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.
Continue reading “Considering Art Podcast – Louise Pragnell, portrait artist”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.
Continue reading “Considering Art Podcast – Graham Crowley, painter”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.
Continue reading “Considering Art Podcast – Annemarieke Kloosterhof, multi-media”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.
Continue reading “Considering Art Podcast – Raghav Babbar, painter”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.
Continue reading “Considering Art Podcast – Bianca Raffaella, painter”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.
Continue reading “Considering Art Podcast – Sarah Adams, landscape painter”Considering Art Podcast – Natalia Millman, multi-media conceptual artist
Natalia Millman was born in Ukraine and came to England in her twenties. Her father’s dementia and subsequent death had a profound effect on her both personally and artistically. In this episode she talks about her Ukrainian background, how she pursued an art career after moving to the UK, how her father’s demise led to a refocus of her art towards expressing grief and life’s fragility, how research and experimentation became a key part of her practice, how she invited people to share their experience of personal loss through sending her letters, some examples of moving expressions of grief, and how she developed the idea into a multi-media and sensory exhibition entitled Letters to Forever.
Continue reading “Considering Art Podcast – Natalia Millman, multi-media conceptual artist”Considering Art Podcast – Britt Boutros-Ghali, painter
Britt Boutros-Ghali was born in Norway but for the past five decades has lived in Egypt having married into one of the country’s foremost families. Her emotional abstracts and figurative expressionism are much sought after and she has been awarded with the Lifetime Achievement Award for Women in the Arts by the Egyptian government. In this episode, she talks about her upbringing in Norway, how a move to Paris kickstarted her artistic career, her relocation to Egypt, how she paints every day with no plan and with many layers, how an exhibition in Norway in 2005 was marred by an unfortunate incident, and how she is striving to paint a masterpiece.
Continue reading “Considering Art Podcast – Britt Boutros-Ghali, painter”Considering Art Podcast – Deborah Grice, painter
Deborah Grice is a prize-winning British painter of atmospheric landscapes with a contemporary twist. In this episode, she talks about how she had ambitions to become a war artist, how moving from Glasgow to London to study art changed her practice, how ill health stifled many an interesting occupation, the origins of her geometric lines and forms in her work, how Sky Arts Landscape Artist of the Year reinvigorated her art career and how early feelings of emotional deprivation and her concerns for the future manifest themselves in the “visual dissonance” in her paintings.
Continue reading “Considering Art Podcast – Deborah Grice, painter”Considering Art Podcast – Brian Sayers, painter
Brian Sayers paints remarkable still life paintings that are often cluttered with all manner of everyday objects and implements. In this episode, he talks about how he got into The Slade art school and meeting Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon, the difficulties of finding a “style”, teaching at Eton College to help earn a living, what influenced his well-known table-top still life works, how he plans them, what they mean to him and in what direction his paintings might be heading.
Continue reading “Considering Art Podcast – Brian Sayers, painter”