Prolific conceptual artist and award winning gallerist Ben Oakley FRSA has curated From the City to the Sea, a brand-new exhibition to be premiered at Lighthouse Poole.

The show features diverse work by ten artists all with different backgrounds and inspirations.

Ben explains: “After creating the Ben Oakley Gallery in 2010 as a platform for emerging artists, we have now upped our permanent London roots and decided to take this show on the road…!”

For sculptor Bobby Tonge, the show represents a welcome opportunity to reacquaint himself with Poole: “I hiked around the UK in the 1980s and worked in the Haven Hotel in Poole. This is my first time back since so am excited to be here.”

Four of the artists in the show are a collective from London, Sussex and Yorkshire who have all shown in the WOMENCOURAGE exhibition curated by Ben Oakley Gallery at The Royal Society of Arts in the Strand and at St Christopher’s Hospice Care in South East London. Their work ranges from urban landscapes, spray paint and acrylics, to portraiture, abstract figurative oils and mixed media.

“We are delighted to introduce a Dorset-based artist to the WOMENCOURAGE collective as part of From the City to the Sea,” adds Ben. “Sarah Jane Ross hails from Bridport, is influenced by nature and its stories, and focuses on seascapes.”

From the City to the Sea also includes the work of international artists from disparate locations including Germany, England and Australia encompassing a contrasting array of styles including urban graffiti, abstract landscape, photorealism and assemblage.

“In true Ben Oakley Gallery style, it all adds up to an interesting and eclectic experience. We are looking forward to the Opening Night Drinks Reception on Friday 7 March with a good handful of the artists present, so please do tell the like-minded.”

A number of special events and public engagement activities are being planned with the help of the exhibiting artists, including a Screenprint Workshop on Saturday 22 March at which participants can learn how to create and produce an exclusive screenprint. 

Please visit Lighthousepoole.co.uk for up-to-date details and join in.

Artists Include: Yvonne Wayling FRSA, Kim Tong PHD, Jo Peel, Nikki Hill Smith, Sarah Ross, Ben Addison, David Bray, Sweler, Ben Oakley FRSA, Bobby Tonge. 

Meet the artists:

Bobby Tonge

Bobby started making sculptures in paper and had his first solo exposition in Paris in 1994. He then went on to assist the American bronze sculptor Gregory Ryan and the French bronze furniture maker Laurence Montano for a number of years at a bronze foundry in Massy Plaiseau, Paris.

His first bronze casts were pork pies and a host of detailed off beat pieces from Spacehoppers to String Vests. Tonge has been with the Ben Oakley Gallery since it opened and has shown globally. His Studio is based in the Northwest where he continues to create wonderful sculpture.

David Bray

A multi-talented artist with many strings to his bow with work in collections worldwide. Working in acrylic, David Bray paints like a modern-day master in abstract and semi abstract landscapes. Inspiration comes right on his own doorstep living in Kent, the Garden of England. His palette choice, depth and softness of brush strokes draw you effortlessly into each painting with a familiarity and comforting feeling.

Ben Addison
Ben is a multi-talented artist who was born and raised in London, with frequent trips to the USA as a child to accompany his father, an interior designer of no small repute, and his mother who was a fashion designer. With both parents being full-time creatives it was almost guaranteed that Ben would follow in their footsteps, which he did initially as a musician in the punk scene in the UK in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Ben saw notable successes with the bands Boys Wonder and Corduroy 80s and 90s Just a few years ago painter Frank Bauer gave Ben a set of oil paints and encouraged him to pursue it, Ben worked with Frank in his studio and honed the skills required quickly. He developed his own style, taking elements from 60s and 70s-era movies and television and translating them onto the canvas in a way that accurately captures the zeitgeist of their age.

Sweler
An Australian artist based in Melbourne, in his youth Sweler was influenced by and involved in the Street Graffiti scene. From that he exhibited in a number of group shows in Melbourne.

After moving to London in 2001 he spent ten years developing his style and working as a freelance artist selling out in London and European exhibitions mainly and on commissions or by word of mouth.

Having a small break from painting Sweler moved back to Melbourne where he is again developing his craft. Today he is working on a variety of paintings, juggling between three different approaches. Unrefined characters, small birds on timber, and birds on patterned landscapes. Currently his medium of choice is a vibrant acrylic and spray paint on canvas

Ben Oakley FRSA
Ben Oakley is a prolific conceptual artist whose work doesn’t stick to one medium or subject matter – why listen to other people’s preconceptions about how to pigeon hole yourself? The whole purpose of art and creativity is to be free and express oneself.

With this being Oakley’s life statement he can relate his creativity and artistic vision to a wide selection of unique works and mediums. Oakley has exhibited in the UK, Europe and sold alongside many of today’s modern masters. Using aerosol, acrylic, emulsion and inventive mixed media, Oakley’s work becomes more and more interesting as he layers and combines new techniques with old materials and subject matters delivering them into the 21st century with impact and dynamism.

Jo Peel
Jo is a painter, print maker, animator, and film maker. She is best known for her distinctive line drawings documenting ever changing city landscapes. Peel has worked extensively around the world to capture and record in detail the urban landscape around her and a specific moment in time. Inspired by the process of change, particularly the ways in which a city comes to develop its own personality and culture, she often works in acrylic and spray paint. Her exploration of urban metamorphosis is executed in a variety of mediums ranging from large scale public murals and hand painted animations to screen prints. Her works have been commissioned for a wide variety of clients including Chanel, The Southbank Centre and Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.

She was the first female artist to create a Street Art installation at the glorious Chelsea Flower Show.

Artist Kim Tong PHD
Kim's practice consists of etchings, digital prints, figurative drawings, and sumptuous layered glazed oil paintings that combine gestural, symbolic, and abstract elements. Whilst at Goldsmiths she completed her PhD the Sur(real) Sublime (1997). Shortly after leaving art school Kim founded Tart Art, a feminist collective that exhibited widely and performed live drawing and painting performances and murals across London. She was active in the early days of the London women's art movement, writing for WASL, exhibiting work for the first three Brixton Women’s Art Collective exhibitions.

Nikki Hill Smith
Studied BA Hons Fine Art Painting & Art History & MA Fine Art Painting at university Brighton. “It’s not so much what to paint as how to paint, the “how” being the significant form,” she says. The emphasis on the actual process of making a painting. A dialogue with the grammar, the language of painting. The laws of chance. Natural and unreasonable order just held in check. Fragments of a voluptuous world. An approach that concentrates on the study of consciousness and the objects of direct experience. Neither of which benefits from narrow definition, the truth is in the dialogue, and this is constantly changing, as conversations do. A rapport between painter and canvas. An invitation to the viewer to participate. To expose the guts of the process.

Yvonne Wayling FRSA
Yvonne was born in London and studied Fine Art at Loughton College where she was tutored by Bill Woodrow. It was during the punk movement of the late 1970s, where she studied fine art before majoring in graphic design graduating in 1984 as a fellow of the Society of Industrial Artists and Designers. Yvonne now works across a variety of mediums, including spray paint. Her work blends contemporary street art and classic imagery, taking inspiration from British wartime propaganda, retro advertising and 1950s Hollywood glamour, with a focus on beauty, femininity, nature. Exhibited globally in the early 2000s she combined her skill set to pioneer spray painting portraits and wildlife onto Chanel and Champagne bottles, creating magnificent backlit stain glass-like installations in the windows of many prominent London venues. One of which was a huge commission of 167 unopened alcohol bottles. Yvonne continues to exhibit and work on canvas plus a variety of salvaged substrates breathing new life into otherwise discarded objects from her London studio.

Sarah-Jane Ross
Studied at the University of the Creative Arts, University of Exeter and The Arts institute London, a visual artist (multidisciplinary) hailing from Bridport, Dorset. Her work is bold, influenced by nature and its stories. It’s uplifting and abstract, working in a variety of mediums, including natural found substrates, canvas and the industrial (concrete). Comparisons have been made to Folk Art and Aboriginal Art. There is a folk rhythm to her paintings, with the steady marks, and the rhythm of the seasons. Her work references nature, the land, the food, the flora and the fauna. Ross’s work has been exhibited across the Southwest. She regularly exhibits at Sou’ Sou’ West at Symondsbury and in Torquay, Devon.

Ben Oakley Gallery presents 

FROM THE CITY TO THE SEA

FRIDAY 7 MARCH – SATURDAY 19 APRIL

Tues-Sun (MAIN GALLERY)
Free

Tickets and information 01202 280000 

www.lighthousepoole.co.uk