Artists

Jill’s beautifully modulated paintings are highly sought after by collectors. She captures the likeness of objects without slavish description often incorporating a trademark stripe in to her work. Jill watches the the passage of light on her subject throughout the day to capture their essential character. Her new collection of still life paintings featuring daffodils, apples and jugs of foliage radiate colour and light.Jill was taught by Euan Uglow, Patrick George and William Coldstream at the Slade School of Fine Art and their influence can be felt in her work. She then spent several years painting in France, Spain and Italy, and is now based in rural Lincolnshire. She has exhibited extensively in London and the UK, and her paintings have been selected on several occasions for ‘critic’s choice’ exhibitions. Her work has been sold through Christie’s of London contemporary art sales and features in a number of important corporate collections.

Elinor Bellingham Smith was a leading British painter who spent the last thirty years of her life in Bildeston in Suffolk and therefore belongs to the great line of East Anglian landscape painters. Her paintings are sensitive and poetic, showing a sharp observation of the natural world and the atmospheric effects of the weather.

Francis was born in London and studied at St Martin’s School of Art and Chelsea School of Art. His atmospheric paintings of Walberswick, Suffolk are noted for their vibrant colour and light. As Francis has observed : ‘Colour and Light play an important part in my paintings. The brief moment captured. A richness and enjoyment of colour is always at the heart of subjects that I am attracted to’.

Nicky enjoys small-scale motifs and her paintings emerge in response to the subjects – the hedges, trees, paths and water at Braxted Park, Essex. They are impressionistic, full of love and of a proper appreciation of beauty. She is successful at capturing on canvas in a few freely handled brush strokes, sensually applied, the atmosphere and spirit of a place, not just pure topography.Her works are fresh, conveying the play of light through foliage and with a strong vitality of colour. They are an imaginative reaction to a landscape which she loves. Painting has been an important part of Nicky’s life since she was a child. In 1979 she studied at the Royal Academy Schools, where she was much influenced by Norman Ackroyd, and later at the Central School of Art and Design. Among painters who she especially admires are Joan Eardley, William Nicholson and Harry Becker.A prize winner in the Sunday Times Watercolour Competition, Nicky has exhibited widely in the United Kingdom and in America.

Oliver Campion (1928 -2000) studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, where he was much influenced by William Coldstream. He later taught at Camberwell and between 1968 and 2001 and his work was shown at numerous one-man shows at the Mayor Gallery and the New Grafton Gallery.He was a fine craftsman, paying great attention to the details of his canvas and the quality of the paints. He always said that colour would come when he was ready for it, as it did in his later pictures. In his words: ‘A sense of light and space is what I would like to achieve in a painting.'

Simon Carter lives on the Essex coast, close to the beaches and salt marshes that are the source material for most of his paintings. Although he spends time each week drawing in the landscape, the watercolours are all made in the studio. Carter makes them in order to think about the canvases he is working on, using the developing compositions as a way of structuring the watercolours. He tries to make them directly and simply, although some of them are scrubbed back and reworked several times. He aims to let the paint do its own thing – flow, spread, stain, granulate, bleed and layer.Carter is an artist and curator who was born in Chelmsford, Essex in 1961. He studied at Colchester Institute (1980–81) and then North East London Polytechnic (1981–84). In 2013 he collaborated with artist Robert Priseman to form the artist led group Contemporary British Painting and then the East Contemporary Art Collection, the first dedicated collection of contemporary art for the East of England which is housed at the University of Suffolk, Ipswich.Carter is President of Colchester Art Society and has been Artist-in-residence at the University of Essex and Firstsite, Colchester. He is represented internationally by Messum’s.

Peter Coker RA (1926-2004) must be regarded as a leading exponent of the great figurative tradition of post-war painting in Britain, his work combining strong draughtsmanship with the bold use of paint. Coker endeavoured to capture transient and momentary experiences in paintings of great energy and vitality.Early in his career Coker’s thickly painted works of domestic interiors and of a butcher’s shop associated him with Bratby and the so-called Kitchen Sink painters. Thereafter, landscape became the central theme of his career. Coker’s earliest landscapes were painted in the 1950s, in Epping Forest, after he and Vera moved to Leytonstone.In 1962 the Cokers moved to Mistley on the river Stour on the border between Essex and Suffolk. He began teaching at the Colchester School of Art alongside other tutors who included John Nash RA and William Packer. Nash became an important friend and introduced him to the forests of East Anglia, the source of many important works. Nash had also been instrumental in setting up the Colchester Art Society in 1946 and Peter Coker showed with the society at the Minories on several occasions.However, Coker had a profound love of 19th century French painting and in his artistic allegiance was probably more French than English. He particularly responded to Courbet and to Nicholas de Stael and crossing to France toured the sites favoured by the artists he revered. Courbet was directly responsible for Coker’s choice of Etretat as the principal area for his first visits to France in 1955 and 1956 and of the many of his early landscape paintings.The outstanding quality of these, and of his later landscapes, is their energy and vitality which captures a concentrated feeling of light and of landscape. He vividly records the changing aspects of the sky, gliding clouds and oncoming storms.In the mid 1950s Coker first became aware of the work of Nicholas de Stael. It was his delicacy, finesse and refined sense of colour that Coker found so attractive. De Stael was fascinated by lighthouses, which may explain Coker’s numerous images of the lighthouse at St Valery en Caux.Coker’s sketchbooks were always of great importance to him. They were made to his specification of high quality paper. The drawings make very satisfying works of art in their own right in a much freer, impressionistic style than his more finished work, which frequently come direct from sketchbook drawings made on the spot. A sense of urgency leaps out from the pages.Coker was reluctant to sell work from his sketchbooks regarding them as his reference library.Coker continued to visit France throughout his life. Normandy pre-dominated but he also stayed with friends near Antibes and at Bargemon. From 1985 the Coker’s paid many visits to Badenscaillie the home of friends on the North West coast of Scotland.Coker’s work has been described as being balanced between tradition and experimentation. His painting commands attention with it’s combination of strength and energy. Delacroix once said ‘The first merit of a painting is to be a feast for the eye’. Coker’s work, time and again, achieves this objective.

Francis Davison had originally intended to become a poet, but after Cambridge was invited to go to St Ives by his former school friend Patrick Heron. Here he met Margaret Mellis and, encouraged by her, he started painting and drawing. In 1950 Francis, Margaret and her son Telfer Stokes moved to Suffolk. Davison’s Suffolk paintings are inspired by the surrounding landscape, with fields and houses distilled to simplified and geometrical forms in black, brown and white. In 1952 Davison gave up painting and for the next 20 years concentrated on collage, creating a distinctive and original body of work which was later to inspire a young Damien Hirst.

Anthony Eyton is acknowledged as one of Britain’s leading figurative painters. He studied fine art at Reading University before serving in the Army from 1942-47. He went on to study at Camberwell School of Art from 1947-1950, receiving an Abbey Major scholarship in 1951 which took him to Italy. Eyton taught at the Royal Academy schools from 1964-1999 and was elected a Royal Academician in 1986. He has travelled extensively, particularly in India, Israel and Sudan. His works are held in major public collections, including the Arts Council of Great Britain and the Tate and he has exhibited widely. Anthony Eyton lives and works in Brixton.Eyton studied with Dick Lee at Camberwell from 1947-50 and both received an Abbey Major scholarship in 1951, travelling to Rome together. The drawing is of an Italian scene, though the date is unknown. It was given to Lee by Eyton on Lee’s retirement from teaching at Camberwell in 1982, and is inscribed ‘Tony Eyton to Dick Lee with love 1982’. It is possible that the drawing dates from their journey together to Rome in the 1950s.

Jason was born in Malaysia in 1968 and grew up on his family’s farms in Suffolk. He initially trained as a zoologist before working as an artist, farmer, writer and researcher. Based in Suffolk, his artistic work includes drawings of livestock and wildlife alongside landscape painting using natural pigments and, more recently, narrative drawings. He is the director of The Alde Valley Spring Festival, which he founded in 2009. In 2012 he co-authored An Artist in the Garden with the painter Tessa Newcomb [Full Circle Editions, 2012]. His drawings and paintings feature in various private and corporate collections. The latter include : the Hiscox Collection and smaller collections bought by Adnams Brewery, Aldeburgh and Thorpeness Hotels, Milsoms Hotel and the collection of Jesus College, Cambridge.In 2014 he started a small series of residency programmes for drawing, painting, sculpting and writing at his farm in Suffolk and launched a new Residency Award for Painting. He also places collections of new works for sale with Cobbold & Judd each spring and autumn.

Maggi Hambling is in danger of becoming a National Treasure. Born in Sudbury, she now lives in an idyllic riverside cottage in Suffolk and all her life she has loved the county of her birth. She was catapulted to national fame in 1980 when she was selected as the first ever artist in residence at the National Gallery. She has never looked back.Her talent was first recognised by her art teacher at the age of 14. A year later Maggi presented herself to Cedric Morris and Lett Haines at their quirky East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing and thence, via Ipswich, to Camberwell and The Slade.She has painted many penetrating portraits including Henrietta Moraes (a series), Michael Jackson, Francis Bacon, George Melly and Stephen Fry. In the late eighties there was a series of bull-fighting paintings. Other series have been laughs and sunrises. And of course there have been rollicking television appearances with George Melly and Melvin Bragg – and a large number of exhibitions all over Britain and abroad.Maggi’s sea paintings began on a stormy day in November 2002 and the series continues to this day. As Cezanne had a compelling fascination with Mont St. Victoire, as Monet did with poplar trees and water lilies, so does Maggi with the North Sea in all its moods. She writes: “The approach of a distant wave gathering momentum is exciting. Then it becomes solid, reaches its climax, dissolves and retreats, and the whole sensual drama begins again. Moving water is a potent symbol of life. When a wave breaks, the skin of the surface meets the flesh of the depths.”’

Dick Lee is widely admired as an exceptional painter, one of the very best of his generation. His discipline of direct and faithful observation of nature can be traced straight back to Constable and sits firmly within the great British landscape tradition.Born in Rhodesia he went to Camberwell in 1947, joining the generation of young painters who, like him, had served in the war. Through the guidance of Coldstream and their Euston Road teachers they looked for an objectivity that was then new in English painting.Dick Lee was one of the most important followers of this approach. In his landscape paintings, painted on the spot, Lee sought to put down the essence of the subject whether it was a cricket match at the Oval or the hot afternoons and August sands of Normandy where he had a home. He had the ability to go straight for a particular moment or conjunction of time, light and place. His painting is admired for the lightness of his touch and the freedom of his handling of paint across the surface of the canvas as well as the organisation of the work, the pictorial space and construction. Lee was at his most radical in watercolour, oil pastel and gouache. These pictures have, as in many of Turner’s and all of Cezanne’s works on paper, the quality of private meditation. The watercolours possess a supreme economy of means; thin fluid washes floated across the paper until the subject emerges with gentle force.

Jane writes about her painting:I live in rural Suffolk and am an abstract painter using oil and watercolour.The landscape is my starting point for painting - I walk through it everyday in all weathers, allseasons often taking the same path, seeing the same fields, trees and woods etc. There aresuperficial changes daily though the underlying structure remains constant. In this way theelements add to my internal visual vocabulary. Colour, tone, shape, line, weather, temperature, light and shade all coalesce and distil and will atsome point contribute to a painting.Jane has exhibited throughout the UK, including the Royal Academy and Bankside Gallery and is an elected member of the Royal Watercolour Society

After an early career as a specialist furniture painter Lucy trained at Colchester School of Art and then continued to learn sculptural techniques with sculptor Miles Robinson in Suffolk.Lucy lives and works on an organic farm near Colchester and finds inspiration in the history of this medieval settlement. The surrounding landscape, found objects and the cyclical continuity and balance of nature have moulded her creativity for over thirty years and are key sources of inspiration, influencing the flowing sculptures which evolve into birdlike or botanical forms reduced to simpler, abstracted ideas. The work of contemporary sculptor Bridget McCrum inspires and informs Lucy's work as does the work of Barbara Hepworth.

Frances Mann writes about her painting:My small landscape paintings tend to be ‘portraits’ of the light at a particular time. A colour chord to do with a specific light is always the most important thing but space is vital too and therefore so is the drawing. I love Cezanne’s phrase ‘a minute of the world going by’.Frances trained at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts in the seventies where she met and subsequently married the painter Sargy Mann. She has exhibited regularly in London, and taught at Camberwell and the Royal Drawing School.

Sargy Mann (1937-2015) is considered to be one of the most important artists of his generation. Throughout his life Sargy had a fascination with how we see the world around us and how best to communicate that experience through painting. The long hot summer of 1976 was a key moment in Sargy’s development as an artist. He spent several weeks in Thorington Street, Suffolk where he produced an astonishing amount of work and where his painting underwent a series of important transformations. The collection shown here dates from this period as Sargy searched for the new language of painting he knew he needed to find. The paintings he produced that summer were also his apprenticeship in using colour and were critical to the development of his later work.From his thirties, Sargy experienced serious eye problems, and from the 1980s onwards his eyesight continued to worsen. After the total loss of his sight in 2005 he continued to paint, developing new ways of working which he found creatively liberating. It is probably for these late paintings that Sargy is best known. However, the transformative summer of 1976 was a moment of change and of breakthroughs which made these works possible.

In the early 1940s Margaret Mellis had been part of the development of British abstraction in St Ives, Cornwall. She had worked with Naum Gabo and Ben Nicholson, but after leaving Cornwall in 1946, her contribution was quickly forgotten. From 1950 Mellis was based in North Suffolk, where her work moved between abstraction and the figurative, collage, painting and construction.In the late 1970s Mellis began to form constructions out of driftwood, works that synthesised the various strands of her artistic practice.\n\nMargaret Mellis’ works were exhibited widely in her lifetime and are represented in major national collections. In 2008 Margaret Mellis: A Life in Colour opened at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich. The exhibition Margaret Mellis: Modernist Constructs ran at the Towner Gallery, Eastbourne from 2021-22.

Glyn Morgan was a Welshman like Cedric Morris, whose Benton End School of Painting at Hadleigh he attended. Morris was a major influence and a great supporter of Glyn’s work all his life. (Glyn also studied at Camberwell). His flickering, visionary landscapes, richly coloured and often with deep impasto, carry echoes of Blake, Palmer and Sutherland.Glyn was an important and truly imaginative artist and his work can be found in many major public collections.

For over fifty years Tessa Newcomb has been painting her own distinct vision of the world around her. Based mainly in Suffolk, she has captured the landscape and life of the county with great sensitivity, often focusing on the unusual and the quirky. Many of her paintings are full of humour, and revel in odd conjunctions, while others capture the timeless beauty of nature and the Suffolk landscape. Tessa was born in Suffolk in 1955, the daughter of the painter Mary Newcomb, and as a child she met many well known artists including Ben and Winifred Nicholson. She started painting early on and later trained in Norwich, Bath and Wimbledon. Tessa has exhibited regularly in the UK and abroad.

Robert Sadler was born in Newmarket, the son of a noted racehorse trainer. After studying at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, he joined the Royal Air Force as a pilot in 1930. Over the next few years, he held various posts in the RAF and also began to paint, attending art schools in London, Winchester and the USA where he encountered abstract expressionism.In 1955 he moved back to Newmarket, having retired from the RAF to devote himself full time to painting. He was influenced by de Stael, Peter Lanyon, William Scott, Bryan Winter and Adrian Heath. Sadler had a distinguished exhibiting career, and in 1964 moved to Aldeburgh where he continued to paint until his death in 2001.

Colin Self was pivotal in the development of Pop Art in the 1960s. Born in 1941 he studied at Norwich School of Art and then at the Slade where he met and was influenced by Peter Blake and David Hockney. His early work addressed the theme of Cold War Politics.Colin’s highly personal and distinctive style of drawing, often focussing on everyday objects, led the artist Richard Hamilton to call him ‘the best draughtsman in England since William Blake’. He is also widely regarded as a printmaker. Colin’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is represented in many public collections including Tate and the Arts Council.

Arabella Shand’s work is primarily focused on the domestic areas of life drawing on family, landscape and nature for inspiration. She takes inspiration from a wide range of artists including Picasso, Winifred Nicholson, Vuillard, Chagall, Utamaro, Indian miniatures and Russian religious iconography. She studied at Colchester Institute 1983–4, followed by Kingston Poly and City and Guilds School of Art. Arabella has recently moved to Wales from East Anglia. She began her career as an abstract painter and has carried her interest in composition, pattern and colour through into her current, more representational work.

Born in St Ives in 1941, Telfer Stokes is the son of Margaret Mellis and Adrian Stokes, and as a child grew up at the centre of the avant-garde Modernist Movement centred around St Ives. He graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art and continued his studies at the Brooklyn Museum Art School in New York where he was introduced to Barnett Newman. He later taught at Reading Art School and Bath Academy, and founded the imprint Weproductions publishing artist’s books. Over the last twenty years Telfer has been based in Suffolk and has redirected his focus to sculpture, using marine and industrial scrap metal.‘In the construction of a piece, the spacing could be compared to the pauses or the fermatas in music. The repeated pattern returning continuously with different emphasis might be the melody. I keep the colour to both combine and distinguish the separate parts. I want to catch the eye with this combination and the angularity of a bit of metal. What finally emerges is something somewhere between a sculpture and a painting that goes on the wall and which relates very strongly to an architectural setting’. Telfer Stokes April 2023

The artist Charlotte Verity painted Bottengoms, the house and garden of the writer Ronnie Blythe in Wormingford on the Essex/Suffolk borders, over three intense periods between September 2016 and April and July 2017. The watercolours she produced are painted on heavy sheets of paper, and are close to monochromatic. They evoke with poetic simplicity the garden created by John Nash from 1943, and cared for after his death in 1977 by Ronnie. In 2018 nineteen of these watercolours were exhibited at the Garden Museum, London. A selection is now available from Cobbold and Judd.Of ‘Their Bench ’ Charlotte has written:‘The bench was the first thing that I painted. It sloped down hill and just above it stretched a branch of an ash tree making a perfect horizontal in contrast. Its neglect was poignant but to me it resonated with conversations from the past. I imagined John Nash as well as Ronnie sitting there when both it and they were younger, observing and discussing the garden and other things. Cedric Morris was a frequent visitor as well as many figures from the literary world, so many animated conversations would have been had on it and around it’.Since graduating from the Slade, Charlotte has exhibited regularly in London since 1980 and in solo and group shows nationally and internationally. Her garden in SE London and now in Somerset, has been the focus of her work. By immersing herself in it by drawing or painting, she has developed a deep knowledge of the forms she depicts and her paintings are often meditations on broader ideas and themes.

Joan Warburton was one of the first pupils at the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing. She flourished in this environment and helped Cedric in his famous garden at Benton End, becoming a knowledgeable and enthusiastic plantswoman. Joan Warburton is known for her still lifes and landscapes, and her work is admired for its qualities of stillness and reflection.

Nat Young excels at abstracted landscapes, painted freely and with a confidence that captures the atmosphere and beauty of his subject.