Artist of the Day 2024

25th Edition

As a tactile and intuitive painter, I translate the constant motion and visual disturbances of my sight through gestural marks. My work is about memory, perception, movement, and fragility. Never losing contact with the canvas, colours are blended until they become a hushed impression, details are made with fingertips or scrapes of a pallet knife. Often the viewer will detect the echo of a figure that was once there.
- Bianca Raffaella

I first saw images of Bianca's work when she applied for a place at TEAR (Tracey Emin Artist Residency). I immediately fell in love with her painting, something so strange and other worldly. I could tell immediately that there was something unusual and very sincere. It was only on meeting Bianca that I found out that she is partially blind, she paints how she sees, fragments of shape and light form a dappled surface of rich memories and emotions. Bianca's work is beautiful.
- Dame Tracey Emin DBE RA

My paintings unlock the linear structure of the grid. The freehand geometry attempts to discipline and battle against the emotion and movement brought by the use of colour, and the physicality of the brushwork. The limitless potential of this single compositional method allows me to explore the boundaries of colour, rhythm, and space. My engagement with the repetition of squares within squares is seeking to break down visual order and imbue it with a kind of chaos and poetry more akin to our experience of life. 
- Lucienne O’Mara 

Lucienne O’Mara is a brave painter, whose unabashed sense of color and expressive brushstrokes not only collide but often amalgamate with the loosely painted structure she puts in place on her surfaces. The grid, which consists of a conglomerate of individual rectangles or squares, is often rendered in shades of the same color and similar temperature. Placed within each unit we see quasi-geometric forms, painted with wide brushes that merge colors, wet in wet, and freeze the gesture of that moment forever. They pulsate and hover, emitting the light of an action now past, crystalizing the thought and feeling which prompted it within its delicate membrane. 

In her paintings we find echoes of Kandinsky, Albers, Hodgkin and Sean Scully. O’Mara takes the structure of the grid, thaws its confining quality by assaulting it with an emotional force that turns the painting into something sensual, and animate. 
- Liliane Tomasko

My work is characterised by an obsession with those twin disruptors born of Modernism, abstraction and collage. I like to play with the friction generated between these two modes. I try to make objects and images that are materially dense and brutal yet somehow remain delicate, ludic, poetic.
- John Bunker 

John Bunker is an artist, writer and curator who I admire greatly. He combines abstract painting and collage in a highly original way. I look at his artworks every day on my way to the studio. I love their thingness. John obviously has fun in his studio, obsessively making these beautiful and fascinating artworks.
- Sir Frank Bowling RA

My themes are juxtaposed between urban and rural motifs, 'method meets modernity', depicting city, country, and wildlife. Working in lino printing I create limited edition hand-burnished linocuts, all of which are printed by hand without using a printing press and are unique and special. I exercise a lively, free brushstroke in my egg tempera paintings, which complements my graphic approach to my practice.
- Paula Pohli

It was my son Vincent who first drew my attention to Paula Pohli's work which he showed in the gallery that he ran for a number of years in Westport, Ireland. Whilst stylistically very different from my own work, I was immediately struck by the authenticity of Paula's delicate, but intensely worked pictures of the barns and sheds of the rural environment in which she worked. In the best of these paintings, there is a tension between the man made and the natural world. She has carved out for herself a small, but particular space, a pathway left by a tractor, a field sown with corn, collapsing and dilapidated barns, incongruous signs in the countryside of human presence without anyone actually being present. Images of things that, most of the time, people do not notice, but are now drawn to our attention by this artist's work.  

When I thought of Paula for this exhibition opportunity, it occurred to me that her paintings could be given enough room to breathe and would benefit from the luxurious environment provided by the white cube that is the Flowers Gallery exhibition space. Paula's panels are painted in egg tempera, an ancient and unusual medium, which she prepares herself and uses with great virtuosity and individuality. This establishing of her own 'ground' so to speak is an important aspect of how a painter establishes their own identity and voice, how they distinguish themselves from all the other voices out there. These small, jewel-like paintings can have an intensity that makes them feel much larger than they in fact are. 
- Hughie O'Donoghue RA

I have always found that working as a painter has given me a focus, a link with nature and great strength. The interaction of meeting other people in the arts is rewarding and gives me a sense of belonging.
- John O'Donnell  

O' Donnell's work amazes through its power. And draughtsmanship, as in the paintings of people, add to this pure colour. How does he create gentle still-lifes of flowers or tender glimpses of Peckham? The brutality of his brush belies the soft mystery of a rare vision, so unlike contemporary figurative painting.
- John Lessore 

My shonky sculptures explore transformations that occur when forms are ‘dressed’. They combine an investigation into fashion trends and popular culture, with forms inspired by familiar, domestic relatable objects and personal memories. I combine found, donated or second-hand materials unsteadily, playing with elements of emotional resonance, humour, and precariousness.
- Bella Bradford

In my recent painting practise I have been growing and photographing my own flowers and using the bouquet as a stage or backdrop for an allegorical narrative. Drawing on the language of 17th century Dutch art with it's readymade gravitas, I add kitsch objects, fairies and animated vegetables. My cultural heritage is reflected in the paintings, a blend of cockney humour and Polish exotica influencing the work both atmospherically, emotively and aesthetically.
- Angela Lizon

Several years ago, Angela radically changed her work. I recognised this as both a brave, and for her, a necessary decision. Curiously, she seemed to emerge from this dramatic change almost fully formed, and since there’s been incremental adjustments as she’s gone along. The textures and layers of meaning in Angela’s work are interestingly delineated. There’s a celebratory element to her paintings - be it the technical issues of painting itself, or in the flowers of her most recent work (which she often grows herself) – but then there’s another thing; a darker yet witty undercurrent. I recognise Angela in it. 
- Stewart Geddes PPRWA

It would be fair to say that the recall of memories, ideas of time, and location as feelings or sensations are explored in my practice. There is an autobiographical push-pull of aesthetic sensibilities, where notions of East meets West are interwoven, explored, and played with: states of abstraction and figuration are in 'Superposition' or in 'entanglement', A mode by which I can explore and reconcile with my Anglo-Japanese heritage.
- Aethan Wills

Aethan Wills's work pushes the idea of abstraction, in a similar manner to colourfield painting, reflecting the memories and emotions of a moment in time. There is an investigation between figuration and abstraction - how does one reconcile with the idea of being in-between, and celebrate being uncertain, incomplete, with freedom.
- Victoria Cantons  

My artistic practice collapses the cosmic, the communal, and the individual. My recent work is inspired by fragmented memories from my childhood in Eritrea, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, and as a young woman in London. Capturing moments of liminality, I interrogate concepts of Western hegemonic "normalcy" and the innate human desire for boundaryless connection. Otherworldly energies vibrate through my work, creating landscapes of sensory ambiguity. The large-scale, vibrantly-pigmented paintings are meditative offerings for healing, ascendance, and exploration.
- Freya Tewelde

I've nominated Freya Tewelde for her remarkable talent in creating captivating practice, characterised by vibrant colours and dynamic patterns. Her pieces suggest the presence of hidden energies and cosmic influences, depicting an otherworldly realm inhabited by unique and fantastical beings. The video works feed onto the paintings and vice versa and are a testament to her unwavering dedication, evoking a sense of wonder and admiration in viewers. The Artist of the Day showcase at Flowers Gallery provides an ideal setting to honour her talent and experience the brilliance of her creativity within the vibrant gallery atmosphere.
- Barbara Walker MBE RA

The objects that surround me occupy a position of abstract autonomous plural thought. They explore what an object's potential is or what it could be. How it communicates, plays, discusses, learns, and becomes active. It is within these boundaries, where the sculpture tries to find itself, when gravity, weight and heat polarise fields of vision. The objects observe each other, they flirt with the organic and inorganic to investigate structural limits through the effects of time, temperature and balance.
- Nick Paton 

I asked Nick Paton, whose work, although very different from my own, shares a lot of the same themes. From worldbuilding to stages, folklore and ecology. Nick's work is delicate, mischievous and thoughtful. I enjoy the way he brings together different materials to compose curious installations. With his titles acting like charms that reveal an occult personal logic.
- Jessie Makinson