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 – 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 – 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”Considering Art Podcast – Jean-Luc Almond, painter
Jean-Luc Almond is a prize-winning portrait painter whose images are distorted in order to give them a psychological and emotional depth, representing the polarities of the human condition. In this episode, he talks about his early life in Africa, how he developed his current visual language at art school, how working in care homes influenced his oil paintings, how the texture and materiality of paint itself becomes as important as the representational subject, how he expresses the polarities of the human condition and how he’s been influenced by Victorian post mortem photography.
Continue reading “Considering Art Podcast – Jean-Luc Almond, painter”Considering Art Podcast – Sophie Duez, surrealist portrait artist
Sophie Duez is a multidisciplinary emerging artist with a particular love for graphite. In this episode, she talks about why she felt an outsider as a child, how having double vision has affected her art, why she chose to study Illustration for which she gained a first-class honours degree, the unconventional techniques she has learnt, details of some of her drawings and how she is developing as an artist.
Continue reading “Considering Art Podcast – Sophie Duez, surrealist portrait artist”Considering Art Podcast – Daniel Shadbolt, painter
Daniel Shadbolt paints portraits, landscapes and still life using cleverly contrasting soft colours and shadow. In this episode, he talks about his experience at Chelsea College of Art and the Royal Drawing School, examples of inspiring advice he’s been given by both tutors and other artists, the influence of Impressionism and post-Impressionism on his oil painting, how his style has become more abstracted, how he handles colour, how he draws the viewer into his landscapes and still life work, and about some of his regular sitters.
Continue reading “Considering Art Podcast – Daniel Shadbolt, painter”Considering Art Podcast – Lorna May Wadsworth, painter
In this episode, acclaimed portrait painter Lorna May Wadsworth talks about how she began painting celebrities as a teenager, how her first London solo exhibition subverted the traditional male gaze, the experience of painting Baroness Thatcher over five sittings, how she depicted Christ as a black man to which someone took exception, the imaginative materials she has sometimes used in place of canvas, how she painted a relative of someone executed during the French Revolution, and why working quickly brings out the best in her.
Continue reading “Considering Art Podcast – Lorna May Wadsworth, painter”Considering Art Podcast – Dola Posh, photographer
Dola Posh is a young prize-winning photographer from Nigeria, now resident in England. In this episode, she talks about the difficulties adapting to life in the UK, how lockdown inspired her to document her pregnancy and ensuing motherhood through photography, how she experienced postpartum depression, how winning the Leica Women Foto Project Award in 2024 validated her photographic practice, how she has become involved in helping others suffering from post-natal depression, and what she most likes about being a photographer.
Continue reading “Considering Art Podcast – Dola Posh, photographer”Considering Art Podcast – Coral Woodbury, painter
Shocked by the complete omission of all women artists from the main referential book on art history, Janson’s History of Art, American painter Coral Woodbury decided to right this wrong. In this episode, she talks about ripping out the book’s pages and painting portraits in black ink of women artists upon them, how she uses palimpsest as a metaphor, how she has accumulated knowledge and experience on numerous overseas residencies, examples of a few of the extraordinary women that Janson did not include, and how she also paints, in oils and in colour, women in other series of works.
Continue reading “Considering Art Podcast – Coral Woodbury, painter”Considering Art Podcast – Miriam Escofet, painter
Miriam Escofet’s works have evolved over the years from still life, fantasy, architecture and portraiture. In this episode, she explains the trauma behind her family’s move from Spain to England when she was 12, the difficulties she experienced at art school, her early obsession with architecture and celestial charts, her love of process and making, how she builds atmosphere into her works, how winning the BP Portrait Award led to a commission to paint Queen Elizabeth II.
Continue reading “Considering Art Podcast – Miriam Escofet, painter”