Anna Lovely Gallery
Liz Keyworth is a contemporary artist, based in London. Her long and prolific career with strong roots in the landscape, flora and fauna has led to her exuberant paintings which operate in the space between nature and abstraction. She likes to play with this ambivalence leaving open the possibility for interpretation.
Books, cups, posies, painted cloth, hand mirrors, silk, organza, anemones, hairclips. These objects are the constituent parts of Emma Somerset Davis’ fifth show at The Anna Lovely Gallery, now showing with her daughter and fellow painter Madeleine Jacob. Both painters’ work investigates place, femininity and the small-scale.
Emma’s work is in oil and gouache painting, dealing with the interstitial space between subject and object. Her figurative gouache paintings document wildflowers kept from walks on the Sussex Downland and Weald, meticulously arranged with domestic objects. A painted dress depicts moments from walks along the Adur river. Her abstract oil paintings are similarly attenuated to strong, inarticulable feeling, registering their shape and colour like television static on canvas.
Emma Somerset Davis attended Royal College of Art, Chelsea College of Art and Camberwell School of Art (Painting). She is interested in how painting explores and depicts feminine performativity. Before establishing her independent painting practice, she worked as lead artist in 1990s experimental art/architecture collective FAT, developing their renowned postmodernist artworks. She lives and works in West Sussex. Her work is held in many private and public collections.
Madelaine Jacob works in painting, video, performance & text. She is also a critic, writing for ArtReview and Architecture Today. Her current series of work is focussed on spectacle and vulnerability, using collected stills from late twentieth century BBC costume dramas. She is due to begin her MA at the Slade School of Fine Art in October.
London-born painter, Arnold Dobbs, has built an extensive body of work over his prolific career spanning six decades. It includes mainly abstract pieces and some figurative work.
This exhibition offers a glimpse into my practice that resists neat categorisation. Together my new work hangs alongside a small selection of pieces from the last 25 years created in my early days at APT Studios (Art in Perpetuity Trust), Deptford, where I still work. None of the older pieces have been previously exhibited.
While the range of work may appear eclectic at first glance, a consistent thread runs through my practice. Each piece begins from intuition rather than plan, allowing the work to evolve through gesture, emotion and expression. The diversity of approaches is informed by an instinctive desire to test what painting can hold.
Previous show – Still Working
Gabrielle trained at Camberwell School of Art winning the SOGAT82 Award in her second year and leaving with a First Class Honours degree in Fine Art Sculpture. She continued her studies at the Rural Development Centre in Salisbury completing several courses in Blacksmithing and honed her welding skills working for a year in the metal shop of the National Theatre.
We are pleased to be exhibiting work in the gallery this year and to welcome you to the Private View and Garden Party on Friday 12 September 2025, 5 to 8pm.
I would like to warmly invite you to a talk I am giving at my exhibition Back Stories at the Anna Lovely Gallery on Saturday from 2pm.
Anna Lovely Gallery has invited Trevor Burgess to hold a solo exhibition to mark his 60th birthday. “Back Stories” takes a reflective look back at his journey as an artist.
Trevor Burgess has a long association with the Anna Lovely Gallery and was one of the artists in the very first show when the gallery opened in 2014. He is known for his paintings of everyday urban life and markets around the world, usually using his own snapshot photographs as a source material.
+ Ambreen Hameed speaks about Trevor Burgess’s paintings (see below)
Tessa Holmes – Print making
James O’Hara – Digital Drawing
Sophie Harris Taylor – Photography
Jill Rutter – Ceramics
Thomas Gale – Drawing/Painting
Curtis Donavan – Painting
Kate Newington – Painting
Magdalena Michliak – Textiles
Private View Saturday 29 October 2022 3 – 5pm
Exhibition Thursdays to Saturdays 12 – 6pm & Sundays 12 – 5pm
Matthew Bateson experiences something of a haunting during the process of painting. He starts the works in a very open, abstract and exploratory way – just pushing the paint around with his brush on the canvas, allowing forms to evolve and interact and letting different colours resonate and bleed into one another. There is no pre-planning or guiding under-drawing to map his terrain.
At some point, the abstract painterly process begins to take its own pictorial rhythms and specific qualities of light, atmosphere and emotional tone begin to pervade the spaces. With each work, accidental marks and a strata of residual pigment establish a ground. Spectral contours of a particular landscape or figurative form emerge almost alchemically from within the materiality of the paint.
We are pleased to be Exhibiting work in the Gallery this year and welcoming you to the Private View and Garden Party on Friday 2nd of September 2022 6pm -9pm
Within the Garden of Hope and Dreams is an exhibition of Emma’s paintings, drawings and sculpture, made through her recent performances in relation to a series of landscapes. A live performance will take place on the opening night which will be screened throughout the duration of the show.
The Exhibiting Artists were selected from our annual Open show during the Sydenham Artists Trail. Artists were selected from each Medium and also a Young Artist Category was created this year.
Artists:
The Selection Committee Included:
The Celebration of Venus and Gardens exhibition was itself celebrated by a Meet the Artists afternoon on Saturday. There did seem to be a large contingent from Camberwell School of Arts!
The exhibition continues until 28 November.
Show runs until 15 August – more details…
The Sydenham Arts Artists Trail are delighted to promote The Anna Lovely Gallery Exhibition for the winner and runner up from the 2020 Virtual Artists Trail – printmaker Lilophilia and painter Kitty Jenkins.
With Covid-19 restrictions easing, it was time to stepover the demarcation lines and enjoy the show and the company.
