JonaQuestArt

presents

Waves, Landscapes and Rhythms – Art Exhibition

Featuring the works of

Celia Carr, Suzie Szabo, 

David Cottingham and Nayomi Dharmatileke

Join Us at the Opening Night Tues 9th Oct 6 – 9pm

Click here for FREE admission or RSVP to jonaquest@jonaquestart.com

At: JonaQuestArt. 36 Greenwich Church St. Greenwich. London. SE10 9BL

Artworks on show from the 1st of October with a collection of contemporary jewellery.

Art Exhibition ends Sun 28th October 7pm

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Celia Carr is a Louisiana native with a diverse cultural background. Growing up included Friday night Cajun family get-togethers on south Louisiana bayous to Sunday afternoon matinees at the opera or ballet. It was a blend of rural and city, zydeco and classical music, farming communities and corporate offices.

From an early age, Celia displayed strong aptitude for drawing and creativity – seeing everyday objects as art mediums. Throughout her life, she has studied and experimented with different art forms, from fine French sewing to creating intricate stained-glass compositions.  However, painting is her passion.  Her experience with other forms of art has greatly influenced her current work.  Celia’s work is inviting, passionate, and relatable.

Celia strongly believes that it is experiences that connect people.  Her art is a reflection of the full spectrum of her personal experiences and perceptions.  Every person goes through joy as well as grief, love and hate, boredom and intrigue. This is her life view. Celia’s motto is “always embrace the experience”.  It is her hope that you feel a connection when viewing her work.

David Cottingham is a London-based artist who has developed a unique body of work on the themes of dance and landscape abstraction in the media of painting, drawing and sculpture. He graduated from St Martin’s School of Art in London, where he studied with William Tucker, Phillip King RA and Sir Anthony Caro.

‘My paintings are abstracted improvisations on the two themes that most inspire me, the human body in motion and the spirit of place. My work has its roots in sculpture, which I originally studied. In time, my love of both music and dance pointed my art in a new direction, towards creating paintings with professional dancers in an improvisational style. After experimenting with different techniques, I eventually adopted a linear rhythmic and collaborative approach. That approach combined with my other strand of more abstract painting and with the colour ideas which it generated, gradually became fused into my current figurative style. Light moves across a landscape like the dancer moves through space, I am a painter of transient things.’

David has exhibited in New York, Chicago, London, Beirut and Rome. Commissions include work for Cartlidge Morland in the City of London and work is also held in various private collections worldwide.  David is Hon Vice President of the Drawing Society of the Federation of British Artists, and a member of Axis and the Riverside Art Group.

Nayomi Dharmatileke is an artist based in London. Born and raised in Denmark, but of Sri Lankan origin, frequent travel to the beautiful island of Sri Lanka from an early age influenced her use of colour and love for nature in all its forms. Later, her work evolved to focus on women’s representation in nature and the innate relationship she feels women have with our natural world in terms of their beauty, gentleness and fragility, weathered by their strength, resilience and their capacity to rise from adversity with grace.

Her work in international development has taken her deeper into this notion, observing women and their perceived roles in countries in Africa and Asia, but more importantly the way in which women carry themselves became a passionate observation. Exploring the female form through her own passion for dance and the way women express themselves through the shaping and draping of fabric across the world.

Nayomi journeyed further to pay tribute to women, weaving them deep into some of her paintings. ‘Society can sometimes be quite hard on women and in turn women can be hard on each other but more so themselves. We are often seen as beautiful OR strong, but I will always challenge this… beauty and strength are intertwined in every woman and like nature, if you let them be who they are meant to be… there is a wonderful and calming power within that which can offer so much to the way we live’.

Suzie Szabo was born in Hungary and started cultivating her love for arts and science as a child. Local artists in Debrecen taught her to draw and paint, until she turned towards the pursuit of scientific knowledge at university. After obtaining a degree in microbiology, Suzie worked in medical laboratories in Hungary and the UK. It was a nerve inflammation and the subsequent loss of normal use of her right arm in 2015 that prompted her to return to arts. Ultimately, the catharsis provided by art-making helped motivate Suzie and lift her mood.

Suzie is inspired by beauty in nature: ‘21st Century life is largely urban, pressurised and time-poor. Images of landscapes and the natural world evoke learned memories of an earlier, simpler way of living, one which the present does not allow, and the future does not promise. Capturing the space and simple beauty of nature in a painting brings a sense of escape, of possibility. It reminds of the luxury of solitude, the comfort found in a chosen form of loneliness and of the prospect of discovery. Something new and unseen, over the next hill, on the next turn of a narrow road, in the space of the curve of a coastline.’

Suzie regularly exhibits with the Medgyessy Art Circle Hungary of which she is a member, amongst other European exhibitions. She is also a volunteer teacher at the Hungarian School in Birmingham.