SOUTHBANK MOSAICS

Southbank Mosaics is a not for profit social enterprise bringing together world class mosaic artists such as Jo Thorpe, Tessa Hunkin and Susie Balazs with members of the general public.

Southbank Mosaics runs an “Open Studio”, where artists, volunteers, school students and active citizens are trained in mosaic design and then help us to make public realm art works. There are over 250 installations in central London: Westminster, Camden, Lambeth and Southwark, with most of our work being in the Southbank area.

SIRO CARRARO 

Siro Carraro is a London-based professional artist. In 2008, he graduated from Central Saint Martins with an MA in Fine Art. His works have been widely exhibited in the UK. In 2007, Carraro won the Boundary Figurative art prize and he was highly commended by the Nagoya University of Arts. He has also worked as a lecturer at the University of Brighton.

Carraro works from his sunny North London studio based in the famous Chocolate Factory.

The Artsist about his work:

“A painting is like a stage

The shapes are the actors

The colours are the costumes

The painter is the director

When actors and director

Work in perfect harmony

The stage becomes alive...

The same happens on a painting

When colours, shapes, balance

Work together, we create a fine painting. “

PAUL CUMMINGS & MARK CUMMINGS

Paul and Mark are esteemed artists based in London. The twin brothers career amalgamates shared ideas and they utilise their skills that lie in wide field of practices. Their work is dedicated to the relationship of magic and the occult in art.

Blake and the Beast

William Blake wrote the poem “The Tyger” in 1794, it was regarded in his time as very strange. When this poem was written it was most unusual for writers to show interest in wild animals. He was renowned for his philosophical and mystical undercurrents within his work. This was evident in the later years as he was an elected chief of a druid order. Blake’s imagination constantly saw natural objects in terms of their interconnectedness rather than their discrete separateness. The animal in some respect was seen as crude and vulgar, weighed by the physical and yet the form was majestic and sublime and demonstrated the beauty of creation.

The wolf, the goat, crow and dear are common motifs in the foundational mythologies and cosmologies throughout Eurasia and North America. The totemic value of these creatures aided shamans to seek knowledge and transformed spiritual experiences into non-ordinary reality by identifying with the spirit of these creatures. These sculptures offer up a modern visceral urban folk myth. Craft is aided by technology to afford a new status by providing a new kind perceivable reality. The homogeneity of geometrical forms lends itself to a virtual or nonphysical reality, similar notions that Blake embellished in “Tyger” poem. The lyric clearly implies that the same force (natural or supernatural?) lies behind the tiger and the lamb: “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?”

DANUTA HASINSKA

A lifelong passion for photography has been Danuta's key inspiration in producing this series of works that explore various themes. Since childhood she has been using a camera to highlight images that seek to express hidden depth, emotion and detail in everyday scenes and landscapes. In more recent years Danuta has given special names to each of her art projects. Over time these small projects have grown to offer a unique body of work and offer insights into a variety subjects. The Sari, Through The Window and My Place each focus on set themes and offer the viewer a personalised interpretation and a photographic experience..

Danuta about her inspiration by William Blake: “His works were sometimes considered mysterious, but he was immersed in his world, aiming to create the not immediately obvious... In a such a way I found some similarity as I am aware my abstract works are not for everyone, probably only for the individual who can try to look into him or herself. I intentionally try not focusing on the purely material life, and so feel I can convey much more from the photos. A kind of energy, different feelings or just nudge the viewer's imagination...”

SHAVKAT MURATOV

Shavkat is a London –based artist sculptor, a graduate from the Art Academy in Moscov, Russia. In 2003 he was awarded an RBA from the The Royal Society of British Artists Sculpture. “Majority of my pieces have grown from the notion of the universality of life and order within varying forms of life, has no real variety only differing levels of disorder or discontinuity. All living things have, by definition, their own energy and although they involve great structural variety of form, movement and energy are the essence of being. I have attempted to bring forms to their structural minimum and reconstitute the individual parts into collective in order to bring the universality of being from the collective unconscious into the consciousness of (those who interact with the works) the viewers. ” Says the artist about his work.

CURTIS RADCLYFFE

Curtis trained in film and photography and for many years worked as a film director. He is a graduate of the Royal college of Art with Ba (Hons) Photography and MA in Film. He conceived and directed two commercial feature films.

Curtis about his work: “Slowly my passion for stills photography has returned and now I found my way back into the art form. I'm interested in evoking the nonliterate, the resonances between, above and below. “

‘A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened’ – Camus.

MARCO ROSSATI

Marco Rossati was born at Reggio Emilia (Italy) in 1943. He studied at the “Istituto d’Arte” and at the “Accademia di Belle Arti” in Rome with Mino Maccari, Renato Guttuso, Franco Gentilini, Ferdinando Bologna. He later taught in the same Academy. During that time he met Giorgio De Chirico, whose art strongly fascinated him, and became his pupil for several years.

He went – and is – going through different artistic periods. During his youth, he engaged into ‘youthful’ iconographic experiences from surreal paintings, to a sort of metaphysical realism and well painted copies of beloved masters of the past, like Domenichino, Titian, Raphael, Leonardo, Philippe de Champaign, Lorraine, Metsis. From them he learnt their great technical knowledge.

In the seventies, Marco was already among the principal exponents of the Italian group “Arte Colta”. Such artistic movement, which was highly influential in Italy and abroad until the late eighties, sought to interpret in a contemporary way the interior forms and themes of the Italian art of '500 and '600. Marco also strongly felt the nostalgic need to get back to his metaphysical and originary inspiration, still never parting from a high quality texture of painting. This period started from the nineties and touches still our days: it includes paintings like “Il mancino pescatore di linee”, “Blue Circe”, “Pinocchio”, “Il tritone”.

From 2010, Marco is working on dreamy landscapes of his beloved Rome. They are very detailed visions of a Rome of marbles, stones and buildings corroded but, all the same, made precious from the centuries. Against this background pilgrims (that is the “romei”, singular “romeo”) and romans lose themselves, oppressed from the sultry heat of august and from the mystery of the invisible presences which transude from walls.

Many of his works belong to well known collectors (Bettino Craxi, Silvio Berlusconi, Rocco Barocco, Brian Sewell, Paolo Portoghesi, Claudio Strinati...) and museums. Marco also made paintings and sculptures of large dimensions in public and private buildings (New Municipal Stadium of Trieste, Casino of Sanremo, Palazzo Corrodi of Rome, New Head Office INPDAP of Rome, Carabinieri’s Barraks of Latisana (Udine), Acqui Terme (Asti), Pietrelcina (Benevento), Church of San Nicola in Carcere of Rome, City Hall of Licenza (Rome), University “Roma 3”, Rome...)

MARK SHEEKY

Mark Sheeky is a UK based self-taught painter and craftsman with a diverse range of skills. He runs his own sound effects library and compose music on commission for the computer game industry. As an artist he primarily paints oil paintings and design art objects, which include a variety of craft techniques from gilding and metal/jewellery work to plaster work, working with stone, wood, plastic resins and other materials.

Mark about his work: “As an eclectic artist; mystic, writer, printer, musician, William Blake naturally fits in with my ethos and we share many ideas on art and its philosophy. In 2012 I decided to illustrate Blake's Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience on a whim, and have assembled these into a book for this unique exhibition at Gabriel Fine Art. I took pains to keep the author's original text, retaining the ancient spellings and text as closely as possible.  I also created some works in pen and ink for this exhibition, inspired by Blake's vision of an angel in a tree, which I understand completely! This vision served as inspiration for a piece of music for string quartet which I composed for this event, and which now forms the soundtrack to a short video entitled "Science is the Tree of Death", also screened at Gabriel Fine Art as part of this exhibition.”

JO STARKEY

Jo is a self-taught artist, although she did do a BTEC art foundation course in Nottingham. She comes from an artistic family background and have always loved the arts in one form or another. A half of her education was spent at a ballet school in Surrey and the latter part at a state school in Nottingham, where she continued to juggle painting and dancing at the same time, until eventually her passion for art exceeded the love of dance.

Jo about her work: “I try and depict the essence of nature and its magic into my paintings, which are created using mixed media on silk, which is mounted on hardboard. I use the silk as a canvas and build up layers using lots of different materials, which give it a three dimensional effect. This is a process that I have developed over time and it really lends itself to the scenery that I paint.”

“I am so impressed at the sheer diversity of William Blake. Not only was he a wonderful artist and printmaker, but his poetry was also beautiful; he was multi-talented.  I think he was ahead of his time as he pushed all the boundaries in the face of adversity, which must have been very difficult for his era.  He was so dedicated to all his crafts which is admirable and truly inspirational.” Says Jo.

ROBERT STUART

Robert is an emerging self-taught artist, who went professional in February 2011.  He has sold a number of pieces to private individuals, including several commissions.

A self-taught artist, in 2012-13, Robert attended a course at the Prince’s Drawing School. In July 2012, he took a residency with Wycombe Environment Centre, where he has studio space, and teaches.

This is what Robert says about his inspiration by William Blake:

He who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments, and in stronger and better light, than his perishing mortal eye can see, does not imagine at all.

William Blake, quoted in Knight of the Living Dead

(Kathleen Lundeen) p.22 and other sources

“I am figurative artist for whom image making starts with a mark.  Whether the mark is formal (a straight line, say), or abstract (a smudged haze of charcoal swept across the page), here is a base for exploration, a hook to catch the web of imagined possibilities.

At first tentative, my marks explore the surface, teasing and testing the options. As the picture emerges, the marks get stronger, throwing up new and unlooked for ideas.  New tools and different marks are sought as the image collaborates in its own production.

The figures that emerge from this process have a spiritual or elemental quality; the character might be an angel or the embodiment of the wind.”