Contemporary and Modern British

1932 - 2017

Joan Eardley was born in Sussex in 1921. A tragic childhood, with her father committing suicide when she was just nine years old, she moved with her Mother and sister, Patricia, to Blackheath, London in 1929.

Showing an early aptitude and enthusiasm for art, Joan attended the local art school in Blackheath, but soon won a position at the prestigious Goldsmiths College. Following a family move to Glasgow, Joan secured a place at the Glasgow School of Art in 1940, a move which was to significantly influence the course of her future life and art work. Here she was awarded the Sir James Guthrie prize for Portraiture.

Following spells away from Scotland after graduation, Joan returned and set up home and studio in Glasgow in 1949. Close to the tenements of Townhead, Joan began to paint the children from the “slum areas”. These are regarded as amongst the most powerful and prized of her life’s work; depicting the deprivation and yet humanity within the faces of the children.

In the early 1950s, Joan purchased a cottage at Catterline, a small coastal village close to Stonehaven. Here she began to experiment with both land and sea-scapes, working with paint to depict her surrounding world with a life and energy few had managed before.

Joan was made and associate member of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1955, and voted a full member in 1963. Sadly, it was in that same year Joan lost her battle with cancer and died, aged just 42.

Regarded as one of the UK’s most influential and highly respected artists of the twentieth century, her work is held by most of the UK’s best regarded public and private collections, including the Royal Scottish Academy, National Galleries Scotland, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and the National Gallery.

Duncan Grant was born in Aviemore, Scotland in 1885. Educated in England from a very early age, Duncan Grant was to attend Westminster School of Art from 1902, subsequently studying at the Slade School, and also in both Italy and Paris, where he met and spent time with both Matisse and Picasso.

Introduced to the famous Bloomsbury group, Duncan Grant was to become a central and important figure in the movement, and was to have a relationship with Vanessa Bell, then and to become an artist of international standing and sister of Virginia Woolf, also a group member.

Duncan was to become a key figure within the Omega Workshops from 1913 to 1919, and was closely allied to Roger Fry and Vanessa and Clive Bell, with a first exhibition at the Grafton Gallery, London, in 1912.

Duncan was introduced to Paul Roche in 1946, the influential poet and novelist, an introduction that was later to become a long-lasting relationship. In his latter years, Duncan was supported by Paul, at his home, Charleston, in Sussex, up to Duncan's death in 1978.

Duncan Grant is regarded as one of Britain's most important and influential painters of the twentieth century. In 1959, the Tate held a retrospective exhibition, with numerous international exhibitions subsequently. Works by Duncan can be found in numerous international public and private collections, including the Tate and National Gallery

Stephen Chambers is one of the most critically acclaimed and respected artists at work in the UK today. A member of the Royal Academy of Arts, Stephen Chambers studied at Winchester School of Art from 1978 to 1979 and then at St Martin's School of Art, London from 1979 to 1982.

Graduating with a Masters from Chelsea School of Art in 1983, Stephen Chambers won many scholarships and awards, including a Rome Scholarship, a Fellowship at Winchester School of Art, and a Mark Rothko Memorial Trust Travelling Award.

Through both paint and printmaking, Stephen’s work often flows from the figurative to the abstract, with narrative both subtle and overt. His work is held in many of the most high profile public and private collections, with exhibitions staged internationally, including the Royal Academy of Arts, London. 

A 2017 graduate of the prestigious Duncan of Jordanstone Art School in Dundee, Alice Campbell embodies all that is great about the true resurgence in British contemporary painting. Inventive, skilled, mature and aesthetically exciting, Alice's work has both the energy you'd expect from a immediate post-art school artistic life and the maturity to recognise influences and produce something truly unique in itself. 

Based in Glasgow, Alice could almost be described as a latter-day Scottish Colourist; her ability to deploy strong colour whilst avoiding distraction and confusion shows a maturity and talent beyond her years. 

Awards to-date include:
Alexander Graham Munro Travel Award,  Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour, 2018
Ninewells Hospital Radiology Art Prize, Dundee, 2017
Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour invited artist for the ‘Student Award’, 2017
John Kinross Scholarship, Royal Scottish Academy, 2017. Award based in Florence, Italy, October – December, 2017.
Watermark Award, presented by the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour, 2015

Exhibitions to-date:
RSA John Kinross Scholarship group show, Italian Cultural Institute, Edinburgh, 2018
RSW open exhibition, Edinburgh, 2018
Gallery Heinzel, New Faces exhibition, Aberdeen, 2017
DJCAD degree show, 2017
‘Sneaky Peeks’, DJCAD reception, Dundee, 2017
‘Multi’, DJCAD reception, Dundee, 2017
Higher Bridges Gallery, Enniskillen (N.Ireland), 2016
‘Selection Box’, Tin Roof, Dundee, 2016
Laurel Gallery, Edinburgh, 2016
Velvet Easel, Edinburgh, 2016
RSW open exhibition, 2015
Edinburgh Macmillan Art Show, Edinburgh 2014/15

Collections include:
Royal Scottish Academy Collection
Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art Collection, (University of Dundee)
Ninewells Hospital Art Collection, Dundee

Born 1885 in Liverpool, Grant is known as both painter and printmaker, and latterly as well regarded teacher.

Mostly proficient and regarded as a portrait artist, Grant studied a the Liverpool school of Art (LSoA) and then the Academie Julian in Paris before returning to England, subsequently taking up a teaching post at Taught at LSoA until his marriage when he moved with his new wife to London.

Grant had a successful teaching career in London, becoming the Vice Principal of Central School of Arts and Crafts as well as for a period teaching both etching and painting at the City and Guilds of London Art School; it was during these years Grant became close friends with many well known and regarded artists such as John Lavery, Oswald Birley and Frank Dobson.

Throughout his career Grant’s paintings and printmaking works were shown at the Royal Academy of Arts, the New English Art Club and the Chenil Gallery.

James Ardern Grant died in 1973 aged eighty six, leaving works in many well known public collections, including the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool and the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester.

Born in 1931, Sheila Fell grew up in Aspatria, a typical West Cumbrian mining village. Whilst gaining a place at the Carlisle College of Art at 17, within two years she had obtained  a place at St. Martin’s School of Art, London. Here, she befriended Frank Auerbach, amongst other contemporaries, and went on to teach at the Chelsea School of Art.

Sheila Fell held her first exhibition in 1955, courtesy of Beaux Arts, London. It was from this that she met L S Lowry, who purchased a number of paintings from this exhibition, and many more in the years that followed. This was to be a friendship that lasted until Lowry’s death in 1976. Indeed, he assisted her financially to the tune of £3 per week for two of her early London years.

Acclaimed by critics, collectors and her peers, she began exhibiting at the Royal Academy in 1965, being elected an Associate  Member of the Royal Academy in 1969, and a fully blown Member of the Royal Academy in 1974.

Sheila Fell died in 1979, aged just 48. It is likely that she only painted some six to seven hundred paintings during her life, but what arguably makes them so powerful is her almost unique ability to convey the emotion inherent in a landscape; not just the landscape itself, but the impact it has on you. As Lowry suggested, Sheila Fell was arguably the greatest landscape painter of her age.

Many of Sheila’s paintings are held in major public and private collections throughout the UK, including the Tate Gallery, Walker Art Gallery and in the Government Art Collection.

A quite exceptional self-taught artist, Craig was born and brought up very close to Manchester; relocating in his late teens to Brighton, Craig began to express both himself and those around him through paint, building a solid reputation as a painter of portraiture. Returning recently to the North West, Craig continues to focus his work around a figurative narrative, but with a very individual method of expression.

Now an invited member of The Contemporary British Portrait Painters, Craig's work has undertones of both Stanley Spencer and Lucian Freud; Craig’s works often have a feel, through tone and subject matter, of a Britain of the 1940s and 50s, an era Craig immerses himself in through his daily life.

We’re very proud to be working in partnership with Craig and bringing his unique paintings to a new and growing audience

Mosek Josek Herman (Josef) was born in Warsaw into a Jewish family in January 1911. His childhood was one of adject poverty and, at the age of 13 he initially trained to be a typesetter, however by 1930 attended the Warsaw School of Art, leaving in 1932. In 1938 to escape Nazi persecution he moved to Brussels, however two years later with Germany about to invade Belgium he fled to France and then onto Glasgow. In 1940 Herman discovered he had lost his entire family in the Holocaust, he channelled his grief into his work, producing ‘memory paintings’ that evoked his childhood and Jewish heritage, along with compositions addressing the horrors of the pogroms.

In 1943, moving to London, Josef exhibited with LS Lowry and was subsequently discovered by the highly respected dealer, Roland Browse and Delbanco in Mayfair, with whom he was then associated with for 35 years.

Herman is best known for his paintings of working people, including peasants, fisherman and most notably, coal miners. In 1944 he moved to Wales to a mining community in Ystradgynlais where he lived for 11 years. In 1951 he was commissioned to paint a mural of miners for the Festival of Britain, this is now housed in the Museum of Wales in Cardiff. In 1952 he joined the London Group and over the next 20 years had many solo exhibitions, displays and retrospectives including Leicester and York (1953), Wakefield (1955), the Whitechapel Gallery in London and the Auckland Gallery in New Zealand (1956), Melbourne (1957), Frankfurt and Sheffield (1958), Bradford (1959) and Swansea (1963). Dresden, Toronto and Montreal also hosted solo exhibitions, while galleries in Britain and abroad started to acquire his work. The Tate Gallery owns many drawings by him and some of his best paintings.

He had a third retrospective exhibition in 1975 at the Glasgow Museum and Art Gallery, and in 1976 his fourth and most important at the Camden Art Centre.

In 1962, Herman was awarded the Royal National Eisteddfod's Gold Medal. He was awarded the OBE in 1981, and in 1990 he was elected to the as a Royal Academy and he had an exhibition, Children of North End Road, at the Royal Academy, London.

Herman died in February 2000

Threadneedle Prize finalist David Storey is a British figurative painter. His psychologically charged paintings are about memory, with half-remembered people and places emerging from complex layers of texture and colour. 

David says, 'Personally, I find working with memory very therapeutic as well as creatively invaluable. I become haunted by the image I'm developing and it's tremendously satisfying when I manage to get the milky idea from the back of my mind onto the canvas.'

ARTIST'S STATEMENT

A short film of David and his work may be seen here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_AbuSuXOPw&feature=youtu.be

"My paintings are an exploration of memory. They offer glimpsed or half-remembered figures and faces – 're-imagined ancestors' recovered from a personal archive of the forgotten.

I come from West Cumbria, which is a bleak coastal plain, welded onto the side of the Lake District. The municipal buildings and churches are mainly Victorian and built of sand stone that turns black when it rains... and it rains an awful lot there. This melancholy and primordial world of black buildings, rain, sea and mountains in which I grew up is the one that I paint.

Wherever possible I paint using my fingers, palette knives and rags instead of brushes, I achieve a much more expressive result and find I can create a fuller range of tones, colours, textures and lines working this way"

CV

Born: 1954, Workington, Cumbria

Education:

1996 - 96 Slade School of Art, Summer School

1973 - 76 Middlesex University, BA honours degree, art & design

1972 - 73 Hornsey Art College, Foundation Course

1967 - 72 St. Bees School, Cumbria

Professional Experience:

1995 - present: Artist.

1986 - 94 Artist/designer, The Bureaux

1991 - 92 External Assessor Croydon Art College

1987 - 90 Visiting lecturer Central St. Martins, London

1983 - 85 Art Director, Chrysalis Records and 2-Tone Records

1979 - 82 Designer, Chrysalis Records and 2-Tone Records

1977 - 79 Designer, Rocket Records

John Bellany was born in Port Seton, a coastal town in East Lothian, Scotland. Born into a fishing family, both his father and paternal grandfather captained fishing boats.

Regarded as one of the most notable British artists of the 20th century, he was viewed as an outstanding student at Edinburgh College of Art from 1960 to 65, during this time gaining the Andrew Grant Scholarship in 1962, taking him to Paris. He went on to win the Burstain Award to attend the Royal College of Art in London in 1965, where he studied under Carel Weight and Peter de Francia.

In 1968 he became Lecturer in Painting at Brighton College of Art and 1969 – 1973 he was Lecturer in Painting at Winchester College of Art.

He moved to London where he was the visiting Lecturer at the Royal College of Art. It was during this period that he separated from his first wife that his reputation for being a heavy drinker began. From 1978 until 1984, Bellany was Lecturer in Painting at Goldsmith College of Art. He remarried in 1978, but his second wife spent long periods of time in hospital suffering with schizophrenia which contributed to his increased bouts of heavy drinking, a “curse” that was to persist throughout his life.

In 1986 Bellany was given the first solo show ever at the National Portrait Gallery, and a solo show at the National Portrait Gallery, Scotland in 1986. In 1988 he survived a pioneering liver transplant. His surgeon Sir Roy Calne said he was the only patient he had known that had gone back to work the day after surgery.

John Bellany died in 2013, he was found in his studio clutching his paintbrush.

Works by John can be found in The Tate, the National Portrait Gallery, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, National Galleries of Scotland, to name but a small few.

Among Bellany’s honours are a Major Arts Council Award (1981), Athena International Art Award (1985), Royal Academy’s Wollaston Award (1987).
He was made a Royal Academician in 1991 and awarded the CBE.

Anthony Whishaw RA studied at Chelsea School of Art from 1948 to 1952 (awarded NDD) and the Royal College of Art, London from 1952 to 1955, when he was awarded the ARCA (first class hons), the RCA Travelling Scholarship, an Abbey Minor Scholarship and a Spanish Government Scholarship.

His work deals with explorations of memory and experience. On the edge of representation, varying in intent, scale and depiction, it seeks to reconcile illusion and allusion, the abstract and the figurative, past and present pictorial languages to create unforeseen visual experiences.

His first solo show was held at the Libreria Abril, Madrid in 1956. Subsequently, he had regular exhibitions at Roland, Browse and Delbanco, London, throughout the 1960s and went on to have numerous solo shows throughout the UK at venues including the ICA, London (1971), the Oxford Gallery, Oxford (1978) and Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge (1982). He also exhibited in many key group exhibitions from 1952, and has participated regularly in the Whitechapel Open, the Hayward Annual, and the John Moores Painting Prize.

He has many awards to his name, including the RCA Drawing Prize (1954), Perth International Drawing Biennale Prize (1973), South East Arts Association Painting Prize (1975), Arts Council of Great Britain Award (1978), Greater London Council Painting Prize (1981), Abbey Premier Scholarship (1982), John Moores Minor Painting Prize (1982), Lorne Scholarship (1982-3), Joint winner Hunting Group National Art Competition (1986), and Korn Ferry Carre Oban International Picture of the Year in 1996.

He was elected a Member of the London Group in 1979, an Associate Royal Academician in 1980, a Royal Academician in 1989 and a Member of the Royal West of England Academy in 1992. Between 1958 and 1992, he taught on an occasional basis at Chelsea School of Art, and St Martins.

He lives and works in London.

When scouring the UK looking for modern British (20th century) works for the gallery, we often come across wonderful artworks which are unattributed or by less well-known names than we usually deal in, but which have strong appeal and ooze that "50s and 60s" style which revolutionised British art. We've decided rather than letting these works pass by, we'll acquire them and bring them to the gallery and provide others with the opportunity of owning some wonderful work but benefiting from a more modest budget.  

Edgar Lionel Hereford (1886 - 1953) was born in Inverkip, Gourock, Renfrewshire. 

Hereford formed part of an important small circle of artists that existed around Charles Rennie Macintosh following the Scottish artists's move to Port-Vendres near Collioure on the Mediterranean coast of southern France. Hereford probably knew Mackintosh through drinking with him at the Blue Cockatoo in Chelsea in the early 1920s. At this date Hereford shared lodgings at 28 Draycott Gardens with the painter Rudolph Ihlee and the two artists travelled to Collioure together in 1922. Here they reconnected with Mackintosh, painting distinctive stylised landscapes of the surrounding French countryside that reflect something of his influence whilst remaining refreshingly distinct in their own right. Although comparable to Ihlee's work, Hereford's is perhaps even tighter in execution and dramatic in its sense of contrast. Hereford exhibited his work in London at the New English Arts Club in the mid 1920s and in the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. 

Stefan Orlowski is arguably one of the most talented exponents of classical meets contemporary painting at work in the UK today.

Born in 1985, Stefan was to initially study for his BA in Fine Art at the University of Aberystwyth before attaining his Masters in Fine Art at the highly regarded Wimbledon College of Art in 2012. It was just after graduation from Aberystwyth that Stefan, in 2008, was to win the Young Artist Award at the prestigious national Lynn Painter Stainers prize.

With numerous exhibitions to his name, including showings at Abbot Hall - Kendal, Kings Place - London, Brantwood - Coniston and in both 2021 and 2022 with the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, Mall Galleries – London, Stefan continues to build a national reputation as a highly talented artist producing engaging and often thought-provoking works born of classical tradition yet firmly planted in the twenty-first century.

Stefan works largely from life; figurative paintings the result of a significant amount of in-person sittings, an understanding of the person and not just the aesthetic, with a relationship forged over months of sittings, meetings and thus creation. Where such painstaking in-person paintings are not possible, such as landscape works, the studio painting is born of countless hours of drawings and smaller preparatory plein air studies produced as observer of and participant within the landscape to be depicted, in whole or in part. Impressions are forged at different vantage points, in different conditions and with different emotions in order to bind together and inform the creation of the whole.

We are immensely proud to be working with Stefan, a true master of the contemporary interpretation of classic form.