21 Special Invited Artists, in last year’s event 2024.

She is an elected member of the Royal Watercolour Society.

“My paintings are about experiencing and responding to the places I encounter. This is often achieved by spending periods of time in a landscape and looking and working directly from it. Working outside means I am immersed in the landscape and experience many different things. My senses are alive to the conditions of weather, the sounds and smell from the sea and land, the call of a birds and animals. I’m dressed for the cold, heat, wind and rain, even snow. Seeing the dawn through to dusk, the seasons change and the constant movement of the landscape is a real privilege and one I want to express in my paintings.

“I meet many people too when I am painting. I listen to their stories and share familiar thoughts on the weather and politics, some bring me tea and offer food. All of this in some way adds to the richness of being and painting in the landscape.

“As I try to capture the ever-changing scene before me, I do so in a way that allows paint and colour to be used in an expressive and gestural manner.

“Know when to stop? This usually happens when I have made something that has gone beyond anything I had expected. It’s a moment of discovery when painting and looking say something of the grandeur and beauty I experienced in that moment.”

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.

She Studied at the Royal Academy Schools. Among her recent exhibitions are Kew Gardens and Oxford Botanical Gardens.

Helen’s paintings are no ordinary views of flowers. They are well observed, beautifully drawn but not immediately recognisable.

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.

“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.

“I am absorbed with the way light changes and defines places, constantly transforming the same piece of land. This changing quality of light against the permanence and stillness of the landscape are fundamental to my work…clouds across a hill, flashes of light through woods or shadows along a track”.

“My first joy was in working stone. I loved the sound of it under a mallet, the smell when it’s cut, the colour and the texture. Most of all I loved its permanence, millions of years in the making, hundreds perhaps thousands of years in the form it gives me.

“Nowadays I am engaged on a journey that doesn’t have an end finding something deeply expressive in drawing and painting in the flat planes of the two-dimensional in the Life Room and now the Landscape”.

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.

Jessica Gale is based in North Dorset. She is primarily a landscape painter who likes to investigate the dynamics of what is in front of her – the shapes, the light, the negative spaces – and then manipulate them, whether it is through form or colour, focussing on the energy of her subject rather than a visual truth.

You may have seen her recently competing on Sky Landscape Artist of The Year 2024.

In February this year she was selected by Messums West to show her work in an exhibition entitled “Four Artists in February”.

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.

He has exhibited individually in London, New York and Madrid. Among many awards he has won the local Marshwood Art Award 2023 in painting, also in 2023 he exhibited at the Florence Biennale, and the prestigious London Group Open.