We also take great pleasure in introducing blissfully abstract painter: Greta Taxis, her deep love of nature shows clearly in her vivid canvases. She connects with both contemporary and ‘primitive’ expressions of the natural environment.

Another fresh talent, Judith Gait, plays tricks on our mind tempting us to fill in the gaps in spaces we cannot see. Shades of dark red and burnt sepia create and affect moods in her series of analytical still life.

Four new paintings were uploaded this week by Rebecca Fontaine-Wolf; her studies of femininity are showing a comfortable natural progression.

BP Portrait Award winner Peter Monkman has completed two new paintings, a considered continuation of his body of work. Gateway is a very interesting study, hinting perhaps at Colourist influences seeping into his future work?

But don’t take our word for it, see for yourselves!

I usually get up around 9am have a cup of tea, spend some time playing with the cat and then either go to the gym or straight into the studio.

2) Tell us about your studio or working space.    

I work from home which is very convenient on many levels. My studio backs out onto a roof terrace which becomes an extended working space in the summer.

Working from home allows me to work until late at night and also means I can go and do other things in between layers. When I shared a studio I used to spend a lot of time literally watching paint dry! I’d get to the studio, do half an hour of painting and find that I couldn’t carry on until the layer had dried – this would often mean waiting for hours or going home and coming back the following day. Having a studio at home removes this dilemma but it’s also quite isolated and means that I spend most of my time alone. Luckily I have my cat to keep me company while I work, but I do have to make an effort not to turn into a complete hermit.

3) Where do you find your inspiration?

There are obviously many artists and movements which inspire me. Art Nouveau, the Pre-Raphaelites, Austrian Academic painting, Klimt, Schiele, Doig, Bacon, Jenny Saville etc and quite often flicking through magazines and going to see exhibitions will give me ideas but often inspiration comes from the world around or events in day to day life. Last spring for example I just couldn’t get over how beautiful the blossoming trees were. They looked so impossibly perfect, almost unrealistic and I found that it made me feel elated and melancholic at the same time. I knew this perfection was so brief and fleeting and only a week or two later their entire glory would start falling apart. These blossoms truly inspired me, they made me more aware of my feelings towards beauty and the passing of time which highlighted the essence of what I am actually trying to capture in my work.

4) Where do you go to re-charge when you’re feeling uninspired?

I go to Munich to visit family about 3 times a year and i find that this distance from my day to day life usually generates fresh ideas. I also think that having a period of time in which I am physically unable to paint (due to the lack of studio space) makes me really look forward to getting started again when I return.

5) What can’t you get through the day without?

 Tea

6) How do you know when an artwork is finished?

I usually just know. Sometimes however it’s not that obvious and I have ruined quite a few paintings by not stopping in time. Sadly there are no hard and fast rules.

7) Do you feel an emotional attachment to your work? How do you feel about selling a piece and letting it go?

Some pieces feel like milestones which I can not part from, although sometimes I just need to hold on to them until the next one has been reached. In general though I have to feel happy with any piece in order to present it to the public to purchase, and if I feel happy about it there is always a certain level of attachment. As long as I’ve had a bit of time with the painting the joy of making a sale generally overrides this attachment. Obviously being paid is a part of this but it’s more because it means that someone else has formed their own attachment to it, sometimes even fallen in love with it, and this feeling makes it easy to let go.

Another element of this is that if the work is sold, and has effectively flown the nest it makes it easier to focus on the next generation of paintings and provides more motivation to look forward.

8 Can you remember when you realised you were an artist? Describe the moment if possible.

I have always fel that I would be in the arts, but the moment I realised I was a painter and that there was no other path I wanted to follow was after my graduation. I originally started studying Packaging design but immediately felt it wasn’t right for me and switched to Fine Art. I made the move to Fine Art primarily because I had no idea what I wanted to do and Fine Art seemed like the basis of all other artistic paths (at least I convinced myself that was the reason). Throughout my degree I hoped and waited for an epiphany to let me know what career path I should follow after my studies only to find it appearing loud and clear after I had graduated and didn’t have my studio space anymore. I realised I just didn’t feel right if I wasn’t painting and producing art.

9) When are you happiest?

There are many moments which could feature in this space, but one of them would be painting in the summer when I have the studio door open to the terrace with the sun and a warm breeze flowing in, the radio playing some good music and I feel like I am in the middle of creating something truly great!  The emphasis being on ‘feel like’. In hindsight I usually decide it wasn’t that great – but in the moment it feels like it is. 

10) How and when do you end the day?         

This varies hugely depending on whether I’m painting, doing my accounts, delivering artwork etc although I will almsot always stop to cook dinner around 6pm.

This article titled “Better by design” was written by Becky Sunshine, for The Observer on Saturday 8th September 2012 23.05 UTC

What did your front room look like 10 years ago? Probably mainly Ikea with a dash of Habitat. Hopefully the past decade has seen it flourish, find a little individuality, even some panache. If it has, you have British design to thank for that. The years have been good to our interiors as more individual but affordable furniture shops have opened up, the trend for upcycling and restoration has brought new life to old wood and metal and the tyranny of the mid-price high-street brands has been broken.

If you want to see the truth of this, visit this year’s London Design Festival. There are more than 300 designers and brands taking part in the event, and interesting furniture will be found in venues from Shoreditch to Mayfair.

The LDF has a residency at the V&A, with the museum hosting displays, talks and events. Trafalgar Square will be home to the Be Open Sound Portal – an art installation which creates a unique acoustic environment. There’ll be discussion and debate at Central Saint Martins, featuring top names in design, such as Tom Dixon and Thomas Heatherwick.

And, of course, there’ll be plenty of chances to lust after furniture – and even buy some. The main exhibition spaces where the furniture designers show their wares are 100% Design, Decorex International, Tent London, Super Brands London and Designjunction.

To celebrate 10 years of LDF, we’ve picked out five names who we think are the stars of the future. Check them out. Go to LDF: your front room will thank you.

For full listings of the London Design festival (14-23 September), go to londondesignfestival.com

Hugh Leader-Williams

Having newly graduated (with a First) this summer, Hugh Leader-Williams has already proven that he has a keen commercial eye. His Spun furniture range was designed using accessible materials and with easy production in mind. The sturdy and useful stools and tables are made from ash with spun metal tops, which connect with magnets – they’re pleasing simple and easily folded flat for transportation and storage.

He has already won three awards at the New Designers exhibition 2012: the 100% Design Award, the Made.com Award (the furnishings website will sell his pieces from March 2013) and the BCFA Lugo Award.

“New Designers was really positive for me,” Leader-Williams explains. “I was able to talk with lots of interesting designers and retailers, which boosted my confidence. It has convinced me to accelerate my ambition to launch my own design studio. This has always been something I hoped to do one day, but now seems like as good a time as any.”

Catch his work and that of his four fellow members of the Anvil Collective – all graduates from the same 3D Design course at Loughborough University – at Tent London as well as on a stand at 100% New Designers and at Made.com.

Buy it Spun furniture costs from £300 and will be available Made.com
Exhibition Tent London, Old Truman Brewery, London E1 (20-23 September)
Contact anvilcollective.com and tentlondon.co.uk

Kirath Ghundoo

“For the past two years I’ve thought a lot about challenging how wallpapers repeat and match up,” says surface designer Kirath Ghundoo, who has just been nominated for her Mix ‘n’ Match 11 mismatched wallpaper series at this year’s Elle Decoration British Design Awards. “Each roll is mismatched on purpose and without repeats, but always works together.”

At this year’s 100% Design Ghundoo will be showing her new digital printed bespoke wallpapers inspired by her love of architecture and fashion – a selection of made-to-order patterned papers, which drop, cut and match without wastage.

With an MA in textiles from Huddersfield University and recently completed commercial projects, such as the interior of a bar in Darlington, Ghundoo has her sights set elsewhere. “My dream is to collaborate with Matthew Williamson,” she admits. “I have a passion for interiors, but what I do is applicable to any surface. I’d really love to do prints for him. I’m a huge fan.”

Buy it Bespoke wallpaper from £200 per 10m roll, plus the commission
Exhibition Emerging Brands at 100% Design, Earls Court, London SW5 (19-22 September)
Contact kirathghundoo.com

JiB Studio

“My initial inspiration for Credenza O came from the sporadic assortment of plants and pots at home,” explains London-based Korean designer Je-Uk Kim, founder of JiB Studio and creator of the Credenza O planter unit with beautiful vessels handcrafted by ceramicist Sun Kim. “It got me thinking about furniture with storage function behind the doors and also a surface for plants, books, objects.”

Having lived and worked in London for six years following studies in the US, Denmark and the Netherlands, Kim can’t decide where his clean aesthetic and logical approach to design came from. “Most of my formal architectural education and career has been based elsewhere, but my cultural background is Korean. Some have told me the Credenza looks Korean, others say Scandinavian or European.”

Up next is a live/work project for an artist in Kangwon-do, Korea, consisting of a house with a small gallery space, a café and a barn.

Buy it Credenza O costs from £4,200 (£6,200 with ceramics)
Exhibition Emerging Brands at 100% Design, Earls Court, London SW5 (19-22 September)
Contact jibds.com

Lauren Davies

Lauren Davies is food obsessed. So when the RCA design product student was offered the chance to participate in the American Hardwood Export Company’s project to create a chair for an exhibition at the festival, she quickly found a link to cooking.

“I noticed so many of the American hardwoods we were working with are connected to food production: maple, hickory, oak, cherry, walnut and so on,” she says, “So I explored the idea of using food preservation techniques, such as pickling, smoking on wood and food dyes to flavour the wood.”

The result is original and charming. Made with the help of Windsor chair specialists Sitting Form and furniture-makers Benchmark, the Leftovers chair looks great but also addresses wood sustainability and food wastage. “I’m excited by that dialogue and see that as a new direction for me. I’ve found my niche with this project. I’m thinking of applying these techniques to other surfaces, perhaps textiles.”

Buy it The Leftovers Chair is made to order
Exhibition Out of the Woods: Adventures of 12 Hardwood Chairs, V&A, London SW7 (14-23 September)
Contact pillowstream.com

Samuel Wilkinson

Best known for winning last year’s D&AD Black Pencil and London Design Museum Design of the Year 2011 for Plumen 001, a clever reworking of the energy-saving bulb, Samuel Wilkinson, a graduate of Ravensbourne College, deconstructs common objects to find intuitive functional solutions and give them a new look.

“I love the challenge of looking for a unique approach and hopefully I then create products that not only look good but function well,” he says. His new Mantis desk for furniture brand Case is just that: its main function is to hide away unsightly cables, and accommodate files and a laptop, which disappears into a drawer – and yet it remains a clean, elegant piece of furniture.

Expect to see the new baby version of Plumen 001 bulb, which launches this month, in various spots around the festival. Wilkinson has also donated two unique products for the Maggie’s charity auction at Designjunction, one of which is special laser-etched Mantis desk.

Buy it The Mantis desk, from £850, available from casefurniture.co.uk
Exhibition Designjunction at the Sorting Office, London WC1 (thedesignjunction.co.uk) 19-23 September
Contact samuelwilkinson.co.uk

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Reading this article bought to mind New Blood Art artist Gareth Buxton – who after a near head-on collision with a large truck in 2004, decided to devote himself to his art. Surely symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s advice to artists is timeless counsel:  ”don’t paint the thing itself, paint the effect it produces” …

This article titled “Van Gogh to Kandinsky: Symbolist Landscape in Europe 1880-1910; Edvard Munch: Graphic Works; Picasso and Modern – review” was written by Laura Cumming, for The Observer on Saturday 4th August 2012 23.05 UTC

There is a painting in the Scottish National Gallery so ominous one cannot immediately shrug off the memory. It shows a grey stone colonnade in some nameless place stretching away into infinity. An esplanade on the right is depthless and deserted, more like dark water than land. The interior of the colonnade is an open tomb. The painting puts you on the spot, confronts you with its eerie perspective beneath a rain-laden sky that is not quite day and not quite night. But where exactly are you?

This startling watercolour is by the Belgian artist Léon Spilliaert. It was painted in 1908 in Ostend. You might wonder, as some have, whether it has something to do with those murderous times, when millions of Africans were slaughtered during Leopold I’s reign in the Belgian Congo. And perhaps it carries deep overtones of horror and sorrow.

But it may also come from Spilliaert’s own experience as a chronic insomniac who walked the streets of Ostend by night to distract himself from the pain of a stomach ulcer. His scenes are silent, monochromatic, empty of all human presence except his own wretched solitude; this is the art of a noctambulist.

Spilliaert’s work is not often seen outside Belgium. Indeed many of the names in the tremendous Van Gogh to Kandinsky: Symbolist Landscape in Europe 1880-1910 may be unfamiliar, since symbolist art of any sort has had mixed fortunes, and symbolist landscapes in particular. Indeed this is the first pan-European show, to my knowledge, and not the least thrill of it is the sight of the continent stretching out before you, from the Scandinavian fjords to la France profonde, from the ravines of Mallorca to the dark forests of Bavaria.

The facts of a landscape are never supposed to be the point for these artists – “don’t paint the thing itself, paint the effect it produces” wrote the symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé – but one cannot help relishing the sight, and not just the sense, of place; the lakes of Finland, bright as mirrors, and the blue snows of the Eiger even in high summer.

As for the effect produced, it is almost overwhelmingly intense. More than a hundred paintings have been borrowed from museums across Europe, including masterpieces by Van Gogh, Munch, Arnold Böcklin, August Strindberg and James Ensor, and the mood plunges and soars by the room. It rises to ecstasy with Ensor’s great vision of Christ Calming the Storm, in which sea and sky appear to unite in radiant meltdown; and it sinks into the most plangent gloom with the German painter Franz von Stuck’s Evening Landscape, in which dark trees glower against the fading twilight.

Light, to adapt Manet, appears to be the main protagonist of the symbolist landscape. Indeed it is hard to see what else connects the works in this show. Symbolism is such a vague term – especially when it is made to stretch all the way from the Victorian visions of GF Watts to Paul Signac’s pointillist arcadias – that it may be worth ignoring altogether in Edinburgh. It is self-evident that these landscapes are more than descriptions; that you’re not just meant to admire the view.

But while it may be very clear that Léon Bakst’s aerial view of an Aegean archipelago struck by lightning while a Greek statue breaks into a sinister grin must have the decline and fall of ancient civilisations in mind, it is less obvious that Spilliaert’s art can be understood in terms of colonial politics. German symbolism, for instance, is routinely diagnosed as a reaction to Bismarck’s modernised materialist state, but that doesn’t begin to explain the immense variety of these German landscapes, from von Stuck’s opalescent puddles at dusk to the island graveyards of Böcklin.

There are some real surprises in this exhibition. The reclusive Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi, master of the mysterious interior, steps out into the streets of Copenhagen to paint Amalienborg Square in the queerest of filtered brown shadows: out of time. There are passionately beautiful treescapes by Mondrian before he turned to abstraction. August Strindberg’s harried surfaces seem to prefigure the art of Anselm Kiefer just as surely as many of the artists in the Silent Cities section get there before Giorgio de Chirico.

And there is a show within a show here, as well – a survey of landscape painting at its wildest. Vertical versus horizontal, near against far, the effects of close-up and cropping, of vantage points high above, or way below, with a disappearing horizon or a double focus or no focus at all; it is a masterclass in radical landscape painting.

These are pictures to send shivers down the spine, and even to fill one with dread, above all in the case of Edvard Munch. In Winter Night, the great shape-maker coins a bat-black tree with its branches out-flung like a cloaked figure before an immense frozen waste as night falls. The tree is as frightening as the dying light: will we get away before darkness overwhelms us?

The Scream counts, I suppose, as a symbolist landscape plus figure. It is also on view in Edinburgh in the form of a hand-coloured woodcut in Edvard Munch: Graphic Works From the Gundersen Collection at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Munch’s prints are as articulate as his paintings – sometimes more so – and this show of 50 works goes as deep, in its incisive way, as the superb tribute to the exuberant old miserabilist currently on show at Tate Modern.

The big festival show at the SNGMA, Picasso and Modern British Art, originated at Tate Britain in February. It is more successful in Edinburgh than it was in London. This is not simply because the rooms in Edinburgh, with their natural light and human proportions, are a better place to look at paintings than the subterranean galleries at Millbank, but because this version is so well edited.

The idea is to look at three artists who paid sharp attention to Picasso without being overwhelmed – Wyndham Lewis, Francis Bacon, David Hockney – plus several more who fairly swooned. In London the comparison was often cruel, but some of the weaker painters (the Bloomsburys) have been cut back here and the main trio given much clearer representation. The show becomes a concise evolution of British modernism in which the influence of Picasso now looks more like learning and less like theft.

Picasso himself springs alive in zany photographs and drawings from the collection of the British surrealist Roland Penrose at the SNGMA, and, of course, in many stunning pictures, including the Tate’s Three Dancers and his beautiful portrait of Marie-Thérèse Walter in blue moonlight. It is also excellent to see those two Scottish mavericks, the Roberts Colquhoun and MacBryde in the cubist context. Look out for MacBryde’s aggressive cucumber and apocalyptic, wild-eyed kipper.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

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This article titled “Portrait of the artist as an older man – this time with a pension” was written by Julia Kollewe, for The Guardian on Friday 18th September 2009 23.05 UTC

When entrepreneur Moti Shniberg asked one of his artist friends how he expected to send his child to college, the artist responded by asking him to buy some of his work. “That’s when he realised that artists don’t do financial planning,” says Pamela Auchincloss, chief executive of the Artist Pension Trust (APT).

Shniberg’s exchange with his friend marked the birth of the APT, an investment scheme that provides artists – many of whom struggle to make a living, let alone plan for retirement – with some financial security in old age.

When the scheme was first set up five years ago in New York, its prospects were dim. Could the concept – a mutual fund in which artists invest in their own future – take off? Yet it has, and the APT now operates eight trusts in 60 countries. Some 1,100 artists have deposited 4,500 pieces, with a total value of about $50m (£30m).

From the outset it had some of the big guns of the art world supporting it. Former San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum director David Ross provided the art expertise, while Shniberg and economist Dan Galai ensured it had a firm financial footing.

To participate in the scheme, artists invest 20 works over a 15- to 20-year period. The artist remains the owner of his or her works, which are held in the trust’s possession until they are sold. Once the artworks are sold, each artist receives regular annual payments: 40% of the net proceeds from the sale goes to the artist; 32% goes into a pot from which the artists receive a pro-rata share linked to their investment; and 28% is retained by the APT to cover its costs and distribute among its 120 financial backers (who have provided $10m in funding so far). The 28% equates to a 0.6% annual management fee over the 50-year life of the fund.

Aimed at emerging to mid-career artists, the APT has some high-profile artists on its books such as Jane and Louise Wilson, Mike Nelson, Goshka Macuga and Richard Wright, who have all been short-listed for the Turner prize.

Each trust must recruit 250 artists before it can sell any art but membership is not open to everyone, with participants hand-selected by the APT’s art specialists.

Galai, an economist specialising in risk, worked out the basic return structure based on the Mei Moses Fine Art Index. Assuming an annual 15% increase in the art’s value and an initial average value of $5,000 to $10,000 per piece, he estimates that payouts to artists could total $500,000 to $1.5m each.

The venture has reached a crucial stage: the New York trust is the first to close to new members and will start selling art next year. It’s about time – Auchincloss admits she gets phone calls from artists asking when they are going to get their first cheques.

The trust does not worry about artists leaving when they become famous. Ross once said if that happens, APT would throw a party, because it would have accumulated several works whose value had suddenly jumped. Once invested, art cannot be retrieved.

The London trust has signed up 175 artists and is expected, along with Berlin and Los Angeles, to close by the end of 2010. The APT is already planning the next generation of trusts, with four covering Europe, the Americas and east and west Asia. For these the investment period is to be shortened to 10-15 years.

Many other plans are under discussion; for example, the APT – which is owned by MutualArt, a holding company – is considering a stockmarket listing to tap into the appetite for art investing, which is seen by some as more resilient than other investments.

A more radical plan, advocated by Auchincloss, is to turn the venture into a “fully integrated financial services company” offering loans, mortgages and financial advice to artists. “I’d call it the APT bank – although everyone says don’t call it a bank,” she says.

Case study: Trusting in an investment for the future

Scottish artist Duncan Marquiss, 30, joined the Artist Pension Trust in 2006 after being approached by Kay Pallister, then director of the London fund. They had known each other since the 2003 Venice Biennale, where his work was shown in the Scottish Pavilion co-curated by her.

“When [the trust] first approached me, it sounded like quite a strange thing,” he recalls. “But as Kay was involved, that gave it some legitimacy. I went and looked at other artists who were participating and I knew a lot of them. That reassured me.”

He was attracted to the scheme because it allows him to build up a collection of his work that will be stored securely. “It’s a way of archiving work,” he says, “another platform for people to know about your work, and it will hopefully sustain my practice.” He thinks it’s not very different from working with a gallery, which typically take a 50% cut on art sales.

He is looking forward to the financial benefits. “It is offering some kind of structured investment for the future. There are quite a lot of good artists involved. I would be surprised if their art didn’t sell.”

So far, he has deposited a drawing and five video works, including Clay Wall, a 12-minute video made at a cost of £13,000 (subsidised by the Arts Council).

Marquiss is represented by Dicksmith Gallery in London and Galerie Peter Kilchmann in Zurich. He hints at potential conflicts when it comes to choosing work to put into the trust: “Galleries want as much work as they can get; they run a business.”

He supplements his income by playing guitar in Glasgow’s Phantom Band. “I see [APT] as some attempt at planning for the future, which is very hard to do for an artist. Your income is erratic.”

Is it a safe investment, and if so how do I join?

• Who can join the Artist Pension Trust? Artists are selected by curatorial committees. They are usually invited, but can also approach the trust directly and then be assessed by its art experts.

• Must an artist have sold a certain number of works in order to be considered? No. Selection is decided by the view of the “highly qualified art professionals who serve on the curatorial committees”. Sometimes the APT takes people straight out of college if they show a lot of promise.

• What are the benefits of investing in the APT? Participating artists will get regular annual payments once the trust starts selling artwork. The art will be sold when the time is right. There are no up-front costs for the artists, and APT membership raises their profile. Unlike a gallery, APT will not drop artists if their work does not sell.

• What are the drawbacks? It will take several years before artists start reaping financial benefits. Each of the eight trusts will only start selling when it has reached full capacity of 250 artists. The more successful artists inevitably end up subsidising less successful ones. But it is possible to leave the trust. Artists who leave will still benefit, on a pro-rata basis, from their past investments.

• How risky is the investment? There is no formal regulation, and no one will be able to seek compensation for “mis-selling”. But it is unlikely the APT will run off with the art, as the art world is a close-knit community.

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We are so excited to have discovered Olga Noes! Watch her creating Contemplation by clicking on the link: Contemplation

What a treat to make this visit and to see the depth and clarity with which these artists work. It is evident that a deep philosophical research underpins studio practice here, which – combined with a strong emphasis on technique, makes for work with gravitas. The space itself had a powerful creative energy and strong sense of community.  The trip has whetted our appetite to venture to other Eastern European Art Colleges. We hope to bring you work from our new friends in Berlin soon – we will keep you posted.

And while this strange alchemy delights, the Glasgow degree show this year was marked by how distinctive each artist’s work was, how particular, even when a shared brief could be traced between rooms.

In an early room, David Sampethai, who has been chosen for the Royal Scottish Academy’s New Contemporaries Exhibition 2013, showed multi-disciplinary work that also had a primitive, folk aesthetic and an outsider art attitude – two preoccupations that are rarely combined. What made them cohere here was a kind of imaginary topography, an anthropological mining of a fictional ‘Interzone’ (one thinks inevitably of Tarkovsky). The space contained Interzone objects, large-scale prints, audio guides, and postcard size pieces, which could have worked simply as exercises in colour had they also not shown such intricate depictions of mysterious narrative import – all mounted beautifully in a kind of rough and clinical categorisation. Hallucinogenic, the resultant effect was of the material remnants of a very personal mythology.

Work by David Sampethai

Multi-disciplinary work was not as fervent at Glasgow, in comparison to last year’s degree shows, where it took a very brave student indeed who showed work in only one medium. Kate MacKay‘s subject was the disregarded and unattended, and alongside a photograph and a poem, she built a plant bed that ran along one wall.

Work by Kate MacKay

A special mention must go to Louise Malone‘s simultaneously ethereal and robust installation made from the most banal and profligate of materials – plastic bags, filled with water. The installation was shaped by organic forces, and transformed incrementally by natural light. An arrested waterfall, or a host of regimented jellyfish – possible resemblances were many and quick to come to mind, each time folded back into the sheer physical presence and gravitas of the work. It seemed strange that something so fragile could be so potent, even muscular.

Work by Louise Malone

This achieved lyricism could also be found in Anne Broe Kristensen‘s series of photographs, which found an intimacy and a poignancy in that most over-told of stories, the relationship between two people. The series had a ‘secretiveness, silence, sadness’, the most wonderful photograph being when the photographer made a vast desert of a rumpled bed. This image showed what photography can do at its best, awakening us to that which is hidden in clear sight, a vignette of the unsaid.

Andrew Black, Bradley Davies and Sumin Bak all used disruptions in distinctive ways. Black perhaps took this to the furthest extreme, with a high level of technique occluded by radical cutaways in the surfaces of the work. Bradley Davies disrupted a seemingly denotative painting with a splendid breach of blue. Sumin Bak‘s paintings managed to be both radically obscure, and somehow architectural (hints of military aircraft could be made out) as if they were the subjects of some mysterious but rigorous elision. Her disruptions were strange and unfamiliar, not all the fashionable obscurity that hides a failure to make choices.

Work by Peter Yxell

Both Petter Yxell and Karen Grant used the influence of other artists in interesting ways. Yxell’s work nodded to Rachel Whiteread, though vastly reduced in scale. A solid Jesmonite cast of a perfectly proportioned miniature building could be viewed through a transparent life size cast of a lap top made from polyester resin, though the words there inscribed ’through these words I remember the now’ seemed more a testament to radical concision and evocative power, as well as the limitations, of one of the oldest technologies – writing. In one painting Karen Grant‘s work evoked Paul Klee, but transformed the markings characteristic of him, playing between what could be read as simply a happy accident of perspective or the coercing of them into signifying – all within the framework of a figurative painting that seemed to have a dialogue at its heart.

Xiao Wang explored abandoned spaces, which bordered on the apocalyptic, with crisp white lines showing a Pop Art heritage (in particular Patrick Caulfield) and which brought out the endangered structure of the buildings, while other parts of the painting were more akin to Gerhard Richter’s blurred filmic style. Mixing painting techniques was very effective in creating paintings that were simultaneously lucid and shadowy. There was also some sense of being at the limits of the land in Qiheng Liu‘s distinctive paintings, which seemed both frank and open in their presentation of self, while also depicting a strange disembodied doppelgänger who attended to the figure of the artist in bizarre ways. Most wonderful of all was a painting of a radiator placed at a distance dictated by habit, just so, a very human arithmetic.

Work by Sally Webber

Sally Webber paid tribute to Eva Hesse and Carl Andre in her pitch perfect space. Displaying a delightful aesthetic insubordination, Webber‘s work was simply beautiful, and was made solely of industrial found materials.

Work by Sally Webber

Robin Everett, already a prize winner, and with work purchased by the Friends of GSA, produced some of the most intelligent landscape painting I’ve seen. They seemed to be composed of a variety of techniques, including silk screen, and showed undulating planes, the effect of the wind on the landscape, and could be misty while being also startlingly crisp and lucid in places, having what Francis Bacon admired in a Van Gogh painting, ”the violence of the grass”, and achieving that ”shorthand of sensation” that was the intention of Bacon himself. It is truly something to marvel at, that the painter can so often give the painting up to the facts of the material, to gamble so often with chance, and yet the painting still coheres; this kind of felicity shows that something is on Robin Everett‘s side.

Work by Robin Everett

Lisa Schmalstich‘s paintings were truly brilliant, in both the qualifying and literal senses. Showing a long immersion in art history, especially the old masters and with hints of the baroque, the artist showed paintings that were alternately burnished and glowing, for example one in a burning orange – the sun’s swan song – while others seemed ghostly. One painting would suggest a 17th century drawing room, another would present the matter of factness of a single sheet of paper. This technique of presenting, as if woven in a plait, two stylistic threads, put the decision making process about subject matter at the forefront. All faces, it suddenly dawned on one, were intimated. These paintings are in actuality abstract, very abstract, except the minute you turn away they are figurative. The eye, or the mind’s eye, informs them fondly and instantly.

Work by Robin Everett

Over at the Glue Factory for the MA, Claire Moore‘s textured and rich paintings in oil and sometimes wax, managed to present an epic historical narrative in a cinematic way, in moments. The artist explored the possibility, the hope, that painting might act as a cultural memorial; made more poignant by the fact that the paintings seemed already to have some intimacy with decay.

Work by Claire Moore

Work by Claire Moore