I can’t really put my finger on what it is I like about Sangram Majumdar’s work. There’s a vibration in the crisp areas of flat colour that come together to form images of an intriguing psychological quality.
Stylistically there’s something of Euan Uglow in the careful delineation and measurement. But while I often find Uglow’s compositions lacking in anything of interest beyond surface quality, Majumdar’s seem to have a particularly curious atmosphere.
His work in charcoal is equally fascinating. They capture moments of intense business, but rather than doing so in an ethereal impressionist way, they crystalise them with a variety of sharp clarity and murky obscurity.
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Landscapes time. This time it’s the watercolours of Joseph Zbukvic. I’ve no idea how to pronounce his name, but I know i love his work. I hold in high regard any painter who can show the over-painted subject of Venice in a way that makes me look at the city afresh. He’s not limited to Venice though, with work covering both urban and rural environments.
A sense of atmosphere is combined with visually absorbing compositions, which have a brilliant sense of focus that keeps you looking around the image, stopping here and there to admire the variations between a broad and tight focus.
A low chroma keeps his colours harmonious and avoids the common pitfall of the brightly coloured touristy images of Venice. Like Whistler’s etchings of the place, one gets a sense of the artist’s fascination with the light around him, rather than a postcard-type image that is peddled to the millions of tourists.
Gallery at Melbourne Fine Art
Gallery at Artists Realm
Gallery at Greenhouse Gallery
A couple of years ago Frances Bell won the De Laszlo Prize for Best Portrait by an under 35 year old from the Royal Society of Portrait Painters. She’s a certainly a painter to keep one’s eye on.
She trained in Florence at Charles Cecil Studios where she has also taught sporadically. This training means a focus on painting from life ’sight-size’ in the tradition of the great portrait portrait painters in Britain in the 18th century, such as Raeburn and Lawrence.
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Jeffrey Hein’s work is utterly modern and utterly traditional. Design, colour and focus describe his work fairly nicely. His work consists largely of figures, often in coloured sunglasses, on an abstract background, painted with great sensitivity
Lately his work has been exploring new directions, becoming darker and moodier with less of the early abstractions.
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Blog
Interview
Howard J Morgan is often called a portrait painter, being a member of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, and having completed commissions of numerous noteworthy figures. However, his work is a great deal more varied than the title might suggest, and even his portrait work has the appearence of the artist painting a person that interests him, rather than creating a happy likeness on demand.
A certain adeptness in the way he controls thick juicy wiggles of paint to create clear lively forms makes one think of something between Hals, Sargent and De Laszlo but with such a contemporary spirit. Images of parties, hippies, beaches and strange semi-magical scenes make up much of his work
Unfortunately his website is woefully inadequate if one wants to look at images of his work bigger than a credit card, so one has to search around the web. Really though, seeing his work ‘in the flesh’ so to speak, is the only decent way to see his work. Smallish exhibitions happen occasionally, and his work crops up in group exhibitions every now and then.
Website
*Appologies for not having posted in so long. Summer travels have distracted me (very nicely!)
Frank Mason is something of a creative powerhouse. Now aged 87, he has had a remarkable career, putting his brush to almost any subject. From portraits of the great and the good, through still lives and landscapes, to vast neo-baroque religious compositions. A number of great commissions have given him the opportunity to really stretch his abilities. A commission in Venice resulted in him being rewarded with the Cross of Merit from the Order of Malta. All this work has been done with virtuosity.
He is known to many primarily as a teacher at the Art Students League of New York, where he has taught countless painters.
His work is very much in the baroque sensibility, with flare, dynamism and vibrancy. This big dramatic style can be a little overbearing, so it is his drawings that I personally find most interesting, though I encourage you to survey his great sprawling oeuvre.
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Alison Lambert creates large oversized drawings of heads in a technique fairly unique to herself. Drawings are created, torn, covered, redrawn, pasted over, redrawn until a very compelling palimpsest of hours and hours of drawing is formed.
The resulting work is powerful, raw and has a psychological impact that comes from a wonderfully paradoxical mix of both frailty and brutality.
Her work has improved over the years, becoming increasingly sophisticated, showing depth beyond simply an interesting technique. My fear is that she will repeat herself ad nauseam.
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