As Lena Cottray, Creative Lead at Lawson Robb let us know, “choosing an artwork with a client is very much a journey”. To help you in your next design, we’ve put together a list with our favourite contemporary painters based in the UK. Ranging from abstract to figurative, from totally new to nostalgic, we have something for everyone. Or in our case, everything at any time. (Yes, we’re that passionate about all of these artists!).
Jake Wood-Evans
Wood-Evans’ work is a nod and disruption to the work of the masters. Through a palette of dark, stormy brushstrokes and oil drips Wood-Evans plays with the violence of abstraction, forcing the onlooker to recognise and subvert their artistic references. His work echoes the halls of artists past, giving them a new image filled with nostalgia and loss.
Jadé Fadojutimi
Fadojutimi creates “emotional landscapes” in her work, where she illustrates, via colour and movement, the experiences, memories and self-knowledge. Her abstract style is self-looking, an exploration of the inward activities of her mind and soul. Yet the vibrancy of her strokes is ambivalent, without answers, allowing the onlooker to ponder and interrogate what is in front of them.
Wang Ziling
Ziling plays with mental landscapes through her spatial art, drawing the viewer through her hardened acrylics into a form of art that defies the constraints of canvas and frame. The view appears to be suspended in space and time, as if conjured up in a half-solidified dream, colours blending in the recognisable swirls of an invented nature. The transience from painting to painting forces the viewer to keep looking, to move alongside the paint.
Rachel Jones
Jones is the epitome of colour and vibrancy. Her art escapes the figure as much as it can, rejecting form in favour of pure expression and self-exploration. In the nooks and crannies of the jagged lines one can see the vague impressions of mouths, teeth and flowers, reminding us of the contextual ties to the real world the paintings so eloquently abstract from.
Miranda Forrester
Forrester’s paintings focus on Black femininity and queerness through the female lens, interrogting into the consquences of looking at these bodies differently, warmly. The figures are posed in tender, personal moments, inviting the viewer to look but not gawk at the human in front of them. The often translucent or transparent background of the paintings further dynamises the figures, positioning them beyond the canvas and moment of viewership.
Gommie
Gommie is a poet, illustrator and painter who blends maps, scribbles, doodles and sayings into naif works of art that inspire hope and longing. The scrappy look mixed with the delicately infantile handwriting inspire the viewer to read, look and ponder, filling the simple gaps laid out by Gommie.
Dickon Drury
Drury creates immense spectacles of domestic scenes, with the occasional infiltration of a bird and a feast. His paintings exude charisma and the comfort of hedonism, with an emphasis placed on pleasure and visual chaos. His style is simultaneously stylised and child-like with his use of compromised perspective and joyous colour,
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