid succession of changes before settling into its final form.

Walking through the forest at twilight. Watching the moon come out from behind the clouds. There is a quiet delight in finding simple pleasures in the midst of a complicated and overwhelming world. These plain air dreamlike forest scapes capture the ethereal period between sleeping and waking.

Catherine Leon’s extrovert pieces, rhythmic with colour and light, are lyrical to the extent that they leave the viewer with a visceral sense of abandon. They speak a subconscious language of a longing to experience the elemental truths of nature, form and time. Using acrylic washes, spray paint and oil sticks, marks are scribbled and sprayed forming biomorphic shapes resulting in a growing and expanding image which takes on a life of its own.

Drawing inspiration from the moments when our internal narrative is broken by noticing something seemingly ordinary like the space surrounding an object or the light filtering through a curtain, Leon’s artworks are an exploration into how we pay attention, what we pay attention to and how that effects our perspective of reality.

She was born in Penzance, UK in 1993 and after graduating from Wimbledon College of Art,UAL in 2015 she now lives and works between London and Cornwall.

Abigail Reed is an artist living and working in Frome, Somerset at The Silk Mill Studios.

Drawing is the dominating force in her creative practice, whether it is ink, charcoal, pastel or paint, it has been used to create larger than life beasts, delicate moths and now, landscapes. “There is something magical about using the bare minimum of materials to conjure up a world of ones own, drawing is so readily available, you just pick up the charcoal and start drawing and that immediacy suits my thinking. You have to work with energy and vigour to capture the idea. If a drawing becomes overworked, it loses something and the moment is gone.”

Recently, Abigail has found inspiration in the landscapes around Frome. She walks frequently and takes photographs which are then translated into drawings back at the studio. She seeks transformative moments like being in the forest shrouded in mist or walking at dusk to find the last of the sun. Whether it’s being reflected off an impassable puddle or casting its warmth over a snowy track, the quest is for light and wherever it falls. A local disused quarry is a favourite place, a desolate area abandoned after use. It has now become a place of hope as young silver birch trees populate it and nature thrives in the absence of human life. Working on the wall in her studio, Abigail uses charcoal that is layered heavily onto the paper, light is extracted with fingertips and a combination of erasers that are cut small to capture detail. Occasionally, a watercolour wash is applied before drawing with sticks of willow charcoal that are used with extreme precision to draw fragile saplings and branches that reach towards the sky.

Catherine Knight is a painter, working in oils, gouache and watercolours based in Bristol, where she has her studio at BV Studios.

Cat writes about her Isolation Windows series: “During the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, I collected images of people’s windows in isolation. Using social media and connections with friends and friends of friends, I managed to collect images from across the globe. In the short amount of time that I carved out to paint in, I made small gouache paintings from the photos. It gave me a rhythm and project in this topsy- turvy time. It allowed me to visit other people’s houses, other countries, other continents, albeit in my imagination, and ponder our shared global experience.”

“This act of shared imagining is timely, offering sensations of closeness with friends and strangers alike. Though actual human figures never find their way into her paintings explicitly, they are ever-present by implication, through traces of everyday actions: the top of a chair tucked under a table, a towel drying on a railing, a window left ajar, a curtain hurriedly not-quite-drawn. These domestic objects and adornings become proxies for the absent humans; the scenes as a whole, like still-life glimpses into the lives of others.” Extract from essay “A view of one’s own” by Lizzie Lloyd, 2020

The two chalk pastels are rapid and colour-filled responses to a stay on Loch Goil, Cairndow in Scotland. They are an attempt to capture the long summer evenings and intensity of colour at the onset of dusk as the light disappears behind the mountains and the night sets in.

Ollie Marr is a painter who lives between Oxfordshire and London. Ollie’s work relies on an emotive use of colour and is inspired by the beauty of the natural world. Their work looks at nature and the landscape through a queer lens. Rejecting the idea that nature is divine proof of many accepted normative concepts, Ollie’s work explores instead how nature and the landscape validate queerness through ‘the beauty experience’.    

In their essay, All Art is Ecological, Timothy Morton talks about beauty as an experience - the ‘beauty experience’ - that provides a fantastic ‘impossible’ access to the inaccessible withdrawn, open quality of things, their mysterious reality. Many describe beauty as a feeling of ungraspability, the feeling of having a thought without actually having one. It tells us something strange about the nature of reality.

“My work draws from this ‘beauty experience’. I see the hint of purple in trees silhouetted against a sky that is suddenly very orange and am overwhelmed by the feeling that I understand the world - and my place in it - a little bit better than I did before. These moments often occur with changing light, when the edges of things become blurred and the landscape no longer seems to want to exist in the way we have defined it. Instead, it becomes a mass of colour, a representation of the queer internal landscape that is both glorious and wild - a validation of who we are.”