John Laven, E.J Laven, Nicola Lebon and Andrew Shrubb

John Laven is a landscape painter. He sees his work in the tradition of European painting stretching back to the late 18th century romantics. His focus is the force of nature imbued with anthropomorphic qualities of struggle and tension that exist at the frontiers and margins of a place. This is a place that exists both in real lived experience and in the imagination. The paintings deal with moods and atmosphere as much as the recording of physical reality expressed through formal elements such as composition, rhythm, balance, colour and mark making. He believes that these are themes that have an urgent contemporary relevance as the dynamics that exist between people and natural world shift and re-align. There is a deliberate absence of any references to, or traces of, humankind past or present and so we are only there as a third person, a witness. This leaves open the question of where we might fit into this.

E.J.Laven has spent most of her life living on the Kent coast and it is from this contrasting landscape, as well as the structures and objects found along the shoreline, that much of her work arises. Her ideas and observations are expressed through a diverse range of media – from sculpture and ceramics to painting, mixed media and installations and often explore concepts associated with the act of collecting and the relationship between curios and artefacts with their audience.

Nicola Lebon has been exhibiting her paintings for the past twenty five years and started to work with Ceramics in 2017.Inspired by mythology and artefacts from the ancient world, creating creatures and spirts from her imagination.  Preferring to work with coloured clays, as this leaves a velvety matt finish in muted colours.

Andrew Shrubb’s dark and imaginative drawings allow the viewer to enter his thoughts, no matter how uncomfortable this can be. Years of reading comics and listening to metal have infected his brain and he vomits this up, with his pen in hand, onto paper.