Top 50 London Artists and their Featured Art

I am a young contemporary painter specializing in oil paints. Having been born in London into a creative family, I was able to experience the artistic presence in the capital. I think I became more connected with the arts as my mother, sister and I suffered massive financial insecurities which cropped up when I was a young child and have persisted ever since. I was awarded a Scholarship that enabled me to study at Chelsea School of Art, University of the Arts London and explore my creative path. My primary practice involves figurative paintings while attempting to make homemade oil paints. My work looks at nature and society throughout history to the modern day; women and nature go back centuries, as does the prioritization of ‘masculine’ culture over ‘feminine’ nature. From my dissertation, 'Thinking about women’s rights through Masaccio’s ‘The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden’ (1426-1427)', the story of Adam and Eve was reflective of the social practices throughout time. Eve represented female humanity, and her act gave men the excuse to look down upon, condemn, and even discriminate against most women in their lives. My work circles around this idea and endeavors to try and change this view, which has seen too many women suffer even into the current. By reclaiming the image of my body and drawing parallels between its submissive form and the pliancy of mother nature, I aim to reassert the importance of ecofeminism and the role the female body plays in the perception of Earth’s value.

Saoirse Egan is a Printmaker and Illustrator who recently graduated from The University of the Arts London. Her work responds to her fascination with the strange, with recent focus points being scandal and voyeurism. She creates visual cabinets of curiosities which showcase the light side of these dark topics, using colourful, graphic, and sometimes humorous motifs within her compositions.

Lily Hargreaves paints scenes from an alternate timeline, her canvases inviting viewers out of their world and into one that parodies, probes, and pulls at the seams of contemporary institutions. By constructing a world of intense detail, Hargreaves exploits the omnipotence of the artist, mapping her characters’ reactions as they negotiate warps in seemingly fixed ideas like time and reality to discover new, unburdened modes of existence. Although contemporary in its concerns, her imagery is often historically inclined, playing with ideas of linearity and cyclicism as threads of past, present, and future entangle. This allows for an expanded and experimental approach to storytelling, with characters and places appearing and reappearing through different tangents of what could be a never-ending series. The project exists as a sort of Ergodic literature, individual compositions overlapping to produce dense tableaux wherein every element is imbued with symbolic importance. Hargreaves’ theatrical approach to the installation of her paintings prompts a viewer to play an active part, investigating the images for clues from which to build their own narrative and, in turn, meaning. Overall, she celebrates the transcendent freedom of the imagination not only as a momentary escape away from a 21st century in flux, but also as a place to manifest new realities.

Holly Brodie is a landscape painter based in suburban West London. She was brought up in rural Somerset and studied English at Oxford University (1998-2001) where she was encouraged to explore connections between literature and art, which continue to influence her practice. As an artist, she is self-taught. Working in oil and taking full advantage of its slow-drying properties, Holly makes it up as she goes along. The results can be unexpected, even surreal. Animals feature frequently and people occasionally. Narratives are suggested, but open to ongoing interpretation. Holly’s work has been exhibited at the Mall Galleries, the Royal Academy, Somerset House and the Royal West of England Academy. She won The Winsor & Newton Painting Award at the Royal Society of British Artists Annual Exhibition 2014 and was invited to demonstrate at Art in Action in 2015.

Jade Connolly (b.1998) Blackburn. Currently living in London. Jade Connolly deals with the dynamics of interior space and is interested in the passages, rooms, and transitional spaces within the inhabited home. Her work investigates psychological spaces and explores the meanings behind different rooms and transitional spaces. Jade likes to experiment with her mark-making ranging from delicate shallow fields of intense colour to flat opaque gestural brushstrokes. Painted in a range of saturated and muted tones of mostly blue, green, and yellow, Jade’s latest series depicts rooms and passageways from her childhood home, reflecting the conflicting feelings of calmness and anxiety resulting from different lived experiences. In addition to her paintings, Jade has made quick painterly studies of interiors in both ink and watercolour, again focusing on the environment she knows best. The relationship between the artist and subject is vital and the role of the viewer has become central to Jade’s work, they become a witness, an observer. The lack of details invites the spectator to complete the image by speculating on past and impending events. She infuses her paintings of desolate interiors with a cinematic aspect and an appreciation of light and shade which contributes to a significant sense of isolation. Jade has long been fascinated with the work of the French Philosopher Gaston Bachelard and is inspired by painters such as Tim Eitel, Lois Dodd, Paul Winstanley, Vermeer, and Hammershøi.

Growing up as a child in communist Poland, Ania’s life was underpinned by stark grey concrete structures. This architecture was raw, substantial and woven into the history and fabric of her upbringing. Ania’s work draws from the rawness, seeking beauty in simplicity of the form, tactility of the texture. She explores how limitations can inspire and release creativity, the tension between surface and form, between the ordered and the organic. She uses geometric forms, minimalistic decoration and natural qualities of the materials.

Chio Fernández is originally from Málaga, Spain but relocated to London in 2009. From an early age, she was a talented painter and this love of art later progressed also to photography. While studying Civil Engineering in Spain, she made the brave decision to leave her degree and follow her passion. She moved to London where she completed a BA in Photography and Film at the University of Roehampton, graduating in 2014 and becoming a full time freelance photographer. In 2020, after finding herself with plenty of time in her hands due to the several lockdowns and related working limitations, Chio revisited her passion for painting and her work has become very popular amongst art lovers. Other than attending some classes in her home town of San Pedro de Alcántara when she was 10, she is mainly self-taught. For the past year, she has been creating beautiful colourful abstract paintings of women that are becoming a reflection and celebration of womanhood, female beauty and the challenges we encounter in this world. In less than a year she has already booked her first gallery show in The Depot, London, and her work is showcased in multiple locations across Hertfordshire.

Sahara Poette started painting in 2015 with a friend around a table in a Spanish farmhouse. Encouraged by her friend, an artist, Sahara painted a few more pieces. After that she didn’t paint much again, then her father passed away and she started painting again. Her heritage is Jamaican - a Londoner and was privileged to have a father who was learned and world wise. The books on the shelf ranged from Marcus Garvey to Dubois, Sex and Race, War and Peace. “We listened to a lot of Black Classical Music-Jazz and art was all around. My mother was an artist, Father a musician amongst other things. My daughter paints as does my brother. I am the late comer.” Her influences and subject matters are centred around iconography and the figurative appeal of the female form. She creates abstract, layered and textured, applying lines, dots, patterns and colours. Sahara loves colour. “I will paint on anything from plates, to glass, whatever appeals to me, I will paint on it.” Her first work was exhibited in the Auntie Freeze Art Fair at CAVE SW1 2019 and sold ‘She Follows’. Subsequently, Sahara had her first solo exhibition ‘She Walks with Nature’, in May 2021 and sold some pieces much to her delight. She enjoys painting a wide plethora of subjects especially figurative and as her artist repertoire of knowledge deepens, she has come to appreciate the art of before and the art of now. Sahara an emerging artist, is keen to continue developing her art to see where it takes her. As a yoga and well-being practitioner, finding the balance between her two worlds intertwines her love of people and to see equality and justice within the human race.

Molly Brocklehurst (b.1994) is a British figurative painter based in South London. She graduated with a BA (distinction) in Fine Art from Leeds College of Art in 2016 before completing her masters at Wimbledon College of Art in 2019. Brocklehurst's work has been exhibited in the United Kingdom, Scandinavia and Miami, recently showing work at the Maddox Gallery in Mayfair and had work included in the Wing’s private collection in London. She was named a 'Women To Watch, Top 10 Emerging Female Artists by the Maddox Gallery in 2020 and a Saatchi Art Rising Star in 2019. Molly Brocklehurst's work is characterised by her use of a limited pallet, often separated within the composition. Her paintings are strange fictions that blur the boundary between recollection and fantasy. Being nostalgic for our lost histories, Brocklehurst uses a muted pallet and varying layers of visibility and repetition to address time, loss and memory.

A self taught Traditional Artist, specialising in portraiture. Lisa has contributed to the Brooklyn Art Library's Sketchbook Project 2020/21 and exhibited her 1st collection at Brick Lane Gallery, London.

Covadonga Valdés (b.1966) studied at Chelsea College of Art (1988-92) and Slade School of Fine Art (1992-94). Awarded: Abbey Fellowship in Painting, British School at Rome, Italy (20011-12) Painting Residency, Hickster Projects, Italy (2018) and The Ricklungarden Museum, Sweden (2009). Azan Contemporary. Painting Residency,Portugal (2020). Laboral Centro de Arte / residency (2020-21) Selected solo exhibitions include: The Bridge, Galeria Arancha Osoro, Asturias, Spain (2021) EJE, Fundation Bruno Alonso, Santander, Spain (2018) Vascular, Turps Gallery, London (2017) Homeland, Galeria Arancha Osoro, Spain (2017). Caprichos, Galeria Angulo, Oviedo, Spain(2011) Hideaway, Contemporary Art Projects, London (2007) Centro Cultural Cajastur, Touring exhibition, Asturias, Spain (2007) Recent Paintings, Pump House Gallery, London (1999).