The Art Of Life
7th - 22nd September
Tuesday-Friday 11am-4pm | Saturday-Sunday 10:30am-5pm | Closed Monday
Peter Messer
'I have never wanted my paintings to be seen solely through complicated notions of art. It is possible for representational paintings to be resonant, intense and poetically ambiguous without sacrificing a certain straightforwardness. The truth is that I like the craft of painting, the materials, the processes and the problems, as much as I like to daydream. I enjoy being surprised by everyday splendour, layers of light, emotion and memory. The luck to be astonished in the right place.'
The Levitating Gardener
Egg tempera on gesso panel
40.5cm x 30.5cm (unframed size)
£1650.00
Woods in Spring, Sussex
Oil on Canvas
45.72cm x 35.56cm
£1410
Tom Benjamin
'I am committed to the practice of plein air painting. The sense of the subject being about to slip away as the light changes lends the working process a sense of urgency. I am often drawn to subjects which have a sense of slippage such as the coast where wet mud or rock pools gives way to water which reflects the sky, or woods where light falling on a visual tangle creates tension between the form and weight of the subject and the play of light which both reveals and disguises it.
I tend to produce a group of paintings in each location and there are some places I have been working in for many years. Paintings are sometimes completed in a single session but more often I return to them aiming to carry on when the light and weather are similar. I paint quickly and relish the improvisations required by painting in front of a quickly changing subject.
I was born in 1967 and studied Fine Art at Norwich School of Art 1986 – 1989
I was elected as a member of the New English Art Club in 2021 and as well as showing with the Star Brewery Gallery I am also represented by The Russell Gallery in London, The Jerram Gallery in Dorset and The Campden Gallery in the Cotswolds.'
Cliff and River
Oil on board
27cm x 37cm (framed)
£700
Paul Newland
'I studied at the Slade School of Fine Art. After a year abroad on a French Government Scholarship I established a studio in London, as well as teaching there and in other parts of England. During a year in Rome in the mid-seventies I took up the use of watercolour, which became my chief means of expression for many years. I became a member of the Royal Watercolour Society in 1990 and of the NEAC twelve or so years later. (At the RWS I served as Vice-President and as Honorary Curator.)
While a lecturer in painting and, later, art history at Roehampton University I travelled frequently across London, along the river east to west: the Thames and its embankments and the hills of South London gradually supplanted the themes of still life and figure which before predominated. Then, in the noughties I moved to East Sussex, to Lewes. Subject matter was extended and oil painting became important to me. There have been several exhibitions over the years, both in London and elsewhere and work is found in many collections here and abroad.'
Rosie Good
'I studied art at Byam Shaw and then completed a P.G.dip. at the Royal Academy Schools where I was taught by artists such as Norman Ackroyd and Christopher le Brun. I have won prizes and awards from the Painter Stainer’s, The British Academy and was awarded the Richard Ford travel Award and the Edna Weiss prize for figurative painting in my final year at the RA. My work was also featured in a review of graduates in the Times.
More recently I have had work included in Royal Society of British Artists annual open, Royal West of England Academy, Green and Stone and the NEAC where I was awarded the critics prize in 2023.
You can see more of my work currently at Venue 36, Paddock Art Studios and at the Brighton Art Fair.'
Don't Look Back In Anger, Horsebridge Mill
Pencil, graphite, watercolour and colour pencil on Fabriano paper
90 cm x 90cm (framed)
£900
Jason Tremlett
'My art explores the complexities of modern life and the sense of disconnection that characterizes our experiences. Through muted color palettes and contemplative compositions, I invite viewers to reflect on the fragile and fleeting nature of our relationships with each other and the world.'
Jason is a classically trained painter. In 2016 he opened an atelier in Lewes where he works on personal projects and commissions. He regularly paints portrait commissions and his paintings are held in private collections throughout Europe. His personal work explores traditional themes through a contemporary lense. Large works are painted over multiple sessions employing a limited palette of muted colours and historic painting techniques, oils and mediums. They are often made from direct observation from nature under natural light, but go past a purely visual representation.
Nude study with drapery
Oil on linen
50cm x 60cm
£585
Rachael Nicholson
Rachael Nicholson creates sculptural artworks from metal, glass and recycled materials. Her process-based approach prioritises integrity to materials and place, and her usage of recycled materials highlights issues surrounding environmental degradation and consumer waste. She collects objects from farmland, shorelines and scrap yards, juxtaposing objects which relate to each other in terms of colour or form. She exhibits regularly in the UK and is currently exhibiting large outdoor sculptures at Rural Venue 146 for Artwave 2024. She grew up in Edinburgh but has lived mostly in the South East and has been based in Lewes for 3 years.
Melting Heart
Glass
26cm x 12cm x 23cm
£275
Mark Munroe-Preston
Mark’s work coalesces photography, painting and collage to create atmospheric pictures inspired by his experiences in nature. Beginning with images drawn from his expansive collection of original landscape photographs, he transforms them, revealing subtleties of colour, texture, light and form, while evoking the natural beauty and drama of the scenes, blurring the boundaries of what is traditionally considered photography and painting. They are presented as limited edition prints on sheets of brushed aluminium, which gives the work a uniquely dynamic look, depth of colour and contemporary feel. Each of Mark’s works is titled with the GPS coordinates of where the original photograph was taken so they can be found on interactive maps, encouraging others to experience the locations in person.
MMP 162 - N50.9294 E0.0398
Hi-Resolution Print on Brushed Aluminium
100cm x 100cm
£1000
Darkness Spreads, Light Falls I
Graphite and chalk pastel on found paper
24.5cm x 18cm
£370
Heather McAteer
Heather McAteer (b. Belfast, 1968) lives and works in Reading, Berkshire. Her evocative landscape works in graphite, recalling her childhood locale in Belfast, address themes of history, memory and identity.
Heather studied Fine Art at Belfast School of Art (1987-91) (BA) and Reading School of Art (1992-94) (MFA). In addition to solo exhibitions at 571 Oxford Road Gallery, Reading in 2019 and 2021, her work has also been selected for a wide range of group exhibitions nationally. These include, ‘Oxford Art Society Open Exhibition’, at SJE Cloister Gallery, Oxford (2022), ‘RBSA Drawing Prize Exhibition’ at RBSA Gallery, Birmingham (2023), ‘Winter Group Show’; at Linden Hall Studios, Deal (2023), ‘Ancient Landscapes’; at Fronteer Gallery, Sheffield (2024) and ‘A Room of One’s Own’ at Irving Gallery, Oxford (2024). In 2023 she also had a two-person exhibition, ‘Uncertain Landscapes’ (with Alex Dewart) at Flowerfield Arts Centre, Portstewart, Northern Ireland. Her new solo exhibition will open at West Berkshire Museum in March 2025.
In 2020 she was awarded ‘The Drawing Prize' at the Royal Ulster Academy Annual Exhibition, Ulster Museum, Belfast and selected for a Jelly (ACE/National Lottery/DCMS funded) ‘At Home’ Artist Residency. In 2021 she was commissioned by the Museum of English Rural Life to make work for their ’51 Voices’ (ACE funded). The first book of her work, ‘Forests of Dreamland’, was published by Redden Press in June this year.
Michael Munday
Michael Munday is an artist, designer and illustrator. For the last thirteen yrs he has been a member of contemporary dance company, Three Score Dance, performing in the Brighton Festival, Lilian Baylis theatre at Sadlers Wells, and theatre and open air venues around the UK.
After decades of life drawing, his practice investigates the movement of the body. How do we perceive movement? How do we represent movement?
His works are often life size, generally in charcoal on large cartridge paper.
The piece in this exhibition, The Working Model, is made from drawings of Kate Shields, life model and an extraordinary artist in her own right.
Michael is exhibiting at venue 50 in Artwave, studio 17, upstairs in Star Brewery.
The Working Model
Charcoal and collage on cartridge paper
59cm x 42cm
£150
Summer Shade
Woodblock print (editioned out of 27) Framed
60cm x 54cm
£600
Adele Scantlebury
My official art education ended in 1987 with a BA Hons in Ceramics from Farnham. I was then fortunate enough to find work in Sussex making traditional finials and floor tiles. We worked on many Heritage projects - including the floor tiles for the Crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral. It was during this time that I explored working with woodblock printing. I really enjoyed the simplicity of the process; instead of a press, using the back of a wooden spoon and a lot of elbow grease! Peeling the paper off the block for the first time is always a magic moment as the picture is revealed, a mirror image of the piece of wood I have been carefully chipping away at for days.
I live and work in East Sussex and exhibit my pictures mostly locally, whilst also facilitating and teaching the occasional workshop through Blackbird Arts.
Nichola Campbell
Nichola Campbell works from her home studio near Lewes, inspired by the Sussex landscape and coastline which she conveys through the changing seasons using Indian Inks. She loves using this ancient water-based medium for its immediacy of application and powerful, sparkling colours.
A Crescent for a Queen
Ink framescape painting
32cm x 20cm x 4cm
£275
A THIN PLACE - CLACHAN SANDS
100cm x 100cm
Acrylic and mixed media on board
£2850
Susie Monnington
Evocative abstract paintings inspired by Outer Hebridean beach wanderings.
I never know what my paintings will look like. They emerge from an intense and focused practice, balanced with trying to be open to surprises, alert and ultimately inviting in a painterly playfulness: A found bottle top from the beach used to make marks suggesting bubbles in the sand. Seaweed crushed into sand to build texture.
Seaweed washed up on sand, deposited in lines resembling manuscript staves with dried kelp spore sacs, scattered like crotchets and quavers, pushed and pulled backwards and forwards with the tide’s ebb and flow. Shape-shifting sands blown across the shore by relentless winds. A never-ending dance along the shore.
Time marked out on rocks. Sometimes sanded and polished shiny smooth, sometimes geometrically precise with delicate traceries and occasional angry abstract gashes, scratched and gouged out like war wounds. A reminder of the sea’s power.
A sense of otherness, a feeling of being neither here nor there, a detached space in-between, that the Celts call A Thin Place - where heaven and earth collide.
Melissa Shatto
I am currently working to create art that is uplifting in a global community where we are nearly all connected and updated regularly regarding the many daily tragedies and travesties. We once needed artists to speak out and raise awareness of unrecognised injustices, but we now need art that inspires hope, joy, and serenity. The subtext of my work is increasingly about the physicality of materials in response to AI generated imagery challenging the value of visual artists. Untraditional processes of deconstruction and displacement combined with classical realism techniques and unexpected compositions yield works that are undeniably made by a human hand. The life drawing sessions that I facilitate, in Lewes and in Seaford, inform the figurative and observational aspects of my work that reside within pieces largely about colour, experimentation, and surprise. The combinations and explorations are a joyful Alchemy of Art Making.
Alchemy #1
Mixed media
31cm x 43cm
£245
John Ball
‘Looking at and painting detail in nature has always been instinctive with subject matter taken from the coast and the South Downs of Sussex and from the Undercliffs, a nature reserve in west Dorset.'
Eye of a horse (Halflinger)
Oil on panel
18.5cm x 24cm (framed)
£340
Medano
Mixed media on canvas
27cm x 27 cm
£250
Yvonne Coughlan
I am an abstract artist who works with mixed media, painting and print. I studied sculpture at Chelsea college of Art and have moved to making wall based textural and abstract work in the subsequent years.
I live and work in East London.
My work reflects differing strands of interest. I am very interested in making work that resonates through colour and texture and use paint as a surface rather than as a gesture. My work process is often an organic process that resolves in the dialogue of materials and colour and my emotional response to this process. I am still very drawn to sculpture and see this play out in the surfaces that I create.
I am influenced by different environments and landscapes that I have seen in my travels and how I relate to this varied geography and enormity of nature.
The lines we leave behind II
Acrylic on paper
41cm x 41cm (framed)
£365
Philippa Futrell
Having had a formative art education in Glasgow, I see myself as a colourist. After gaining my BA in Graphic Design from Middlesex I worked as a designer for two years before moving to teaching. A fulfilling career at Benenden School culminated with becoming Head of Department in 2015 and seven years later I retired to refocus on my own creative journey. As an artist keenly interested in the natural world, quiet wild edges are my preferred muse. Based in East Sussex, light, colour and textures drive my compositions. Painting in water based media is my preferred method, pushing boundaries between realism and abstraction, allowing the pigments to give me serendipitous discoveries. Using photography from local walks as an aid memoir my intention is for a progression from what is seen and observed to a more personal reality, recalling the balance achieved between nature and the man-made environments of farmland and coast with their wild corridors.
David Fowler
I have an BA(Hons) Graphic Design and MA Sequential Illustration & Design. I worked in commercial design and education for 40 years, as a Lecturer and Head of Higher Education. I have most recently exhibited with the ROI (Royal Oil Institute, London). I am primarily interested in the point between abstraction and representation. My work is in oil. I produce one painting a day - usually items that hold an interest for me - simple everyday objects.
Lemon 3
13cm x 18cm
Oil on Panel
£150
Suzanne Hennegrave
Suzanne Hennegrave is a contemporary abstract painter and art educator and the founder of Art Hub Lewes. She paints in acrylics, oils and mixed media, from memory and experience, and her work is developed using artistic intuition. Much of her inspiration comes from the beauty of her surroundings, living in the South Downs National Park. Her greatest loves are atmospheric weather and fleeting light and this she tries to capture in her work, through her own emotional response.
Together We Stand
Oil on board
44cm x 44cm
£350
Susie Hartley
Navigating shape, form and texture my sculptures represent and interpret the human form. My approach is expressive and I aim to celebrate the strength and beauty of the female form through my fragmented figures. Through arching and stretching the forms express tension and energy and I try to capture a sense of movement in the clay.
I draw inspiration from the antiquities and ancient fragmented sculptures, using the torso as my main focal point. The simplified forms and flowing lines are made from both life and from my own intuition.
Whilst studying for my Fine Art Degree at Canterbury College of Art during the 1980’s I learnt how to cast my work into a variety of materials including bronze. More recently I have focussed on working with ceramics in my studio in Lewes and enjoy experimenting with a wide range of glazes and oxides.
Lily
Unique ceramic torso with rich blue glaze mounted on steel
H32cm x W11cm x D12cm
£545
Neeta Pedersen
Danish/British/Indian artist Neeta Pedersen’s vision comes from her unusual heritage, her extensive travels and her rich visual imagination. She has studied film at the New York Film Academy and hold a BA (Hons) in Animation from the University of Westminster in London.
She has developed a very strong style of her own and has created a substantial body of original work expressing herself in many media including paintings, sculptures, digital art, animation and she uses her designs to produce bag, scarves, cushions and mugs.
Since 2006, Neeta has been working as an artist, illustrator, graphic designer and website builder. In February 2020 she became the owner and director of the Star Brewery Gallery in Lewes and has curated a wide variety of successful exhibitions by established and up and coming artists.
Key To Freedom
Giclee art print
A3
£95 (framed) / 75 (unframed)