Denise Franklin

Paintings

This year Denise is the winner of the Hugh Casson Drawing Prize at the Royal Academy for works on paper. This very prestigious award has an emphasis on drawing and is named after the former director of the Royal Academy who was also the director of architecture for The Festival of Britain, staged during the summer of 1951. Denise studied at Newcastle and lives and works in Hastings. She is a member of the Rye Society of Artists and has collaborated with Sarah Palmer, Sally Cole and is currently working on a project with Jane Beecham.

Her work is rhythmically meditative layering of line and tone, speaking at once of abstraction and of the infinitely subtle geographies of land and sea. Her intricate pieces are symphonies of calmness bringing symmetry into our busy lives. The mostly monochromatic works occasionally offer a glimpse of colour and texture. Her artworks have a dynamic movement and draw the eye to line or negative space within the works.

Sally Cole

Paintings

Sally’s paintings are a means of expressing what she feels to be the essence of the land.

She spends many hours working outside in all weathers, simply looking and making marks in her countless sketchbooks. Though she does not work directly from these visual notes, they are a necessary means of storing and holding ideas.

Going back through these sketchbooks she remembers the weather, the sounds and energy of the place, she will call on these sometimes-tenuous threads to help inform the work created in her studio.

Located in Hastings Country Park, her studio again gives her immediate access to a beautifully diverse landscape. She will often spend many hours sitting and contemplating the feel of the natural park right on her doorstep.

She also spends a great deal of time travelling and painting in Pembrokeshire, Wales, and New Zealand.

The quality of light, the scale and the sense of mystery and majesty in both Pembrokeshire and New Zealand continues to inform and excite her.

Melvyn Evans

Paintings and linocuts

Melvyn Evans the artist, illustrator and printmaker's bold lino-cut prints and paintings, feature seascapes and landscapes. Melvyn takes inspiration from the ancient natural elements of the British landscape specifically the Hitchen Stone boundary between Yorkshire and Lancashire.

A series of works including Stone Forest (2019) and Lost Land With Boat Form (2020) reimagine the fossilised ruins of a vast submerged area called Doggerland, where in around 6,500BC, rising sea levels flooded the area which originally connected Britain to continental Europe. Remnants can still be seen today at low tide in some areas particularly at Redcar beach.

If there’s one thing the work of Melvyn Evans conveys it’s his love for the British countryside. In both the representation of land and the sea, through a considered use of colour and shape, his paintings and lino prints embody a historic sense of place. They explore the bonds that exist between human endeavour and the landscape as a dramatic, natural backdrop.