Kit Glaisyer's mesmerizing West Dorset landscape paintings bring a contemporary twist to the traditional genre of the romantic landscape. Many of his paintings take at least six months to create, using oil on linen & canvas, built up using multiple glazes to capture the subtle and sublime character of this unique corner of Wessex.

Works in Bridport

“I like to make people feel good when they look at my paintings. For me, it’s colour that does it every time, to make a painting resonate, you have to understand colour. Mine is very basic and I’m still learning. I was taught that colour is a language with its own psychology and vibrations and to observe the shades nature puts together when you are looking for inspiration. Nature is so powerful, it stills your centre and is very inspiring. Colour is very healing and energising.”

Works in Bridport

“My pots, mainly hand-built, are manifestations of the enduring themes of my experience. They are a conversation between the pseudo -perfection of geometric pattern and the tactile impurity of hand-manipulated clay. I often deliberately create warped planes through the careful pattern cutting and jointing of would-be flat slabs so that vessels become intentionally and subtly off-kilter.”

Works in Bridport

A widely respected artist who has exhibited in galleries in New York, London and across the UK since the early 90’s. His distinctive oil paintings express an emotional interpretation and abstraction of the natural world around him, using hand ground pigments to maximise depth and luminosity and intensify the emotive response.

Workks in West Bay

Boo’s paintings act as a visual diary and a way of recording her everyday walks and journeys through the landscape. When walking we absorb the sights, sounds and smells and they come together to form a very strong memory of place. Our minds can drift and wander yet we are very much in the present. Memories of a repeated walk along a known pathway, the distant horizon, the dramatic changes of colour and light from one moment to the next, day to day, season to season, these immersive encounters with the natural world form the starting point of Boo’s paintings.

Works in Bridport

Ella is fascinated by observing people, their behaviour, temperament and clothing questioning display and social ‘performance’. Painting semi-fictional portraits in real and imagined scenarios, she plays with fact and fiction in an attempt to understand her own sense of being.

Works in Bridport

Grace Crabtree is an artist based in Bridport, West Dorset. Her paintings, often using the ancient techniques of egg tempera and fresco, are grounded in the experience of walking or swimming through a place, while unearthing folkloric, geological, and mythic narratives.

Works near to Bridport

Marina Renée-Cemmick is a figurative Artist working across multiple disciplines. Founded in a drawing practice and working from observation, she finds endless intrigue in capturing people and their character. She often draws from the human body to communicate the subtle poetry of how we relate to each other and our environment.

Grew up in Bridport. Currently lives in Glasgow.

Scottish artist and designer Flora Roberts' enchanting flower paintings come from sensitive observation, and pure passion for nature. From murals to wallpaper and textiles, her atmospheric work captures the ethereal magic of the botanical world

“I am a British artist and live and work in Dorset and London. Ever since I can remember, I have been happiest with a pencil or paintbrush in my hands. From early childhood, I was obsessed with nature and would spend every spare minute in the garden, studying and drawing plants, flowers and insects. Primarily a landscape and portrait painter my work is my visual diary; a recording of the light, colours space and form found in the objects and places that make up the living world. The act of putting charcoal to paper and oil to canvas is a compulsion that gives me great joy. “

“Abstract painting liberates my creative energy – it allows me to express myself with an unfiltered directness”

Ellie’s intense, layered abstracts begin with a formative under-painting, evolving through a carefully considered process where every stroke and gesture matters. Each composition is deceptively simple, with a poised calm that belies the exploratory journey behind it. The thoroughness of Ellie’s approach gives her work depth as well as surface detail: careful viewing reveals more, inviting you to look into the painting and not simply at it. There is a harmonious balance in these abstracts, between power and delicacy, spontaneity and planning, familiarity and surprise.

Works in Bridport

Hugh Dunford Wood has worked as an independent artist designer since student days at Oxford’s Ruskin School of Art in the 1970s. He made a good living painting landscapes and portraits; he ran a fashion business for 15 years handpainting mens’ ties with a team of 24 artists under his direction. He designs crockery, jewelry, furnishing fabrics and wallpapers.

“My first picture book, The Lady Who Lived In A Car was based on a real person who was living in a local London borough at the time, it was nominated for an Early Years Book Trust Award. I was also selected to illustrate a beautiful anthology of Love poetry to coincide with the Radio 4 programme Love Please. I have lectured on the Illustration pathway and BA Honours Degree at The Arts University Bournemouth. My latest book with Cicada, The Problem with Pierre, a story about neat and messy is out this Autumn!“

“My work focuses on process and media and an interplay between gesture and colour, I am interested in how the medium of paint can evoke imaginative responses and psychological states; images grow out of the process and my interaction with the materials, I follow a journey with the painting to a point where colour and mark begin to trigger emotive associations, where the paint appears at once tactile and concrete yet simultaneously having the potential for illusion and the capacity to draw on the unconscious.”

Fomerly based St Michalel’s Studios. Currently lives in Dorchester.

“I am inspired to paint what I see all around me: the interior of my home, my garden, the view of the street, the decorative objects in my studio, the vases of flowers sitting on studio tables. What I am really painting is the feelings that I associate with these places, and with these objects, and how the light and colour of their surfaces affects my mood, and sometimes sets off memories. Occasionally I venture to Southern Europe, where I seek the same things, but soaked in greater colour, and illuminated by that sun drenched light.“ Hugo Grenville

Paul Blow is a UK-based illustrator working for a wide variety of clients including The Guardian, The Economist, New Scientist, The New York Times, Penguin Books and the Folio Society. His bold conceptual illustrations mix contemporary themes with touches of humour and a healthy sense of the absurd.

“Instinct to me is the immediacy of pure thought from the subconsious, not on an aesthetic level but as a collective of meaningful moments of external consciousness. It comes from the experience of a place, not the literal transcription of a landscape, portrait or concept.”

David Worthington is a British sculptor in stone and fellow of the Royal British Society of Sculptors. He specialises in kinetic sculptures that members of the public can physically interact with. Worthington works mainly in stone, and specialises in kinetic sculptures that members of the public can physically interact with. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Sculptors. He has curated shows at Woburn Abbey, Glyndebourne, and the Chelsea Physic Garden.

Beset by Words

”As a predominately visual artist and maker, my working practice has proceeded, more or less, in the shadow of language and its affiliated words and texts. My perception has always been that the English language has, by the nature of its richness of texture, density and adaptability acquired and maintained a dominant position in our cultural landscape.”

Works near to Bridport

John Charlesworth is an [un]conventional easel painter, employing acrylic paint on canvas or wood. He blends the harsh, unnatural acrylic spectrum to a softer, warmer coloration and tonality, more akin to oils. He never uses raw, unmixed pigment. Even his whites have a small admixture of other colours, principally red and yellow, otherwise they would look stark, cold and unbelievable.

Formerly based at St Michale’s Studios. Currently lives in Appleby.

Lesley Slight (1939 – 2024)

“My work is focused on the landscape of West Dorset, where I have lived and worked since 1973 in a remote and very rural situation. This landscape, with its secret valleys, old woods and rounded hills, is the focus and catalyst for everything that I do and is absolutely central to my work. It has an ancient and primordial being, and a timeless quality not quite of this century –so much of it seems relatively untouched by changes evident elsewhere.”

Georgina paints in responce to the sensuality of colour, form, pattern and shapes that abound in her garden and beyond. Summer in particular is a treasure trove with flower's that she has sown from seed or planted.

Previously based at Symondsbury Art Community. Currently lives in Wales.

Daniel Bendel is a published Artist and Woodcarver. He tutors sculptural woodcarving, letter-cutting, whittling and comic book making courses in and around Bristol. He has a lot of experience as an artist in socially engaged community art projects. He wrote, drew and published a comic book about the South Dorset Ridgeway for an exhibition called Field Days an Artsreach project.

Grew up in Bridport. Currently based in Bristol.

John Hubbard (1931 – 6 January 2017) was an American-born abstract impressionist painter who lived and worked in England for more than 50 years. He won the Jerwood Painting Prize in 1996.