‘I paint not what I see of the visible world, but how I feel it to be. It is not a literal description of a place, but a feeling of a place.’ 

This is precisely what Wendy Hyde does with her visionary abstract expressionist paintings, embedding her heart and soul into the violent expression of colour. Consequently, these paintings cannot help but remind you of Rothko, for they both share an almost eager anticipation to share their passion.

Hyde claims that her inspiration comes from her natural surroundings - the landscapes, skyscapes,
and seascapes that envelop her daily life. The freedom which is evident in the environment is most definitely transcribed into her paintings. Hyde’s work is varied, and by placing a limited amount colours from a similar pallet softly together, or clashing bold and strong tones angularly, she can tackle an assortment of emotions. Either way, her work seems to be done effortlessly, conveying everything from angst to tenderness.

Website: Wendyhyde.theartistsweb.co.uk 

For most of us, capturing a moment abroad is left to the camera, as we photograph beautiful views and local events in a matter of seconds. But, Tori records her memories through the medium of art. Every work from her ‘Ethopians’ series above has a story behind it, filled with memories of her time in one of the most poverty stricken countries in the world.
 
The first image documents a man waiting at a community clinic; the second a lady begging outside a castle in Gondar just after being given 20 Birr (less than £1, but enough to buy you a main meal in a posh restaurant in Ethiopia) – the ecstatic smile on this elderly woman’s face is incredibly emotive, and really brings home the differences between our culture of capitalist consumerism and their culture based mainly on survival. The third work above depicts ‘a little boy playing rubble in the middle of a busy market in Gondar’. The expression on his face is perhaps that of any other young boy, but what makes this image striking and, to a point, upsetting, is the setting which surrounds him. Rubble – dangerous debris so often the cause of death and injury is hardly the place for a child to be playing, and looking so comfortable doing it, as if rubble is a perfectly  normal setting for child play.
 
Her fourth portrait is perhaps the most overtly evocative of Tori’s artwork. She describes the story behind this drawing as ‘A young Ethiopian boy who had walked for 10 hours with his dad to the clinic. He has very bad epilepsy and learning difficulties, and had multiple burns on his arms and legs from having seizures near fires’. Tori captures the boy’s sadness, his unimaginable and painful situation, with beautiful simplicity, really drawing attention to his tearful eye, his runny nose, and heartbroken expression.
 
The final image in Tori’s ‘Ethopians’ series is simply named ‘Waiting’. It appears that all the subjects in ‘Ethiopians’ are waiting. Whether that be for help, for food, for death, I am unsure. What is in no doubt however, is Tori’s extraordinary talent for documenting the moments of these people’s unease, their happiness, their sadness, with astonishing clarity and heartfelt emotion.
 
See more of Tori’s artwork at: Facebook.com 

Despite enduring a week of rain, I do believe that summer is just around the corner when I look at Ramzi Musa’s vibrant artwork. Musa’s artwork, in particular his Indian ink collection, combines the softness of a water based form whilst simultaneously clashing it with bursts of exotic colour. It is both comforting and exciting.

Despite his age (Musa is only 22), this University of Leeds graduate has seen his ink paintings transformed into fashion prints for Browns Focus – allowing his creation to be both functional and a piece of beauty.

Ramzi Musa uses his eye for colour and shape to create dynamic and striking portraits; ‘Copying someone’s face is boring, capturing an element of someone’s character interests me far more.’ This aim most definitely comes through - the use of brash poses with the splattering of vivid colour in specific areas conveys desire and energy. Far more so than any realist portrait, we get a sense of the speed – the need to capture that moment and to inscribe it with personal angst or passion.

Ramzi Musa is most defiantly lightening up the art work with his gorgeous and intense paintings. With the fear of sounding too much like a cliché; he is definitely one to watch.

Contact: ramzi.a.musa@gmail.com
Website: Ramzimusa.com 

Flat and static paintings which manage to covey movement, freedom, and emotion are rare and special; an art which Charlotte McLaughlin has successfully managed to achieve. McLaughlin’s oil paintings pick up the subtleties, imperfections, and simplicity of domestic human life - making it beautifully identifiable with everyone.  

McLaughlin exercises a muted pallet in a thick impasto style to her benefit, boldly placing unobvious block colours next to each other. This is because the focus is on the overall shape and the impression of the tones given rather than the detail. McLaughlin gives us the brute and solid outline of a figure and then fills it in with personality and character. Her honesty in both colour and form allows us to witness an intimate and almost secretly captured moment.

Her subjects vary, containing for instance, secluded sleep, the intimate moments between mother and child, or else the mundane nature of getting changed; these moments which are commonly private are suddenly offered up to the viewer. On the other hand we also get to experience the speed and agility of classical dance; in this series she conveys freedom and speed in a solitary moment.

Charlotte McLaughlin’s choice of subject is beautiful, it is always focused on the person conveying something private to the viewer, and with her excellent choice in tones this relationship becomes meaningful and lasting.

Website: Charlottemclaughlin.com 

Louise McNaught’s work emits innovation at every turn, combining the fragility of animals with the physicality of the populous world.  Thus by painting birds on a Costa coffee cup or an owl on a plastic bag she makes a deliberate comment on the relationship between these subjects. In an effort to highlight the imbalance in the environment, which is entirely self-created, she shows these animals in unnatural situations, making them ‘shattered, fragmented and vandalised’. This vulnerability and entrapment she paints, whereby the animals are prisoners to the item they are painted on, demands the viewer to question the costs of a commercial world.

Her delicate paintings on such common placed items create an immediate sense of perspective, allowing the viewer to see the clash between the two subject matters. This style is repeated by her use of luminescent paint, for instance the painting of the stag where the antlers are pink and
orange. By only colouring in part of the animal she makes it look wounded and unnatural, as if physically affected by human action.

Louise McNaught does wonders in demonstrating the imbalance between nature and human influence; whilst realistically painting the animals she manages to simultaneously taint them so they become warped in a way we wonder about our own effects on the environment. Yet it is nonetheless beautiful.

Contact: artandsoul8@hotmail.co.uk

Images: Cargocollective.com

David Fitzpatrick uses his classical teaching from a degree in Art, Design, and Environment to produce drawings with minute detail, unbelievable intricacy and spectacular talent. By using his skills in landscape architecture, urban design, and town and city planning his drawings take on an element of noticeable realism. Space and proportion are in great union and the result is captivating drawings.

Fitzpatrick’s subject is nothing more than the city in which he lives, the tools are humble and simple; charcoal and paper. Yet, there is fragility and sincerity which emanate from the drawings. This art is not bland but evocative, showing us how much beauty there is in the most simplistic of things. A common feature is mystical and ethereal trees which envelope the frame. He manipulates the charcoal to reflect this beauty.

By approaching his artistry with a technical and complex approach, Fitzpatrick manages to truly relay the splendid detail in nature. He plays with light and water tremendously and thus surpasses any typical landscape. Fitzpatrick’s drawings are beautiful and simple, and remind us of the glorious aspects of nature.

You can buy Fitzpatrick's work from: Degreeart.com 

Abigail McDougal paints with fluidity and grace, making the art, regardless of its subject, beautiful. Having lived in a wide range of environments, including Oxford, Canada, Italy and Dorset, she has developed a varied appreciation of nature and architectural structure. Indeed, she studied in Falmouth and used the beautiful natural surroundings to influence her art.

McDougal’s paintings are built up by compiling blocks of basic colour, sometimes only suggesting the form. Her lack of detail and precision is not, however, a detriment. Her subtlety is rather calming. Her form is simple, using relatively plain colours, yet she combines this with a complex and sophisticated use of light, resulting in the creation of something pleasing for all. McDougal has in fact created an
exhibition named; ‘Bristol in a Different Light’, in which she combined her visionary paintings (using water and light to great effect), with revolutionary redesigning of some of the most common place scenes. McDougal gives new light to the simplicity and beauty of the world around us.

Website: Abigailmcdougall.com 

Name: David Verba
Occupation: Artist
Inspiration: ‘I keep an open mind on who or what inspires me.  Central to whatever it happens to be, is a certain difficult to explain expressive element that has to be present to trigger inspiration’.
 
David is an incredibly thoughtful artist. His work has mounds of expression, imagination and critical reading behind it which create powerful and highly evocative works of art. David says that ‘In most cases my work will have an expressionistic and investigative element.  I have an interest in juxtapositions, accidents, and a kind of alchemy’. These interests are reminiscent of those dealt with by Modernists in the twentieth century. Art, literature and film were in rebellion against their nineteenth century, traditionalist Victorians, instead wanting to create works of fragmentation, collage and experimentation. It is in no doubt David was either inadvertently, or knowingly inspired by the Modernist movement. Its pioneering age certainly appears to be one of intrigue to David in his work on Picasso, Surrealism and the like.
 

 
David says the thing he most enjoys about drawing and being an artist is ‘the immediate and direct tactile quality of drawing and to line’. This is never more true than in the image above. This work is an artist study from the portfolio ‘Guarding Picasso’. The pioneer of Cubism, Pablo Picasso found free expression in the breaking-up and reassembling of parts to create some of the best artistic works of the twentieth century. Here, David merges traditional sketching with a handwritten letter, and scattered shapes forming a black hole. It is an implosion of shapes and mediums which come together to create a work of great expression and imagination.
 

 
Also from the ‘Guarding Picasso’ portfolio, this work is injected with a splash of colour. The blue and red are reminiscent of the expressionist chaos David used in the first image. In his ‘Drawing’ portfolio, David referenced Paul Davies who says that ‘Chaoticians have found overwhelming evidence that the universe is not a gigantic clock made up of well ordered and predictable movements as previously thought. The universe is actually fundamentally disordered and free in its movements.’ I think the same hypothesis is relevant here. The blue and red represent a free form of movement which expresses chaos and spontaneity. The image henceforth becomes alive with vibrancy and colour.
 

 
This work harks back to a more traditional style of illustration. The manner with which it was composed appears a lot more simplistic: an observance rather than metaphorical or abstract. The paradox is left to the juxtaposition between black and white, between the paleness of the sky in comparison to the darkness of the windows. It is simply called ‘House with a Fence’. There is no denying that this is what the illustration depicts, but is this the only depiction? It begs the question: is what appears to be simple, to be a ‘House with a Fence’, that simple in reality, or is there a hidden complexity at work within the picture? When I look at this illustration I see not only a house with a fence, but a wooden fence encasing a stone house. I see trees, a roof, windows, a figure at one of the windows. He or she appears almost ghostly in the dark window, their hooded clothing perhaps a façade from whatever dark story they have to retell. It is an incredibly powerful illustration which enhances traditional, sketched reality with a wealth of imagination to be enjoyed by its viewers.
 
By 2022, David would like to complete ‘a collective body of work that when viewed from a distance, tells an interesting story’. If not already there, David is well on his way. He encompasses such a vast range of styles, creates such distinctive and evocative works, that he can truly be defined as an artist.
 
Website: Davidverbagallery.com 

'Midnight Passages'

'Scary Thoughts'

'Signal'

The photography and illustration of Andre De Freitas attends to a humanity that verges on the mythic. Much of his work is portraiture, but crucially, De Freitas destabilises this anthropocentric structure, depicting humans as invaded by both the supernatural and the painfully natural. In some cases consuming the body itself, emotional tensions and mental fractures become fully externalised.
 
In ‘Scary Thoughts’, canine figures nearly overwhelm the female form. The simple tranquillity of the lilac background belies the fear and violence that rage within, suggesting a reality bordering on the unreal, a sense of place nearly displaced, a sanctuary becoming unsanctified. Through this deft manipulation of the portrait, Andre brilliantly renders visible our suppressions of internal conflict. His portrayal of everyday experience presents us with something at once unrecognisable and deeply resonant.
 
But where ‘Scary Thoughts’ depicts the rupture of a surface pressured by internal conflict, the tone of ‘Midnight Passages’ is much softer. The interplay of external reality and the human being is once again at work: the panoramic sweep both extends beyond and reaches within the female observer. How far can we detach ourselves from the great, sprawling cityscapes that we inhabit? The female figure finds herself in a sort of spatial uncertainty, unsure of her exact relation to the towerblocks that litter the horizon. But it’s nonetheless important to note the great, empty space of the sky that occupies the top half of the image and the whitish mist that covers the image, dissolving the reality into the unreality we also experienced in ‘Scary Thoughts’.
 
But the passivity of the human in ‘Midnight Passages’ and ‘Scary Thoughts’ undergoes an alteration in ‘Signal’. The woman here is not merely receiving stimuli or refracting an internal conflict through mythical imagery; she is preoccupied, instead, with reaching something beyond the picture, an external event that is not here shown. The inner force of desire, the desire to communicate, manifests itself. Through sheer willpower, the exertion of agency, the human is able to search for a world beyond the portrait.
 
All three of these images depict subjects with no clear history, no past inscribed on them. Andre captures them in a moment, still, in contemplation. ‘Instead of just drawing,’ Andre says on his website, ‘I tried to imagine myself taking photos of my subjects. That way the illusion of stillness would be a little more believable, almost like a photograph.’ The admixture of the photographic, that which purports to be real, and the illustrative, which can divorce the photograph from this reality, is a key technique in his work, suited brilliantly to portraying the conflicts of inside and outside, reality and myth, wholeness and fracture that reverberate through his art.

Website: Andredefreitas.com

Rachel Harding does not limit herself to just one subject whilst painting; she manages to combine, beautifully, two images. In the process she extends our common preconceptions with the matter, making us search for a new understanding in a new setting to something we are so familiar with. Harding creates this amazing dichotomy using oil pants. She initially paints the first image, covers half of it up with masking tape and then paints a second image on top. When it is dry she removes the tape and unveils the beautiful medley.

These paintings challenge our common perception, highlighting not only the differences but also the combining qualities which are rarely appreciated. By concentrating on the duality of images we get to see both sides of the coin in the same picture.

This juxtaposition on the canvas is exciting and refreshing; the contrast of the images is not blurred or smooth but unashamedly blunt and sharp. There is motive and deliberation in the combination. Harding is trying to show us how much we can learn from a new perspective on two images.

We can gain a lot by appreciating Rachel Harding’s work, ultimately we should be grateful - we practically get to enjoy two paintings on the same canvas.

Contact: hardrach@hotmail.com