Bestselling artists

Of the artists who have been drawing attention this month, Lorena Levi is a recent graduate whose challenging and technically impressive paintings show a unique style as well as emotional sophistication, exciting qualities to see in an emerging artist. The narrative richness of her characters’ faces incorporates her ability to portray the experience of the individual, whose solitude persists within the group. These are paintings that pulsate with intensity, striking the viewer as hyperreal figments. Levi orientated her portraiture practice to the constraints of the pandemic by using online forums to meet strangers and encounter their psychological reality: her painting also explores what it is to be together when apart, and the tension of the screen in this dynamic. Some of her recent works, such as ‘Couples Therapy’, have been inspired by the podcast ‘Where Do We Begin’ by Esther Perel. Perel is a therapist who has become widely known over the course of the pandemic as she speaks to the themes of people’s lives - relationality, intimacy, cohabitation - which have been thrown into stark relief. These are also Levi’s subjects, and she rises to the challenge posed to artists to reckon with the new technologies and circumstances shaping our lives.

Phoebe Hardwick and Julia Blackshaw also seek to reinstate the private reality of their subjects. Hardwick’s portraits portraying women are at once admirably controlled in their application of paint and narratively open to a surprising or strange event - see ‘Bedroom’ for one of her heightened yet ambiguous scenes. Over and again, Blackshaw achieves the interiority of her female subjects: in ‘Quiet Time’, as in all of her works, the subject offers the viewer an atmosphere rather than a face with which to understand them.

Timothy Betton has proven the most popular abstract painter this month. He works with the constructive modulations of light, on the level of a perceptual experience even more basic than space. In doing so, he creates works such as ‘Multiple Choices II’ in a variety of palettes that both interrogate and please the eye. Rosemary Burns’ impressionistic style selects the simplicity of rural and animal subjects to bring refreshing images to life; ‘Strawberry Circle’ is an exemplary instance of this. Thomas Cameron, on the other hand, is a distinctly urban painter in this month’s cohort of best selling artists. Cameron works with the surfaces of the city: reflections on glass buildings, a neon high viz. Jacket (‘Deliveroo Rider’), or electric lights merging with a foggy evening. Sam Wood is also dedicated to painting public spaces and those who gather in them. Works such as ‘Pictures at the National’ are a homage cast in a new light after the overwhelming prohibitions on sharing and enjoying culture from the past year and a half of our lives. Both of these artists work in oil, but where Wood uses a more precise technique to draw out his insight into the solidity of form, Cameron uses a looser stroke to highlight the dynamism of what he sees. Each of the artists that people have been turning to in this past month demonstrate a passionate dedication to their area of research and the development of diverse styles; all of them signify a commitment to depth of experience.

Stretch by Julia Blackshaw

Couples Therapy, if by Lorena Levi

Fern by Julia Blackshaw

Quiet Time by Julia Blackshaw

Multiple Choices II by Timothy Betton

Strawberry circle by Rosemary Burn

Heels by Phoebe Hardwick

Parting by Phoebe Hardwick

The Night Watch by Thomas Cameron

Bedroom by Phoebe Hardwick

Pictures at the National by Sam Wood

Deliveroo Rider by Thomas Cameron