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Celebrating innovation and diversity, United in Art demonstrates the depth and range of work originating from the United Kingdom. Ranging from the figurative to the abstract and enjoying qualities of spontaneity, color and rhythm the works on display teem with energy as they capture both the form and spirit of their subjects.
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George J.D. Bruce
 
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Like strolling back in time, classically trained artist, George J.D. Bruce, is an erudite painter of the first degree, steeped in the traditional techniques of portraiture, landscape, and still life. George works in oils on modest-sized canvases and with an unassuming simplicity draws the viewer in to take pleasure in the arrangements of bright, cheerful bouquets and the play of shadows cast by folds of fabric. He applies paint with lush, confident strokes that reveal a sensitive eye for light and texture, while his sense of drama shines forth in breathtaking landscapes that feature sweeping rain clouds and awakening seas spurred by the oncoming storm.
Educated at the Byam Shaw School of Drawing and Painting, George is a thirty-nine year member of the venerable Royal Society of Portrait Painters in London, where he has taken up multiple leadership roles in the organization, including president. George J.D. Bruce lives in England and works from his studios located in London and in the countryside of Suffolk.
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"Bachelor Teapot & Silver Jug"
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"Black Cuillins"
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Sher Christopher
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I am constantly intrigued by the design and construction of things and I love the fun in exploring the unusual. My approach is to explore the strengths and permanence that can be created by manipulating a medium that is often assumed to be fragile and transitory and I revel in the endless possibilities of construction, form and design. In promoting the medium of paper as a sculptural material I aspire to surprise and captivate in my own unique style and give the same sense of enjoyment that I get when I encounter the unusual or unexpected in the world and people around me.
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"Greta"
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"Louise"
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Michael Gemmell
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The collisions of swelling shapes that define Michael Gemmell’s oil paintings praise the might of single moments plucked from the landscapes he watches. Gemmell captures the raw, natural tension of vast organic mosaics and coats them with delicate and obedient wisps of texture and color that celebrate the monumental spectacle frozen in time while kneading the spiritual ambience emanating from his canvas and linen worlds, pulling holy personalities out through the seams. The orchestrations he filters out from colossal bodies of land and water ring with Impressionist fascination focused on movement and harmony while playfully examining the violent explosions of chilling wind and thundering mass that form environments.
Gemmell’s work has been featured in French and British galleries as well as in Belfast and his native Dublin, permeating collections throughout Europe and the United States. He currently resides in Ireland, where he continues to explore new dimensions of his homeland.
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"Carnival Island"
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"Sections of Island l"
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Andrew Killick
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Inspired by the Japanese practice of momijigari, or the observation of the changing colors of Autumn, Andrew Killick produces close, nuanced studies of leaves in acrylic. His studio is located in the Royal Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire, England, permitting him stunning access to the beauty of nature’s bright, seasonal colors. Killick’s compositions appear as washes of dark but vibrant color that slowly reveal the natural forms hidden among them, and his work bears some distant similarities to that of Georgia O’Keeffe in its intense focus on the details of plant life. Killick’s use of pigment is dense, and his leaves oscillate between movement and life, and stillness and decay. Many have his works appear to be part of a larger series, but Killick insists that although the pieces he “produces share a commonality, each one is individual in its own right.”
His art is a celebration of the beauty of nature and the joy that comes from immersing oneself in quiet and attentive looking. Killick was born in 1969 in Newport, Monmouthshire, England.
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"Serpentines Lament"
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"Tryst of Nature"
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Alan Mercel-Sanca
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In his highly-detailed pencil and graphite works on paper, many of which incorporate pastel and watercolors, British artist Alan Mercel-Sanca focuses on natural and architectural scenes. This preferred subject matter springs from a desire to investigate human beings’ relationship to their environment, be it built or natural. By exploring this connection to our surroundings, Mercel-Sanca investigates what he believes to be the spiritual power present in nature, and how that power is transformed by architecture.
Indeed, his representations of natural and built scenes evoke, through their hyper-realistic details, something fleeting and intangible. Though he is self-taught Mercel-Sanca’s treatment of light and texture is masterful. His technique conveys not only shapes and depth, but also warmth, odors and sounds. By tapping into our own collective experiences of nature and architecture, evoking distant sensory memories, his works accentuate our perpetual connection and interaction with our surroundings. Mercel-Sanca’s investigations of space, light and texture, provide a medium through which to explore our own relationship to space.
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"Temple of Kwannon, Goddess of Mercy: Asakusa, Tokyo"
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"The Stone Circle in the Wood"
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Tania Metalli
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Tania Metalli was born in Rome, Italy, a city drenched in art, iconography, and monumental architecture. Each of these particularly Roman qualities can be seen in her fantastical paintings of brooding, statuesque figures. Metalli’s distinctive faces are rendered as graceful masks while hard-edged, geometric configurations saturate the figures, isolated from context with backgrounds of flat, bold color. "I consider my art a mirror that reflects images from my inner world,” she explains. “Through my work I'm able to explore that world and bring back pictures of symbols and of the creatures that inhabit it.”
Metalli’s interest in costumes and clothing styles is readily apparent, having studied both photography and fashion in college. After graduation, she lived in Australia for eight years before returning to Europe. Metalli’s work has been emblazoned on her own t-shirt line in addition to being exhibited in galleries around England and Australia. Metalli lives and works in London.
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"Red Mask"
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"Red Squares Dress"
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Martina O'Brien
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In my paintings, I strive to create atmospheric impressions of water, sea, ocean and the shorelines around Ireland. I try to reflect and convey the mood of the location through colour, texture, movement and light. Living close to Dublin’s coast allows me to gather constant information on the ever changing ebb and flow of the tides, how light transforms and colours merge as it comes and goes. I work primarily in oil paint, applied with brush and palette knife, adding a range of mixed media such as sand, bee’s wax, acrylic and hemp. I layer different mediums and allow them to create a three dimensional type image.
At times, I prefer to apply these mediums by hand as I find interacting with the textures and canvas can produce very unusual effects and capture the luminosity I want to bring-about.
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"Kenmare Bay"
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"White Park Bay"
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Paula Pohli
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Irish-born artist Paula Pohli’s hand-produced prints are essays in studied simplicity and reflection. Drawing on the visual traditions of German Expressionist and traditional Japanese printmaking, her intricate and deliberate linographs describe subjects ranging from the weathered landscapes of the earth to the weathered faces of philosophers and writers. Fields stretch out into the infinite horizon in stark black and white lines, and reeds sway calmly underwater, reaching for the moon. Done mostly with organic dyes and always without recourse to printing presses or computers, each of Pohli’s prints reflects the nuances of being hand pulled, and her titles are often witty references to Irish landmarks or landscapes. The artist also draws inspiration from the great literary tradition of Ireland—especially the works of James Joyce—and hopes to contribute to the development of printmaking within the country. Despite their ties to her native homeland, Pohli’s works have a kind of classical elegance and timelessness that appeals to an international audience.
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"Evolution Flight"
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"Witches Broom"
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Dominique Salm
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Dominique Salm’s animal portraits present a contemporary spin on traditional wildlife painting. Her remarkably naturalistic watercolor renderings of animal subjects are projected against a stark white background, which not only creates a dramatic graphic image, but conveys her modern aesthetic. Each watercolor has a snap-shot quality, capturing the personality of each animal and imparting humor, character, and whimsy to many of her pieces. At the same time, the painstaking realism with which her paintings are executed reflects Dominique’s own intense love and respect for animals.
The acclaimed wildlife painter has exhibited her work widely throughout the United Kingdom, including at the prestigious CLA Game Fair and is sought out by international art collectors. Originally from Jamaica, Dominique was deeply influenced by the community of artists in her close knit neighborhood and developed an interest in wildlife art from an early age. Dominique Salm holds a degree in illustration from the University of the West of England and currently lives and works in England.
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"I'm Listening"
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"The Parents"
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Graeme Swanson
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Color dictates Graeme Swanson’s understated, atmospheric oil paintings. Soft expanses of reds, yellows or blues give his work an emotive, transfixing quality; his paintings immediately invite meditation. While influenced by places, architecture, nature and history, Swanson tends to record a mood more than he records an actuality. He is attuned to sunlight and to the nature of his surroundings but he abstracts the representational moments that initially inspire him, so that reality becomes more ephemeral and experiential. It is the physical spaces depicted in his paintings that primarily provide the underlying structure for Swanson’s exploration of how colors, painterly gestures and textures can harmoniously work together to create a memorable visual experience.
Swanson, who lives and works in Aberdeen, Scotland, graduated from Gray's School of Art in 1979 and received a Post Graduate Teaching Certificate from Northern College in Aberdeen. His work was recently on display at the ING Discerning Eye Exhibition at the Mall Galleries, Mall, London.
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"Toscana"
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"Babazouck"
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Mieke Vanmechelen
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Having grown up with artistic parents, and feeling a strong connection to the Flemish masters, Mieke Vanmechelen deeply explores the power of color as a sculptural element to be shaped and textured by her sensitive yet powerful brushwork. A palpable tension demands recognition in these exquisitely detailed paintings, a sense of both merging and separation existing in uneasy partnership. The consistent theme in her work of two imposing realms of color, which could either be floral parts or areas of the human body, being split by a more slender strip, serves to both separate and bind the two halves of the canvas. Mieke Vanmechelen's works open up vistas both inner and outer, as the moments of near-impact of these shapes suggest both river tributaries split by hills, as well as abstractions of the human condition and its need for unity.
She has shown her innovative work throughout Europe and Ireland, and has been selected for the honor of exhibiting her paintings at the 2007 Florence Biennale.
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"Wavelength Series I"
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"Flamingo 3"
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