Considering Art Podcast – Louise Pragnell, portrait artist

For 20 years, Louise Pragnell has made a speciality of painting the portraits of members of royal families and military top brass. In this episode, she talks about drawing her mother as a child, her years of studying art before turning to portraiture, what she defines as modern sensibility in her paintings, how she strives to capture the essence of her sitters, the decisions over the details and poses in her portraits, how she started painting the royals and military, her recent commission to paint the Grand Duke and Duchess of Luxembourg and what she paints for fun.

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Considering Art Podcast – Graham Crowley, painter

Graham Crowley has had a long and distinguished career as a painter and teacher, won the John Moores Painting Prize in 2023 and holds strong views on what he believes painting is and should be. In this episode, he talks about his lack of cultural beginnings, his experience of conceptualism at art school and how it strengthened his belief in painting, the influence of the French painter Fernand Leger, his views on illustration, why he painted landscapes in the 1990s, how he’s attracted by luminosity in paintings, why he dislikes being called an artist, and about his prize-winning work Light Industry.

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Considering Art Podcast – Annemarieke Kloosterhof, multi-media

Annemarieke Kloosterhof is a London-based Dutch artist who works in painting, collage, design and particularly in all things paper including single or multi-layered paper-cut illustrations, paper props, film sets and large-scale installations. In this episode, she talks about how her passion for paper first began, how nostalgia has been a theme in her work, the importance of experimentation, how she made a spectacular paper installation for the Bridgerton TV series, making three West-end theatres from paper, her use of recycled paper, how her paintings deal with issues such as female sexuality and how she has made paper versions of classic furniture for London’s Leighton House museum.

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Considering Art Podcast – Reena Saini Kallat, multi-media

Reena Saini Kallat is an Indian artist who has gained international recognition for works that focus on aspects of global conflicts, injustices, inequalities, and climate catastrophes. In this episode, she talks about her family story of Partition and the legacy of it that remains in her home city of Mumbai, how she expresses the issue of global boundaries and frontiers that cause dissension, how the inter-dependence of species inspires her, how she uses legal documents in her work to represent ideas of responsibility and freedom, how people who have disappeared are another source of influence, and about her current sculpture at Frieze London that features the bird calls of extinct species.

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Considering Art Podcast – Raghav Babbar, painter

Raghav Babbar is a young Indian artist who paints everyday people in a sensitive and empathetic way. His subjects reflect his Indian heritage and his works are highly sought after. In this episode, he talks about his upbringing in a family of businesspeople, travelling in the northern Indian states, the influence of British artists such as Lucian Freud whose work he came across when studying at the Royal College of Art in London, his love of painting self-portraits, his experience of witnessing the Hindu pilgrimage of Maha Kumbh and his process of putting paint on canvas.

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Considering Art Podcast – Lucy Chapman, multi-media

Lucy Chapman is a multi-media artist whose artworks draw on scientific research. In this episode, she talks about how her father’s dyslexia motivated her to teach in special needs education, how social justice has been a driver for her, her attraction to cyanotype and her fascination with the Dream Machine and its interpretations of consciousness, her experience of prolonged illness including an out-of-body experience, how ill health has initiated many of her artworks, and how global uncertainty and the climate crisis have been other motivations for her art.

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Considering Art Podcast – Verity Babbs, art historian, author and comedian

In this episode, Verity talks about how she became interested in art history, how she got into stand-up and improvisation while studying for her art history degree at Oxford University, how she developed and founded the Art Laughs event in which comedians give art-themed stand-up routines in art galleries, and about her new book entitled The History of Art in One Sentence that traces 500 years of western art movements written in a playful way.

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Considering Art Podcast – Bianca Raffaella, painter

Bianca Raffaella won the 2025 Women in Art Prize, a remarkable achievement for an artist who has visual impairment and is registered blind. In this episode, she talks about the nature of this impairment, how she developed an eating disorder in her youth, how she spent successful years as a fashion designer, how lockdown led her to return to painting, her technique for putting paint on the canvas, her experience of applying for the Tracey Emin Artist Residency, how she has become an activist for other sight-impaired people and how she collaborated with a printmaker for her current exhibition of portraits.

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Considering Art Podcast – Alice Sheppard Fidler, sculptor

Alice Sheppard Fidler’s work spans sculpture, installation and performance. In this episode, she talks about her early career in design within the film, TV and fashion industries, being a founder member of Studio Voltaire Gallery in London, moving to the Cotswolds and working with a circus, why she took an MA in Fine Art, the creative inspirations for some of her sculptures that embody thought, narrative, history and the contradictions of human experience, and how performance and collaboration are important elements of her practice.

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Considering Art Podcast – Sarah Adams, landscape painter

For the past 20 years, Sarah Adams has captured in oil the rugged features of the north coast of Cornwall where she lives. In this episode, she talks about the artistic journey she has made towards becoming a landscape painter, the extraordinary efforts she makes to explore the stacks, arches and caves that she depicts, her process involving detailed primary sketches and subsequent under-glazing and amplified colour, how she has noticed gradual changes in the coastline over the years and the threat of plastic waste to the coastal environment.

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