‘The Beach’ Gallery is delighted to announce its latest exhibition ‘HORIZONS’, which will commence with a Private View at 6:30pm Wednesday 1 May 2024, and will be open to the public from 10:00am Thursday 2 May until Sunday 9 June  2024.

The exhibition will feature the emotive seascapes and flower portraits of American fine art photographer Steve Gallagher, and beautifully painted and drawn studies by Tess Gartland-Jones from her recently completed Studio H Canadian International Artists Residence on Vancouver Island.

HORIZONS brings together two talented artists whose works reflect and contrast the constantly changing nature of the sea with the tranquil beauty of floral and coastal old growth forest life.

The Artists

Steve Gallagher is a Sussex-based fine art photographer, originally from the American Midwest where he graduated with a Fine Arts degree in Visual Design and Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. After working in fashion photography in Chicago, Miami and New York, he then built a successful career in advertising and digital design before moving to the UK.

Living next to the sea on Britain’s south coast, his love of photography was reignited by the beauty of the Sussex Downs, the local shoreline and the sea. Moving into a house surrounded by nature, with an artist’s studio already built in the garden, his photographic focus on seascapes and floral portraits was almost inevitable. The confinement of the Covid pandemic imposed a time and space to distil his art, allowing Steve to focus on refining and redefining his practice over this period to produce the intricate and skilfully-composed photographs that characterise his work.

The HORIZONS exhibition will feature a selection of his captivating seascape and floral studies, including innovative new works on aluminium and cloth.

Website: www.stevegallagher.art

Instagram: @stevegallagher.art

Tess Gartland-Jones is an oil painter fascinated by the beauty of the natural world and how artists convey what they see and feel. Her love of being in nature and discovering new environments has evolved into a dual process of impressionistic work encapsulating a sense of place as she explores trails in different parts of the world. Her studio practice is built on the interplay of the impressionistic plein air process and how memory and intrinsic qualities of a subject are refined in a traditional, employing an oil painting technique that has a luminosity and subtly that has to be seen directly to be truly appreciated. 

Tess has recently completed a Studio H Canadian International Artists Residence on Vancouver Island, and subsequently has been selected by the Pouch Cove Foundation to join their prestigious Invitation Only Visual Artist Residency Program in Newfoundland, Canada in 2025.

The HORIZONS Exhibition will feature Tess’ exquisite oil, wet charcoal, and drawn studies produced during her recent residence on Vancouver Island.

Website: www.tessgartland-jones.com

Instragram: @tess_gartlandjones_art

‘The Beach’ Gallery at 197 Waldegrave Rd, Teddington TW11 8LX, latest exhibition ‘TOP 10’ will be open to the public from 10:00am Thursday 29 February until Sunday 21 April 2024.

The exhibition will feature the personal 2023 ‘TOP 10’ pick of the of five local photographers, whose work ranges from Street, to Fashion and Portraiture. The works reflecting a range of photographic techniques and processes covering, 35mm film, digital, artificial intelligence, and 19th century wet plate collodion ‘Tintypes’. 

There will also be a series of demonstrations and talks by the exhibiting photographers on the stories behind their work, and the techniques and technologies they use.

The Photographers

Calvin Chinthaka is a British-Sri Lankan fashion photographer based in Strawberry Vale, and founder of Brand Human. Calvin is Fashion Photographer and a public speaker, who invests his time in things that are going to change people’s lives. 

Calvin fosters a range of approaches rather than a singular or fixed practice of fashion photography; defining fashion photography in practice, research and development, and a cultural, educational, professional, and global context; breaking new ground by visually representing the fashion narrative. 

Calvin offers a holistic approach to developing and creating a rich digital body of work ready for industry. Having started his photography and filmmaking career in 2010, after graduating with a BA (Hons) in Fashion Photography from the University of the Arts London and a MA of Fashion Photography from the London College of Fashion. 

Calvin directed his first fashion film ''Osariya'' in 2016, winning Best Cinematography at London Fashion Film Festival. 

In 2018, he photographed English fashion and textile designer Dame Zandra Rhodes for WWD. In 2019, he photographed the British fashion designer Sir Paul Smith. In 2020, he directed and produced a video of Ian Davenport for The Art News and the Kasmin gallery in New York.
In 2020, he was commissioned to shoot the Colombo Fashion Week fashion collection of Lovi Ceylon in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

In 2020, Calvin joined the Sri Lankan luxury menswear designer brand as a business partner. He co-founded Sword and Yoga, a boutique yoga brand based in Budapest and the Brand Human media agency in London later that year. Calvin has also lent his talents to International brands and musicians, including Sri Lankan Airlines, Naked Wolfe, Art News, WWD, Cosyspeed, Gymbox, London College of Fashion, Lovi Ceylon, and The Drum.

Instagram: @fashion_calvin

Akinyemi Paul Odulate is a street photographer based in Camberwell, with a passion for film photography born in Lagos, Nigeria. Arriving in London at the age of five, Paul has spent most of his life as a Londoner. Establishing C.I.M.E Lab; a business providing film and processing with the aim to make it more affordable and accessible.

Paul studied Graphic & Typographic Design at UAL London College of Communication, where he first developed an appreciation for photography. Working as a freelance designer gave him the opportunity to further develop his photography skills. This led to a new pathway seeking a career in commercial photography as a product photographer in the high end fashion industry. 

After several years working in this sector he would go on to realise that what he loved most about photography was people. That along with Covid isolation and the increased awareness of mental health heightened the thoughts of human connection. 

Paul’s style of street photography and street portraits focuses on London and its diverse and culturally rich inhabitants; a highly populated city with many types of social groups and yet loneliness is a subject that seems so rife, this being the main back story to his work.

Instagram: @caught_in_my_eye

Rory Lindsay is a multi-disciplinary commercial photographer based in Teddington.  

In 2008, following 15 years working for some of London's most successful advertising agencies, he studied Photography at Central Saint Martins before starting his freelance career.  His client list now includes Getty Images, National Geographic, Vodafone, HSBC, BBC Picture Publicity and many more. 

Fascinated by the idea of 'glamming-up nature', and drawing inspiration from 19th Century botanical illustrations, as well as the fundamental principles of lighting for product and portrait photography, Rory has harnessed the power of AI to create a series of 10 highly stylised 'Artificial Flowers'. 

Gradually prompting the computer with carefully-selected photographic technical terms he was able to use machine learning to shape and refine the floral compositions to his liking, before digitally applying analogue film emulations in post-production, in order to achieve more 'photographic' effects.

Instagram: @rory.lindsay.photo

Peter Swann is an artist / photographer working with historic processes based in Twickenham. 

Pete specialises in portraits and landscapes of Richmond people and the borough and will be displaying wet plate collodion and silver/gelatine prints, made in his own darkroom, and demonstrating some of the remarkable large format cameras he builds and uses to offer bespoke portraits and workshops using the 19thcentury collodion photographic process @teddingtontintype.

Pete studied industrial design in London in the mid 1990s.  From 1998-2001 he worked on industrial printing machines and factory automation systems.  Then for 13 years he worked for a charity designing special equipment for disabled children.  That included the award-winning Bugzi, an electric wheelchair for toddlers, which is still in production.  

In both roles he learned workshop skills and about materials and manufacturing processes.  In 2014 he left the charity to become an artist www.peteswann.co.uk .  In the last few years Pete has returned to photography, where his creative journey first began, but with the skills needed to build cameras as well as take pictures.  He has built more than a dozen unique large format cameras to his own designs, from 5x4 up to 12x16.

After an initial series of wet plate collodion demonstrations at The Beach ‘Richmond Arts Open Studio’ exhibition in mid-2023, Pete established www.teddingtontintype.co.uk with photographer Simon Whitehead.  Teddington Tintype is a wet plate studio based at Teddington Photographic, in Broad St, Teddington.  Wet plate collodion is an amazing historic photographic process invented in 1851, shooting on metal or glass plates (tintypes and ambrotypes).  Teddington Tintype offers portraits and still life, and offer workshops teaching the collodion process.  

Instagram: @cameraeccentrica / @teddingtontintype

Colin Stout based in Hampton was born and grew up on Stronsay in Orkney, and initially worked on the island as a builder’s labourer. This was when he discovered photography and the work of Bill Brandt, and knew that whatever it took, he had to become a photographer.

Having been accepted to study photography Bournemouth & Poole College of Art & Design, Colin developed a lifelong passion for black and white photography, and of the great photojournalist story tellers: Diane Arbus, Elliot Erwitt, Dorothea Lange, Imogen Cunningham, Don McCullin, Chris Killip and Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Colin graduated in 1985 and eventually move to London where he fell in love with the unique culture and ethnic diversity the city had to offer. Telling people’s stories with pictures had always been something very close to his heart but found it difficult to earn a living from it.

Whilst freelancing and working as a photographer’s assistant he applied for a job advertised in British Journal of Photography, was taken on as the staff photographer at The Haymarket Media Group and ended up working with them for over thirty years. Enjoying every day, Colin worked on magazines such as Campaign, Management Today, XYZ, Newspaper Focus, Marketing, PR Week, Creative Technology and Revolution. 

Over the years travelling around London, Colin saw many different cultures and communities that fascinated him, and promised himself to return and document them.

Retired in 2022, Colin is now revisiting these places to tell in his photographic project of why, having lived in London for almost forty years, he loves it so much.

Instagram: @colinstout

The Beach Gallery is hosting a curated selection from the collection of 'Self Portraits', by exciting new Ukrainian artist Dasha Nepochatova in conjunction with the 'Top 10' photography exhibition. 

This will be a world first opportunity to see the extraordinary work of Dasha - who has only recently started drawing. 

About the “Self-Portrait” collection:- 

Prior to the war in Ukraine, Dasha had been working on the text of a fantasy realist novel about the inner conflicts of a woman - maternity, female sexuality, professional identity, and relationships. However, since the trauma of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Dasha has experienced writer's block, and instead has started using drawing in pastel to express herself. 

In Dasha's own words: 

"It seems easier to express what’s going on in my inner world through lines and colours of soft pastels than to finding the words. I can talk through my portraits about my shock, my anxiety, my grief, my morning, and my sadness. I can talk about feeling of guilt and losing my voice and professional identity. 

I allow my unconscious to appear as a negative on the film I just shot. That is why the women who look at you from the portraits are so different from me, but at the same time, they are my self-portraits, different facets of myself, my identity. The portrait of a woman who lost so much but gained so much at the same time, who is changing, becoming mature and healing herself through art and drawing." 

About the Artist: 

Dasha Nepochatova is a Ukrainian author and artist, co-founder of the first feminist publishing house in Ukraine Creative Women Publishing, women empowerment activist, and co-founder of Creative Women Space. In April 2022, Dasha and her family found refuge in the UK under the Homes for Ukraine Scheme.

The Beach Gallery inaugural exhibition, ‘Relationship – Recognition – Realisation’, ran from 30th September - 17th November. 

The  exhibition featured beachscape inspired copper and brass sheet multi-media, oil and ceramic works of renowned artists Julie Oldfield, Tess Gartland-Jones, and Roz Fletcher.

The works reflect each artist’s individual ‘relationship’ with beach and seascapes, and their deep ‘recognition’ of changing weather and light conditions. Although the themes and composition of their work are common, the techniques and methods by which they are ‘realised’ are very different.