Painting is Now

KIMIYASU NAKAMURA

Kimiyasu Nakamura is a painter with a broad range of experience in architectural design, teaching, curating and exhibiting – utilizing painting, drawing, photography and sculptural maquettes. He won the drawing first prize at Wimbledon Art Studio for the 2004 MA Final Exhibition at Wimbledon School of Art. His current practice charts points in space, examining different approaches to the relationship between the artist and subject. Through the use of humour, memory and studied observation, he is engaged in both a philosophical and methodical investigation into form and space. Kimi’s artworks are based on a concept of Time and Space, with the most essential sense sight. The artist expresses his way of seeing as authentically as possible, recording a phenomenon of time in a place. As perception is elastic, Kimi tries to catch the state of its process, not a vision completed.

LYN LEMONT WEBB

Lyn Lemont Webb, a finalist in the Blind Art exhibition Sense and Sensuality showing at the Royal College of Art London, completed an MA in Fine Art Painting in 2004. A solo exhibition in June is planned for the Mezzanine Gallery at the New Zealand High Commission in London. Lyn is also working as Artist-in-residence at a school in Tower Hamlets for the St .Katherine’s and Shadwell Trust.
Her paintings are a systematic process of experimentation with materiality, surface and mark making, progressing with minimal intervention of hand or brush. The physicality of the gesture is accentuated by the larger size canvas which allows freedom of the body to create marks similar in size to the artist’s height and reach, referencing the tracing of the body through time. The work from 2004 was a tactile abstraction of the organic movement of the River Thames. This has progressed into paintings responding to the more immediate surroundings of Deptford Creek at a more emotional level.

MARTA CASTIGLIONI

Marta Castiglioni studied Fine Art in Italy for several years before coming to London, where she graduated in Fine Art (Painting) from Chelsea College of Art and Design in 2004. The final result of her work comes from a process of collecting images (memories), deconstructing them and melting them together into new images. The concepts come from sources collected by the artist from her background and have an autobiographical component. The images overlap each other and at times “accident “ has played an important role in assembling the images by creating an element of surprise. In order to create different textures and experiment with the paint itself, a variety of techniques are used, from silkscreen to drawing and painting, constructing a visual image based on layers of memories.

PHILIPPA RUSSELL

Philippa Russell graduated in June 2004 from Chelsea College of Art with a BA in Fine Art. She has been based in London since the 1980s, and has lived and worked abroad for a number of years in France, Italy and Japan. To date she has exhibited at Xhibit 03 at the London Institute Gallery, The Discerning Eye at the Mall Galleries, and shown work in several Group Shows at M-ART, Apart Gallery, The Red Gallery and The Toni Heath Gallery, before taking part in Painting is NOW. She started her postgraduate studies at Chelsea College of Art in January 2005.
“My work is inspired by the visual experience of being outdoors immersed in a landscape, directly from which I take photographs and sketch in watercolour and gouache. Back in the studio, I rework these initial sketches and photographs and paint an image that is essentially pared-down to form a basic language of lines, shapes and flat areas of colour whilst, hopefully, still retaining the atmosphere, space and light from the original experience. I aim to create a simplified representation of reality, which offers an instant visual connection with the landscape and a distillation of a personal experience through the manipulation of my sketches and the photographic record”.

SABI NORTH

Sabi North worked as a geophysicist in the Oil Industry before Studying Art. She completed her MA in Painting at City & Guilds London Art School in 2004 and had her first solo show at the Soho Theatre for Tamasha Theatre Company. She is currently showing at the Bettie Morton Gallery in Brixton.
“My work lies between the practices of Abstraction and Ornamentation and is influenced by both my Islamic sensibility, characterized by all over surface decoration and pattern and my Western art education, in terms of the theoretical and practical considerations I undertake whilst making it.
The surface of my large paintings is built up in layers, initially through dripping and splashing very freely and instinctively. This chaos is brought back to forms of order through a conscious and considered decision making process .The interactions of the different surfaces engage and entangle with each other creating territories of encounter awaiting discovery. Using similar principles, I make small, decorative work with doodles and drawings, continuous rhythmic lines, bifurcating patterns and organic flora and fauna. My enjoyment in making them is emotional, linking my love of colour, fabric, pattern and embroidery to the ritual instinct of craft and labour”.

TIZIANA MAZZOLI

Tiziana Mazzoli, drawer, painter and sculptor is one of the fast emerging artists in London. She completed her BA in Fine Art Sculpture at Central St Martins in 2000 and MA in Drawing at Wimbledon School of Art in 2004. Tiziana was invited by Anne Robinson to show at The Discerning Eye at The Mall Gallery in London as well as being selected for The Blind Art Competition Sense and Sensuality showing at The Royal College of Art. Future exhibitions include a solo show in Italy and her first solo exhibition at the Toni Heath Gallery in London where she will exhibit nearly two decades of her work.
Central to her own practice as an artist, is the notion of drawing as the quiet act of arranging and becoming something else. Tiziana is challenging the sensitivity and awareness of the way we look at the world by espousing a new philosophy, the purity of forms in movement and the tension which society imposes on the individual and communities as a whole. In using white ink and embossing and cutting parchment, the artist engages the issue of beauty and repugnance as a contradiction. Through a combination of painterliness and draughtsmanship, the drawings suggest elegance and delicacy, as well as producing mixed feelings of fragility and purity.