Artists – S

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 1901 in Essex, John Skeaping trained at the Royal Academy Schools and became one of Britain’s foremost sculptors. John Skeaping is best known for his animal subjects which combined his wonderful draftsmanship with the aesthetic of the modern movement. In 1924 he won the British Prix de Rome where he met Barbara Hepworth, becoming her first husband.

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