Top 50 Brighton Artists and their Featured Art

I came to painting late, having studied editorial and fine art photography at University for the Creative Arts. I've always drawn and started painting intensively during the pandemic. This period of often (very) early morning walks through empty streets helped me stay connected to my environment and caused me to look at the mundane features of the city in a very different way. I've continued my practice as the streets have repopulated, and while my paintings now occasionally include ghostly figures, I'm still interested in how the streets appear when absent of people. Working around the population has encouraged a faster approach to capturing images and painting, which can be seen in looser brush strokes and gestures over my more precise early work.

Cassia Beck is a collage artist and has been creating hand cut paper works for two decades, even while studying for her degree in workshop ceramics. Behind the scenes, collage has always been part of her life. Cassia’s work has been licensed and sold in Ikea, Urban Outiftters and graces the walls of numerous hotels. Her collage work is playful with a splash of humour and satisfies her need to scavenge in junk shops and car boot sales for interesting paper finds. Cassia is inspired by mid century advertising and likes to mix the old with the new. Bold colourful shapes combined with black and white images have become her signature style.

I am a painter of vivid abstract seascapes and I am endlessly fascinated by the horizon and the symbolism it evokes. I paint from memory rather than life, recalling a special moment of time as my starting point. I love working with pure colour and my paintings are heavily influenced by the beauty of the natural world, particularly light on water at certain times of day. Together with horizons, my work has a recurring theme of time and an exploration of light and darkness. I did a degree in Fine Art at Brighton University and fell in love with the Sussex Coast. Now I live in Hastings and I find that the sea is a constant source of inspiration and subject matter. Music is integral to my work, inspiring my artistic practice and I always listen to music to get me in the zone when painting and feel this has a strong influence on the finished work. For me music triggers memories and feelings and each painting is an emotional response to a sensory experience and an attempt to recapture how it felt to be in a particular place at a certain time. Lately I’ve been listening to a lot of dreamy folk music like Johnny Flynn, Martha Tilston, Nick Drake and Sandy Denny. I think this adds an ethereal quality to my minimal seascape paintings and I often get lost in the music and don’t realise where the time goes. I always title my paintings from songs, with lyrics often jumping out at me while I'm painting that seem to fit the artwork perfectly. I feel that a snippet of a song lyric as a title gives the painting extra depth.

Michael Bishop has worked and exhibited in London and New York and his paintings are in many private collections worldwide. His work was used for the London Tube poster 'Downtown to Soho' in 1996, magazine covers such 'Science' as well as being featured in 'Vogue', The Observer' and 'The Times'. During his stay in New York from 1990 until 1995, he illustrated a version of Frances Hodsgon Burnett's 'The Secret Garden' for publishers Hugh Later Levin. He paints mainly landscapes, urban landscapes and seascapes and lives in Worthing on the South coast of England.