Alice's pick
"Bo Kravencho’s oil paintings are a true celebration of the medium. Working intuitively - with the deftest of touches - he finds beauty in the simple things that surround our everyday lives. I particularly love Bo’s atmospheric landscape paintings, which really demonstrate his mastery of colour. Confident colour combinations and bold compositions give Bo’s landscapes a distinct contemporary feel that elevates his work within the traditional genre, often blurring the line into abstraction. On the surface there is a tranquility to the landscapes, but their anonymous nature gives them emotional charge, as we are encouraged to create our own narratives about the pieces. Bo creates works you want to keep exploring and coming back to."
Richard's pick
"Adam is a master of his craft. He's totally in control of his medium, creating sublime images of the beauty of the natural world, landscapes at once recognisable and familiar, yet somehow alluringly different and not of the every day. His beautiful, evocative landscapes are clearly photographic, but play slightly at the edges of painting and illustration too, helping to underlie the slightly unreal, magical feel to the work.
Sublime is a very apt word to describe these works, as many of the images bring to mind the 18th century tradition of the sublime in landscape painting. Scenes of nature that were so immense or beautiful, it was almost impossible to capture the scale, grandeur and beauty of these landscapes. In short, landscapes of "...a greatness beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement or imitation..." and Firman’s work has that sense of awe at the beauty of the natural world he captures.
The images by and large are photographed in his native British Isles, from the shores of North Devon to the Lake District and the Scottish Highlands, but are so wonderfully unpopulated and with few signs of human life, they feel infinitely more remote and uncharted, but serve merely to remind what incredible beauty we are blessed with on this island.
And, just as they are hard to place geographically, so are they in the context of era. Although contemporary, the scenes captured seem like they could be depicting a landscape from the 1960s or having said that, even the 1860s. There is a timeless quality where the photographer seems like he has played with the passage of time, a feeling of slight nostalgia and melancholy rising from the paper. The quality of light and tone, the colour and composition, are all very skilfully captured. In a period when so many of us have been homebound and with little ability to access much life beyond our local streets or park, these images transport us to a wonderful wilderness, to a world of natural beauty, to these grand and majestic landscapes that now, more than ever, makes us just want to be there."
Dr. Matthew Eve's pick
"When I was very young, one of my more enlightened and creative teachers at school demonstrated how, by drawing a right-angle on graph paper and sewing between different points, it was possible to create a quarter-circle using straight lines. We all followed her example and each sewed a version of the same graceful curve in different coloured threads with varying degrees of success. My artist choice for June, artist and mathematician, Andrey Sahorov, uses this simple ’string art’ in the most mathematically complicated and painstaking manner to create exquisite monochrome works of art.
Using a circular ‘loom’ of 200 evenly spaced aluminium pins nailed into a flat wooden board, Andrey first threads thirty pins to create the image, and then continues with the same thread (of several kilometres in length), mindfully crossing, criss-crossing and interlinking points of the circle - like a spiders web - to build up a carefully nuanced and quasi-sculptural work of art. And the result is spell-binding.
Each piece, whether it’s of a face (ie animal, celebrity or from a celebrated work of art, such as his apposite 'Mona Lisa Smile 2020'), a pattern or motif, a naked figure, or a sculptural form, has all the subtle, textured beauty of the finest 19th century book illustrations combined with a photorealistic aesthetic. It's impossible to fully comprehend the complexity and long hours Andrey spends weaving each artwork, but I strongly applaud him for crafting wholly different, unusual and unique works of art which would adorn any smart flat or house with elegance, and at a price that's within budget.'"
Julia's pick
"Alexander's works caught my eye as really strong graphic paintings. They create a real sense of depth whilst keeping the same level of colour intensity throughout. His use of clean lines and a colour palette work so well as he explores grid, shape and line in a playfully upbeat way. This is serious work for a seriously great space!"
Aindrea's pick
"Uncanny brilliance is deployed as we run through art history’s highlight reel via the work of Ta Thimkaeo. With the recurrent motif of an egg and Edward Burra-like layered body compositions, her canvasses are full of confusion, gritty humour and musicality."
Alex's pick
"I really like Lee Ellis’ new series of smaller, multi-media works. Unlike some of his larger figurative works, these are more abstract and grainy with a muted palette, and as a result are very intense and expressive. They would work well in pairs or in a series and are very affordable."
Juliana and Debra's pick
"We are drawn to Sandor's three dimensional works in clay, inspired by the constructivism art movement. Sandor lives and works in Hungary, a country where constructivism developed in exile after the fall of the Soviet Republic in 1919. These geometric objective forms are pared down to their basic elements. Constructivists sought an art of order which would reject the past and embrace unity and peace. The colours Sandor chooses to use are harmonious and peaceful too, and we particularly love the simplicity of form."
Shop all artists of the month
Cover image via Adam Firman
