Artists – B

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.

Renowned painter and printmaker Richard Bawden was born in 1936, the son of Great Bardfield luminary Edward Bawden. Richard studied painting, printmaking and graphic design at Chelsea and St Martin’s Schools of Art, and then at the Royal College of Art. Based in Hadleigh in Suffolk, Richard was well known for his many views of Aldeburgh. In 1987 he was commissioned to paint a series of murals for the Regatta Restaurant on Aldeburgh High Street. This watercolour is a preliminary study for one of the murals, which can still be seen at the restaurant today. Richard Bawden’s work is represented in major public and private collections, including the Tate, V and A and the Ashmolean.

Harry Becker was born in Colchester in 1865 to German parents. His father, Charles, was a well-respected GP and from 1884-1902 the family lived at the Minories in the centre of town. Becker began his formal training as an artist at the age of 14, eventually joining the studio of Carolus Duran in Paris. The studio encouraged direct, rapid working from life to capture the essence of the subject. Following his studies, Becker spent several years in London and became well known as a master printmaker and an exhibition of lithographs on an agricultural theme was widely acclaimed. Becker was also at the forefront of contemporary painting and was a member of the New English Art Club along with Sickert, Orpen and Steer. After a series of professional and personal setbacks, Becker moved with his family to Wenhaston in North Suffolk. Here he lived a more reclusive life, immersing himself in work and the rhythm of the agricultural year. Money was in short supply and he would work on whatever was at hand, including old sacking or greaseproof paper. However, these were intensely creative years and continued until his death from pneumonia in 1928. After his death, Becker’s work fell into obscurity until used by Adrain Bell to illustrate the 1948 edition of his famous farming trilogy. It has since been widely admired for its striking immediacy and unsentimental depiction of rural life.

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.