Taking photos is more of an obsession of mine than a career. Being around nature makes me more than happy.

Combining the two is a not so guilty pleasure of mine and the outcome is a photographic memory that I can keep forever.

I like to share my work with people simply so that they can see the beautiful things in life, the things that pass us by every minute of the day.
I’m never afraid to learn something new and experiment.

I’m not too sure what else to say, if you want to contact me feel free.

Location: Sevenoaks
Contact: eroserussell@aol.co.uk

I have worked with paints and inks for over 34 years, initially decorating fine bone china for Royal Crown Derby for 3 years, followed by a 17 year periodwhen I printed fine art etchings for many successful local artists including Graham Clarke, Michael Chaplin and Robert R Greenhalf.

Feeling the need to expand my mind and develop more self-confidence, at the age of 39 I took on a graduate diploma in counselling and I have since specialised in the field of eating disorders, working with people suffering from anorexia, bulimia or binge-eating.

Over the past 2 years I have been developing my own artwork which provides a calming, restorative balance to the psychological demands of my counselling work.
I work on canvas using acrylic paints, which I love for their vibrancy, texture and immediacy. I mainly work from photographs that I have taken myself although sometimes I will use images provided by the friends or family who have commissioned a painting.

I have been inspired by the work of Georgia O Keefe whose flower paintings have a life and boldness that I resonate with. I also love the photographs of Christopher Beane who creates images using flowers and oil colours floating on water which fire my imagination.

In my own work I see each painting as an individual portrait, trying to capture the essence of each flower as a unique being with its own intricate complexity, which is very like what I do with my clients in my counselling work.

Location: Maidstone
Website: www.pamsflowerpaintings.co.uk
Contact: pamcaney@aol.com

I never have a clear idea of what a finished painting is going to look like. They evolve organically during their creation. My inspiration comes from the Kent countryside and childhood holidays spent in Cornwall. I’m very interested in narratives that are intrinsically linked to the countryside such as local history and folklore. I like to hint at mysterious happenings within the paintings however, my stories exist only within the paintings and reveal themselves only in the closing stages of their making.

I discovered colour when I was in my first year at college. Since then it has caused me no end of anguish. Recently I have become very interested in the physicality of the paint surface as well which has led to some rather unusual additions to my painting materials.

Location: Rochester
Website: www.richardfriend.co.uk
Contact: info@richardfriend.co.uk

A lot of my inspiration comes from literature, old photographs, music and distant memory. My paintings deal primarily with colour, composition, and the decorative. The dress pattern templates are inanimate objects that act as a metaphor for the human body. These are composed in surreal or romantic scenarios which are the architecture of a given environment. Light and dark elements are a dual nature in my work and in my philosophy. This sets the tone and mood for my work. Like setting a scene for a stage set. Masculine and feminine forms are set in groups, as duets or independently in isolation. Much of the work is layered adding visual depth along with shadowing the form and highlighting the decorative which shifts perceptions of what the viewer initially sees in the work.

On closer inspection detail evolves into the decorative elements of lace and free hand repetitive mark making echoing the technological manufacture of the lace stencilled onto the canvas. Light plays and dances across the surface with other media reflecting light back out. Through these processes the camouflaging and emerging elements like breathing add to nature’s organic movement competing with formalism. It is like trying to find an ideal utopia within a mechanical world. Nature prevails in many aspects of our lives. Over time layers build up within the memory of the human mind just as nature layers her organic constructions over derelict pasts. Fighting the rigid architecture of man-made ideas and tendencies towards the natural world evolve in order to work in harmonious balance of progress and technology with what the eye sees and the heart feels. And yet one still needs to visualise the need for freedom and creativity around us encompassing the old with the new.

Location: Cranbrook
Website: www.myspace.com/earthlingcool
Contact: earthlingcool@yahoo.co.uk

The substance of my painting is essentially concerned with the actual experience of the landscape, the external environment. I reflect on the landscape through observation, memory and imagination.

A dialogue with the work develops discovered through the actual process of painting. I revel in the physicality of the paint, the material; how I put the paint on the canvas, the unconscious, the process. Construction ideas within the painting manifest as the painting develops with the language of colour, light, form, texture and the pictorial space, of movement, rhythm and pattern.

Location: Canterbury
Contact: tina.canterbury@hotmail.co.uk

I am a multimedia schitzophrenic. I work in any medium that will enhance the experience of creating, and seeing. I paint, draw, make beaded items and chainmaille, create felted images and would be nothing without my beloved  photography…
Why stand in front of someone else’s shop window, yearning- create your own!

Location: Dover
Website: www.sjs-artandsoul.com
Contact: sharon@sjs-artandsoul.com

I was born in Yorkshire and raised in Kent. I studied the visual arts at the London Institute and the University of Kent. For over 22 years I taught successfully in Secondary schools across the county.

I live by the sea on the north Kent coast, in Whitstable – famously a place of beautiful and dramatic sunsets. The sky and the sea’s ever-changing palette of colour and mood influence my work.

My paintings have been shown in group and solo exhibitions in the UK. I have exhibited at the Horsebridge Arts and Community Centre in Whitstable and at The Sportsman, Seasalter. Other venues across Kent have included The Metropole, Folkestone, Maidstone Museum and The Gulbenkian Theatre, Canterbury.

I am a constant and enthusiastic traveller. My experiences and observations have a resonance in my use of vibrant colour. The shocking pinks and acid yellows from Rajasthan, the brilliant blues of tropical seas and the vivid colours of South American costumes against indigo and ochre landscapes have all informed my palette. I find real delight and excitement from using striking colours.

The themes of my work are grounded in the reality of my experience of places, particularly of the built-environment and of living in Whitstable. I use bold, flat colour, often with black outlining, to bring out the strength of adjacent colours and to describe simplified forms. The influence of Matisse and Patrick Caulfield are evident in my current work.

Location: Whitstable
Website: www.daphnestanley.co.uk
Contact: daphnestanley@googlemail.com

A graduate of Chelsea School of Art (BA Hons) and Canterbury Christchurch University college (MA) and De Werkschuit  in Amsterdam,  I have been primarily focused on the English tradition of landscape as a valued subject of artistic enquiry, exploring the position of this genre as a mode of expressive representation in a high tech age. The concept of a landscape and the interaction of human forces within it underpin the infinite possibilities of the subject that provides the catalyst for a painterly enquiry. By necessity the search for a painterly language is a by product of establishing the value of the act of painting and the homage to the traditional and historical language of European painting and in particular – but not solely – landscape painting.

Location: Canterbury
Website: www.markhowlandpaintings.com
Contact: m.howland@canterburycollege.ac.uk