Battersea Affordable Art Fair here we come

All packed up and on their way to London,

Paintings by...Chris Rigby,

Andrew Tozer,

Sarah Wimperis,

Miles Heseltine,

Paul Wadsworth,

 

and Ashley Hold

some amazing paintings and truly delicious framing:

Hope to see you there, you can still download half price tickets from our web site.

Still Lifes

Simon Stooks
1930s Boat with Cornish Cup

Still Lifes, quiet places and silent moments.  It is January, misty and grey outside.  Take the time to pause for a while and look around an imaginary room.

Emma Jeffreys
Still Life with Pink Bag

A vase of flowers sit beside a cup, a bowl and a glass, before them are scattered four shells and a fallen bloom and beneath a glorious splash of pink in the form of a plastic bag.  Look again and a blue and white jug is echoed by a blue paint pot.

Simon Stooks
Paint Pot and Cornish Cream Jug

Three elegant and superbly simple pots sit on a white shelf,

Paul Lewin
Three Alice Gaskell Pots

Light is reflected in rosy hews from apples placed in unconscious arrangement upon a china plate.

Robert Jones
Three Apples

In the corner of this imaginary room is the stillest life of all, a television set, closed to the bustle and shriek of the world outside, reflecting back, as if through a glass darkly, your still life.

Ashley Hold
Off

Petals fall and rest on patterned cloth, shadows move imperceptibly and a small harvest ripens on a windowsill.

Philip Hogben
Farmyard and Flowers

Beside the Wave is celebrating the still life genre of painting with a beautifully fresh exhibition of work from some of our artists.  Paul Lewin has come inside, away from the cliff edge to paint calm and elegant works with a limited and very beautiful pallet.

Paul Lewin
Interior, After Gwen John.

Anne -Marie Butlin is celebrating exotic pattern and rich colours with her paintings of flowers and everyday objects that burst with a powerful femininity.

Anne-Marie Butlin
Blue Shoes

Simon Stooks and Emma Jeffryes present us with beautifully composed paintings that have a deceptively simple altered perspective.  Robert Jones and Philip Hogben give us domestic still life and steep their subjects in the rich painterly tradition of this genre.  Ashley Hold has painted interiors, desperately empty, still and peaceful yet brimming with unspoken comment.

Ashley Hold
Ocean

Still Lifes opens on Friday 27th January, with the Private View, 6-8pm and continues until Wednesday 8th February.

Star of The Show

Night View
1500mm x 1200mm
oil on board
by Ashley Hold

We had a very successful show at the Edinburgh Art Fair with our artists and their outstanding work being hugely appreciated.  We were extremely proud of the caliber of the work that Beside The Wave represents and it was a genuine pleasure to be able to meet so many people and to talk about the work that we had on show.  The work of Sarah Wimperis flew off the walls, Andrew Tozer's new paintings were very popular, Emma Dunbar's work was much admired as was Robert Jones and Anne Marie Butlin.  Miles Heseltine, as per the Art Fair in London, attracted genuine acclaim from fellow painters and Danny Markey's work was also appreciated.
One painting, it has to be said, was the star of the show.  Night View by Ashley Hold. This attracted so much attention.  People were coming back two or three times to have another look, bringing their friends and having lively discussions about what they could see in the painting, gasps of delight as they spotted yet another nuance and huge admiration for the skill involved in such a complex work of art.
We were delighted to be able to live with this painting for three days and found that it stayed with us long after the show closed each night, informing the way that we looked at, through and beyond the reflections in night windows, creating a still and quiet contemplation of the human condition.  It is a rare thing to be the conduit of such a work of art, and it feels like an honour.

Introducing Ashley Hold

Opening tonight we have an exhibition of the work of five artists, showing for the first time at Beside the Wave.  These  artists are all well established on the contemporary art scene  and we are very pleased to be able to include their work in the gallery. 

I shall attempt a blog introduction to each of them over the next few posts.  The first to cooperate with my nosy questioning is Ashley Hold.  He  is an academician of the Royal West of England academy, has had work accepted for the BP portrait award, exhibited in the Hunting Arts Prize, the discerning eye among others.  He is also a lecturer at university college Falmouth.

His paintings are simply beautiful, quietly melancholic with an enormous sense of place.  Often painting in the evening or at night he describes the search for some mental space as being very important. 

The paintings have the nature of a daydream, a moment when one gets lost between two worlds, awake in  the middle of the night, caught staring both at and through your reflection in a window.  They have a meditative quality and seem to be perfectly resolved.  

    

Paintings, like the parked cars at night can take up to a year, slowly evolving into the final conclusion. 

Imbibed with a  filmic atmosphere, I can almost hear music as I look at them.  A musician, Ashley says that he often switches between painting and playing the piano, so perhaps the music is trapped within the paint.

His teaching seems to aid his painting and he says that this informs his work, influences come from constant study talking about and focusing on new and different disciplines.  Although his style is very consistent there is an openness present in the paintings.  Sometimes, he says, he can search for days for a subject, walking and climbing until it is found then producing many paintings of the same subject as an example the trapped boulder series.

 His studio is a bedroom, easel next to a piano, his bike and computer, it is unassuming and unpretentious.

His paintings are unassuming and unpretentious and absolutely out of this world and very much a part of it, all at once, I am sure that you will enjoy them as much as I have... now to pin down the other artists!