CONTEMPORARY PAINTING
CONTEMPORARY PAINTING
24th June – 4th July
Opening: Instagram Live 23rd June 6 pm
.’YFRE’.
Stephen Watkins
Emma Fashokun
Weston Paints
TG Freeson
Lissa Arditi
Emily Martin
Damjana Jokity
.’YFRE’. @yanisfrere
“I’m a 27 year old French artist based in Paris, who works on visual connections between dreams, nightmares, and reality. I make paintings and prints by using photographs of my own body or anything interesting that I see outside through different filters, lights and framings. The angles and tricks that I use allow me to create landscapes, visual narration through scenes that involve sometimes multiple characters. It also could be a classical city or countryside landscape that I digitally modify.
In my paintings, the use of color ink is important. It allows the superposition of shapes, illusion of movements, adds some extra colors, and creates the strength of a dynamic composition. I have been influenced by great artists from the Symbolism period: Odilon Redon, Mikhaïl Vroubel, Gustave Moreau, Arnold Böcklin, and Fernand Khnopff (to name a few). The main topics you can find in my artworks are often about the afterlife, science fiction, spirituality and even politics sometimes. I propose a vision of an oneiric world with different codes, that involve elements from the real world.”
STEPHEN WATKINS @art_by_stephen_watkins
I am fascinated by the relationships we have to the important places in our lives. Life-changing events like proposals, new jobs, and even deaths become inexorably tied to the spaces where they occurred. You can tell the story of a person’s life with nothing but pictures of the places they’ve been. I find great personal satisfaction in helping my collectors celebrate these places in a way that brings them back into their lives. My work is typically done with acrylic brushes (not pens) on canvas, and my style is an homage to an older, now almost forgotten, style of architectural drawing that has since been replaced with computer generated images.
EMMA FASHOKUN @emfash
Emma Fashokun began her career as a fashion and textile designer, specialising in hand embroidery. After living abroad for many years Emma returned home to Cornwall. Known for its majestic coastlines, it was the scrubs and hedgerows of Cornwall that influenced her art. The last year of pandemic lockdowns and isolations have produced an intense series of work. Finding solace and peace in the woodlands, these pieces are a study in colour and optimism. Using a combination of contemporary painting, pencil work and embroidery these tree studies are intended to be immersive for the viewer. Her unique perspective and technique has created pieces that are both unique and yet strangely familiar.
WESTON PAINTS @westonpaints
“I was born in Hackney in London to a mum who painted murals all over my bedroom walls and a dad who was a traditional gilder and sign writer and painter of pub signs. Both of them have had a huge influence on my painting.
In this series of plants and foliage, I submerged myself in green for days, calmed in its hues, with oversized details of plants on a big scale, my mood lightened when blending the reds to pink tones and spreading them over the canvas, which I favour for its texture. I created these during lockdown, the plant life surrounding me as I worked and the leaves unfurling on the canvas in front of me giving me a sense of outdoors and escape, an egress from the concrete encompassing me. They are painted in oil paint, using palette knife, brushes and fingers, sometimes rags, to create different effects, and I worked for 5-9 hours at a time. I mix up my styles with defined lines, block colours and rough, liberal brushstrokes, or scuffed up blobs made with rags. Sometimes I use thick, layered, structural lumps of paint, other times thinning the paint with turps or linseed oil, using it like watercolour, drips and all.
I took inspiration from pop art, and rather than just painting plants as decorative objects, I wanted to humanize them, giving them character, they are my pets after all.”
TG FREESON @tg.freeson
TG Freeson’s representation of the world starts from the idea that the artist sees the world through a “shattered glass”; they see “how the light is fragmented by the shards” and represent it that way. The artist has an extremely meticulous artistic process. “First, I sketch the subjects with a black pen, then I use shadows to understand the ways they are, and later, I synthesise them to a single black line. After this process, I metaphorically shatter the object and imagine how light would interact with the shards, and I depict it that way”. TG Freeson believes that their art and art, more in general, should always convey a sense of sincerity. “When an artist represents their point of view without filtering their expression to be more acceptable, that is when art is created”. Through their art, TG Freeson moves away from “what is perceived as beautiful” and instead represents their subjective, sincere reality.
LISSA ARDITI @lissaarditi
“My art is the creative expression of how I feel about the world and existing. It offers a sense of honesty, freedom, and takes the viewer on a journey into the depth of the soul, symbolising and speaking to aspects of my personal experience and struggles. My art is my way of communicating with the outide world, the same world I live in, the same world I don’t quite understand yet.”
EMILY MARTIN @_emartinart_
Emily is a Scottish artist, based in London. “I love to paint my hometown, catching all the small details that makes the city beautiful. In this collection, I wanted to show how picturesque Edinburgh can be when bright and sunny but also capture the haunting nature of the city.”
DAMJANA JOKITY @damjanajokityartist
My work is done with faith that in every man the most valuable thing is his inner strength.
Expressive gesture and vivid colors testify about beauty and
Simplicity of emotions, an attempt to equate lived and imagined.
It speaks about the happiness that for me is a possibility to manage
Our own lives when we know who we are and why we exist.
The Brick Lane Gallery – The Annexe
93 – 95 Sclater Street | London | E1 6HR
IG: https://www.instagram.com/bricklanegallery/
