London Art Fair 2023

In Dust to Pigment – Morning, and Dust to Pigment – Night, newly elected Royal Academician Katherine Jones pulls us into a nuanced field of meaning; combining her love of flora, contemplations on her life as an artist and as a mother. On one level these are gestural prints of flowers made using a painterly inking process. Here also the two variations – Night and Morning, adopt kindred spirits as Jones reflects upon Virginia Woolf’s lecture ‘Professions for Women’, 1931. In ‘Killing the Angel in the House’, Woolf described the need to kill the ‘Angel’, a personification of the domestic, caring and selfless, in order to be able to write.

This year I am excited to introduce to our platform the mokuhanga prints of Scottish artist, Paul Furneaux. Mokuhanga describes woodblock printing in the Japanese tradition. This informs a radical beauty in the layering of line and colour, surface and the residual wood grain that is both visually eloquent and absorbing. In Yellow into Black: Inside Outside, simplified and abstracted language is utilised to suggest, rather than overly describe, where the horizon meets land. Furneaux trained at Edinburgh College of Art and Tama Art University, in Tokyo. He has returned to Japan over the past 20 years to continue his practise and explore the contemporary potential of this exacting medium.

Susan Preston is an abstract painter using oil paint and pastel. These are mobile and versatile mediums; the imagery changes through the painting process, dissolving and reforming as a layered, ambiguous space develops. Through this meditative process, the work alludes to memory traces, to the shifting spaces between presence and absence, loss and retrieval.

A piece is eventually resolved when the tension between the layers and the elements on the surface draw the viewer into the space, where the painting reveals its secrets slowly; these works repay contemplation.

Susan Preston has exhibited widely, including in Strasbourg and London. Her work is in collections in Europe, Asia and the USA. After an absence of several years we are delighted to have lured this private and intimate painter to make a new series of 6 pastel drawings for us to launch at the London Art Fair.