24 Special Invited Artists, for 2025 event. This section under construction..!

Mackerel Moon. West Bexington. Looking towards Portland. Site materials and acrylic on canvas fragment.  49x83cm framed

Frances works out of doors, in and with nature. Her work arises out of relationship with any environment in which she spends time. She uses water-based paints and integrates them with locally sourced, foraged earths. Her paintings arise out of conversation with the land and as a result of teamwork with weather. They become containers of experience with ‘Nature herself as the primary text.’ (words by Thomas Berry)

Enduring themes expressed in Frances’ work and life are reflected in titles of recent shows: 

OF TRUTH OF WATER. Brantwood, Coniston Water, Cumbria.

COMMON GROUND. RWS Gallery, London.

RESTLESS EARTH. Sladers Yard, West Bay. Dorset. 

She is an elected member of the Royal Watercolour Society.  

” Painting is a conversation with the visual world and starts with painting in front of the subject. My painting starts with an immediate response. Seeing, perhaps, an effect of light which really grabs my attention, the first step will usually be a painting – made fast enough to get the moment down. After years of working with oil paint and watercolour, their familiarity means I can rely on working quite instinctively at this stage. The moment passes and I usually need more information especially if I feel it could become a bigger painting. The next stage will often be to make a more considered drawing, which might take many hours. Bigger paintings might be started in the studio and when practical taken back to the location and completed on the spot.”

 Richard lives in West Dorset, is an elected member of the Royal Watercolour Society and the New English Art Club. 

Last year she participated in “Art in the Open” the well-established en plein air Festival in Wexford, Ireland.

Early on he studied with Euan Uglow and Frank Auerbach at Camberwell, latterly he spent time at the New York Studio School influenced by Abstract Expressionist values.

Hugh Dunford Wood’s paintings present the landscape as theatre in an exploration of belonging, and for the rapture of our purposeful relationship with the earth.

 He inhabits the natural world in awe, completing each work in a day, painting out in the field, racing against the passing of the light, growing hunger and fatigue.  Going out painting, for Hugh Dunford Wood, is really going in.

 www.dunfordwood.com

Instagram and Facebook: @hughdunfordwood

There is calligraphic liquidity in her figurative and abstract forms and brushed shapes. A spontaneous fluid sketch process enlivens her work. Expressive and energetic mark making are characteristic of her work. Her plein air paintings are interpretations and often include an element of imagination. She aims to share her sensation of a space with the viewer.

The themes of nature, birds and animals in views and vistas permeate his work. His personal painting practise is in the spirit of a contemporary vision, espousing line and symbolism. Moby’s compositions sit comfortably beside recently published ingenious poetry.

He studied Fine Art at Camberwell and Southampton.

“From a converted cowshed in north Dorset, Rachel’s studio looks out on the prehistoric hill fort of Hambledon Hill. From there she can explore many of the ancient tracks, footpaths and holloways that she loves and is inspired by.  Light and ambience in nature are her constant themes. Walking and revisiting the same places in all
weathers, seasons and times of day gives her endless references.I feel so lucky to live in Dorset and be able to access so many beautiful places. Walking and revisiting the same places in all weathers, seasons and times of day give me endless references.”.

Mike has a sculpture on the steps of St. Martins in Trafalgar Square as well as in a Dorchester public street and a life sized carved wooden horse in the Hospital.

“Having spent 25 years, as a stone carver and sculptor; my work has gradually evolved into a more 2 dimensional form.

I now spend most of my time in a tiny studio at my home in Somerset, painting and drawing.

Mostly I’m moved by observations of people, but occasionally I venture into the great outdoors in an attempt to capture some of its magnificence. This, I really enjoy”.

Primarily a landscape and portrait painter my work is my visual diary; a recording of the light, colours space and form found in the objects and places that make up the living world. The act of putting charcoal to paper and oil to canvas is a compulsion that gives me great joy”.

Helen Lloyd Elliott was a finalist in Sky Arts Portrait Artist of the Year 2023.

I’ve drawn and painted most of my life, flirted with many ways of making an image and finally settled on painting out of doors, directly from the landscape.

Plein air painting is a delicious thing to do.  Trying to capture one elusive ray of light as it hits a particularly bright field in the distance, while hanging on to your hat and easel in a high wind is exciting.  You can’t work too carefully if the brush is bouncing on the surface, and the struggle against the elements comes through in the energy of the piece.

I love the smell of the paint, the light, the weather, the fact that everything is in constant flux.  This is infused in the work, along with small insects, bits of grass, windblown sand and, occasionally, a complete rework as everything has blown over and landed facedown (of course) in mud.

My aim is to create as much air and depth as possible on a small surface, working quickly and using big brushes and broad strokes to distill the scene without losing its essence.  Since the length of time spent on a piece is limited by the changing light, I establish the main elements as quickly as possible and try not to pass over any area of paint more than twice. I am drawn by strong areas of contrast, especially light and shade and keep detail to a minimum.

My subjects are landscape, coast and countryside, mainly of Dorset

Linzi’s career has spanned a wide range of creative arts – from theatre set design, to children’s book illustration, advertising, then interior design and more recently, teaching.

“Painting is what I hold closest to my heart”. Recently Linzi is applying her skills to Landscape painting.

Iryna grew up and studied Art in Ukraine; she has lived in Dorchester for the last 20 years.

She studied at the Arts University Bournemouth and has a Fine Art Studio/Gallery at Abbotsbury in the Abbey Farm Workshops.

His work is recognisable by its use of a palette of bright sharp clean colours with spontaneously made clean shapes.

Fiona lives and works in Bridport, balancing a busy psychotherapy practice with making time to paint in and from the local landscape. A sabbatical on a Scottish Island ignited her current painting practice, while living in the Cambrian mountains in Wales during lockdown afforded her time for sketchbook walks and studio experiments. “Painting for me is a vital and all consuming immersion in the natural world and an escape into the infinite joys of colour and texture.”

After studying at Weymouth College, last year Kim completed her BA Fine Art at Bath Spar University

His portraits have been exhibited in the BP Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery and the Royal Society of Portrait Painters. In Dorset, his work has been shown at the Jerram Gallery, Sherborne and Sladers Yard, West Bay.

He has been teaching life drawing, portraiture, and oil painting for many years most recently for Dorset Centre for the Creative Arts and The Dorset Museum.

Since the mid ‘90s my home and studio have been at Bull Mill Arts on the upper reaches of the River Wylye near Warminster. Most of my work since then has been inspired by the immediate landscape and, in particular, a three- mile stretch of this stunning chalk stream close to my studio, along with adjacent water meadows and nearby woodland. I walk here often, observing and drawing changes from day to day and season to season. In my paintings, I aim to convey a sense of the life, movement and ‘my own ‘solitary involvement’ with this landscape.

I also undertake plein air drawing projects exploring urban and landscape themes. Currently I’m working on a series of pieces depicting the sources, tributaries and confluences of the five chalk streams that flow towards and through Salisbury and that have shaped the landscape of south west Wiltshire. This collection is destined for exhibition entitled ‘Confluence’ in Salisbury in September 2025.

Known internationally for his work in pastel and aquarelle, Simon has had ten books published about his work in English, French, Italian and German.

He has exhibited widely, painted portraits on commission and been sponsored by French, Japanese and German multinational companies.

As well as painting he ran his own design company in England and won the first prize for a landscape feature.

He lives with his wife Julie in France and Morocco.

Based at his Studio & Gallery at 11 Downes Street, in Bridport, Kit Glaisyer’s painting process begins with an Impressionist touch, capturing the immediacy of a fleeting moment. He then methodically applies thin paint layers, creating vibrant tapestries of light & colour, a patient approach that harks back to 19th-century European Romantic artists and the British landscape tradition of JMW Turner & John Constable. Kit’s Gallery is open every Saturday from 10am to 3pm and by appointment.

Ursula’s work is to do with landscape, particularly the agricultural landscape around where she lives and in which she is immersed.

She walks and draws on the land daily as drawing seems the first step to understanding the territory.  The work then moves into painting and printmaking in the studio.  Pictorial structure and the edge of the image offer exciting scope to explore the space and scale in a landscape of huge fields, scattered trees and hedges. Oil paint is applied fairly thinly and is then built up as the image is edited.  Colour is used in a way that is not realistic but is intended to evoke a parallel to the atmosphere of the subject and to recreate the intensity of a visual experience.  It is colour that first alerts Ursula to a subject.  Space within the image is manipulated away from the literal to imply distance, height and mass.  Things placed on the edge of the image indicate possible sidelining, disappearance, fragmentation.