Clare Astor
Clare Astor took up oil painting in the 1980s when her youngest child went away to school. She works from her studio in Oxfordshire, where she also makes sculpture. Her landscape paintings are abstract; shape, line, texture and colour convey the emotion of the land onto canvas. Her childhood was spent in West Sussex and she has an especial fondness for the Downs and the Sussex countryside.
Bridget Boulting
Bridget Boulting works in a variety of media: pastel, ink, oil stick and collage. Her work is loosely figurative and based on the bones of landscape and the human form, a vivid response to the compacted energy of the natural world. She has run art groups for the Vineyard Project, a drop in centre in Richmond, and co-ordinated the organization We Can Draw, which encourages and promotes art in centres for the homeless. She has been strongly influenced by visits to the west of Ireland and Northumberland.
Honor Brogan
Honor Brogan’s work is concerned with landscape and the human form. Her spare images reveal an intense and thoughtful response to line and shape. In 2007 she was artist-in-residence with the English Choral Experience at 12th century Dore Abbey in Herefordshire, making large working drawings of orchestras and choirs in rehearsal.
Kate Montgomery
Kate Montgomery studied Visual Islamic Art at the Royal College of Art where as part of her course she practised constructing patterns according to geometric principles.Her work mixes patterns of medieval, Indian and Victorian origin. The paintings suggest dreamlike spaces associated with female responsibility, creativity
and desire – silent houses with children outside, workrooms, a costume gallery. Real time and space are avoided, permitting both personal and impersonal histories to be read.
Kate Montgomery is represented by HQ Gallery.
Chelsea Renton
Chelsea Renton studied at Brighton Art College and the Byam Shaw School of Art. She worked as an illustrator and mural artist in London before pursuing a career in the Foreign Office. Since 2003 Chelsea has been concentrating on drawing and sculpture, looking at the animals and landscape around her home in the South Downs as inspiration. She is currently working on a bronze bust of Sir George Christie for Glyndebourne.
Jane Skingley
Jane Skingley initially pursued a career in PR and Marketing. In 2004 she changed direction, following her interest in painting. She is inspired by the British coast, the sea and shoreline, a love which began during childhood holidays sailing on the south coast. She now lives and works in landlocked Berkshire and gathers material for her work on regular trips to the family beach hut on the south coast.
Sîan Wilkins
Raised in Lewes, Sîan Wilkins has been attending rehearsals and performances at Glyndebourne since her schooldays. She studied graphic design at Brighton Art College. After a career in advertising, she has returned to Sussex and painting. These watercolours for Glyndebourne were observed and worked during the 2006 and 2007 Glyndebourne Festivals.
Thomas Ostenberg
Thomas Ostenberg worked for 15 years as a financial consultant before training as a sculptor. His work celebrates the natural world with humour and compassion; the figurative compositions transcend their subject in a search for balance, showing an ecstatic confidence and poise. Ostenberg works in bronze. He trained at the prestigious Kansas City Art Institute and later, with a grant from the Henry Moore Foundation, at the Royal College of Art. ‘Striving for a sense of harmony … inspires me to make sculpture. I aim to stimulate emotions, feelings and the imagination. I want to create an atmosphere conducive to well-being, happiness and joy.’ Thomas Ostenberg has a one-man show at La Galleria in London in September 2008.
Thomas Ostenberg is represented by A Gallery.
Harry Cory Wright
From July 28 the Stalls Gallery will celebrate Journey 2006, the work of landscape photographer Harry Cory Wright. Two Sussex landscapes by Cory Wright will also be on display throughout the Festival in the Foyer Circle covered way. Work can be seen in the Foyer Circle covered way throughout the Festival and the Stalls Gallery from 28 July. In the tradition of Celia Fiennes, Daniel Defoe, William Cobbett and J.B. Priestley, Harry Cory Wright set out in spring 2006 to capture the variety of natural landscape that makes up the British Isles. A highly individual schematic route commenced in the Shetland Islands in March, returning in October to the Isle of Skye.
Cory Wright often spent several days in one location, immersed in the landscape, his large-format Gandolfi plate camera capturing images resonant with detail and intensity. Glyndebourne was one of his stops. The photographs have been collected into a book, Journey through the British Isles, which is available from the Glyndebourne Shop. ‘I am a photographer, and my job is to bring it all down to no longer than one-fifteenth of a second ... you reach as deep as you can into the world in front of you and return; it’s a sort of hunt if you like … a raid.’
Craft Makers
The Glyndebourne Shop will show work by the following craft-makers: jewellery by Jean Scott-Moncrieff, River Song, Sandy Hernu and Rachael Whitteridge, pottery by Jonathan Chiswell Jones, leather goods from Jane Hopkinson and Tamara Fogle, silver and jewellery by Pruden and Smith, textiles from Gracie Burnett, Shoto Banerji and Diana Irani.