Naila Hazell

The Paintings of Naila Hazell

Born in 1981, Naila Hazell is a British contemporary artist who was raised in Baku, Azerbaijan. She studied fine arts under the renowned Soviet social-realist painter Boyukagha Mirzezade, a laureate of the State Prize of the Azerbaijan Republic. Hazell received her MFA at the Azerbaijani Fine Arts Academy. Although working mainly in oils, she is exploring other mediums for her conceptual art projects.

Hazell is mainly a figurative artist whose work in oils contain a diversity of deep colors and structures surrounding her figures. Her works explore the stillness found in those short precious moments that happen throughout one’s life, often ignored due to life’s rapid pace. Hazell’s themes contain many stories linked to ordinary life experiences; they also contain messages about the deeper realities of life and offer glimpses into individual identities.

Naila Hazell’s work has been included in many group exhibitions since her initial entry in a 2000 group exhibition in Baku. Her second group show was “White and Black” held in 2009 at the Azerbaijan National Museum in Baku. From 2010 to 2020, Hazell has had work in sixteen group shows in Azerbaijan and England. Among these were the 2011 “Novruz Celebration” held at Gibson Hall, Bishop Gate in London, the 2020 Mall Galleries Annual Exhibition for the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, and the 2020 Mall Galleries Royal Society of British Artists 303rd Annual Exhibition in London.

In 2008, Hazrll had her first solo exhibition entitled “You Are Always With Me” at Baku’s Art Centre Gallery. Her second solo was the 2012 “Naila Hazell” exhibition held at the Axerbaijan Cultural Center in London. In 2020, Hazell exhibited her works at a solo exhibition in the Hogarth Health Club in Chiswick, London. Currently based in her West London studio, she was the recipient of the 2021 Royal Scottish Academy’s Lyon and Turnbull Award.

Naila Hazell’s work is currently being shown at an exhibition entitled “Face to Face” held at London’s Gillian Jason Gallery on Great Titchfield Street until the 17th of December. Hazell’s website can be found at: https://www.nailahazell.com

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Naila Hazell with Self Portrait”

Middle Insert Image: Naila Hazell, “Intersection with Shadows”, 2022, Oil on Linen

Bottom Insert Image: Naila Hazell, “Resting on Truth”, 2022, Oil on Linen

Mark Wallinger

Mark Wallinger, Three of the “Id Paintings” Series, 2015-2016, Paint on Canvas

Mark Wallinger is a British artist, best known for his 1999 sculpture, “Ecco Homo” in Trafalgar Square and his 2007 “State Britain” at Tate Britain. He won the Turner Prize, an annual prize presented to British visual artists, in 2007.

The “id Paintings” have grown out of Wallinger’s extensive series of self-portraits, and they reference the artist’s own body. His height – and therefore his arm span – is the basis of the canvas size. They are exactly this measurement in width and double in height. Wallinger uses symmetrical bodily gestures on the two halves of the canvas to mirror one another, recalling the bilateral symmetry of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man”.

Created by sweeping paint-laden hands across the canvas in active freeform gestures, the “id Paintings” bear the evidence of their making and of the artist’s encounter with the surface. In recognising figures and shapes in the material, the viewer reveals their own desires and predilections while trying to interpret those of the artist.

Trevor Leaf

Trevor Leat, “Calgary Stag”, Willow Wicker Sculpture

Trevor Leat is one of the foremost creators of willow sculptures in the UK. Using traditional techniques combining beauty with functionality, Trevor Leat has been weaving willow to great effect for over 30 years. Although he creates baskets, garden furniture and even willow coffins, it is for his willow sculpture he is best known.

His work ranges from lifesize animals and figures, through to giant willow sculptures spectacularly burned at festivals and events such as The Wickerman Festival, The Edinburgh Hogmanay Celebrations and The Burns Light Festival in Dumfries. Based in coastal Galloway, Southern Scotland, Leat’s work is exhibited widely in galleries, and seen by tens of thousands at festivals and events around the UK and beyond.

David Inshaw

Seven Landscapes by David Inshaw

Born in Wednesfield, Straffordshire, England, David Inshaw is a British artist who sprang to public attention in 1973 when his painting The Badminton Game (bottom image) was exhibited at the ICA Summer Studio exhibition in London. The painting was subsequently acquired by the Tate Gallery and is one of several paintings from the 1970s that won him critical acclaim and a wide audience.

David Inshaw studied at Beckenham School of Art in 1959–63 and the Royal Academy Schools in 1963-66. A teaching post at the West of England College of Art, Bristol, in 1966–75 was followed by a two-year fellowship in Creative Art at Trinity College in Cambridge. Inshaw moved to Devizes, Wiltshire, in 1971 and formed the Broadheath Brotherhood with Graham and Ann Arnold in 1972. The three artists were joined by Peter Blake, Jann Haworth, and Graham and Annie Ovenden in 1975, when the group was renamed the Brotherhood of the Ruralists.

Peter de Francia

Paintings and Drawings by Peter de Francia

Peter Laurent de Francia was a French-born British artist, who served as Professor of Painting at the Royal College of Art (RCA), London, from 1972 to 1986. He was the author of two books on Fernand Leger: Leger: The Great Parade (Painters on Painting) (1969) and Fernand Léger (1983).

Brought up “mostly by servants” in Paris, Peter de Francia was the only child of a wealthy corporate lawyer of Genoese descent and his English wife. He attended the Brussels Academy and, after four years in the army, the Slade. However, his real education was in Italy, in the reawakening of neo-Realism and in the studio of the Communist artist Renato Guttuso, whose denunciatory drawings ‘Got Mit Uns’ were a lifelong influence. When de Francia arrived in England in 1940, he knew almost no one. He would remain for more than 60 years a Displaced Person, fundamentally opposed to all the British art establishment stood for.

Peter de Francia met both Beckmann and Grosz in New York in 1950. His identification with the late figure compositions of Léger was evident in his impassioned essay on The Great Parade, published in the RCA’s “Painters on Painting” series in 1969. Those three artists all pointed towards linearity; and it was in large-scale complex charcoal drawings, rather than paintings, that de Francia found his mature expression.

Felice Beato

Photography of Samurai by Felice Beato

Felice Beato, who was born in Venice but became a British citizen by virtue of his family’s residence in Corfu which was a UK protectorate at the time, began his photographic career with a trip to Constantinople, now Istanbul, alongside Robertson who later became his business partner and brother-in-law.
When war broke out in the Crimea in 1855, Beato journeyed to Balaklava to document the progress of the conflict – and, in the process, became one of the world’s first war photographers.

Later, he journeyed to India before arriving in China in 1860 where he photographed the progress of the Anglo-French military expedition slugging it out against the indigenous Qing Dynasty in the Second Opium War.
His photographs of China, some of the earliest ever taken, include numerous shots of Victorian Hong Kong and a gruesome set featuring the Taku Forts surrounded by the bodies of Chinese troops who died defending them against the British.

Three years later, Beato moved to Japan where he remained until 1877. Based in Yokohama, he was given an unusually large amount of freedom by the ruling Shogunate which allowed him to tour the country, taking photos as he went. The photographs, which date from between 1863 and 1877, taken by Felice Beato are among the earliest examples of coloured photography ever produced.

Snow Ghosts, “And the World Was Gone”

Snow Ghosts, “And the World Was Gone”, Live Version

Producer Ross Tones (aka Throwing Snow) and vocalist Hannah Cartwright (aka Augustus Ghost) first met and started collaborating in 2008, having a shared interest in British folklore and experimental electronic music.

The first Snow Ghosts record, the ‘Lost At Sea’ EP, was released through Black Acre Records in 2011. Following this initial release, Tones and Cartwright spent the next two years compiling their debut album ‘A Small Murmuration’, which was released on London nightclub Fabric’s record label Houndstooth in 2013.

In 2014, Tones and Cartwright joined forces with multi-instrumentalist Oliver Knowles, and Snow Ghosts became a trio. The band’s second album, ‘A Wrecking’, was released on Houndstooth in February 2015. In August 2013, Snow Ghosts track ‘And The World Was Gone’ featured in a pivotal scene in episode 10 ‘The Overlooked’ of Teen Wolf (Season 3).

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