Summer Exhibition
Exhibiting Artists
John Ball
With a background in art and architecture, my main focus in Sussex is now on painting, drawing inspiration from the structural aspect of nature and weaving unusual perspectives into my work.
I produce work mainly in oil and watercolour but also in acrylic, graphite and conte.
Botanical and wildlife feature predominantly in early work but now I explore similar subject matter where the subtleties within the composition are readily depicted. The detail of nature and its landscapes therefore provide inspiration for ongoing work.
Work is shown in Sussex and West Cork and has been exhibited at the Mall Galleries in London.
Reeti C
Reeti C is an Indian artist born and raised in Kolkata, India. Originally trained in digital media and design, she moved to England to pursue her MFA at West Dean College.
Constantly in the search of the sublime, the work of Reeti C is often inspired by moments of silent contemplation triggered by a sense of disorientation of perception. Her work refers to the immersive experience of landscape, especially in connection to altered states of consciousness as she tries to understand and unpack her own experiences of transcendence. Through drawing, she investigates how landscape can evoke sensations of scale, stillness, and expanded perception, inviting viewers to reflect on their relationship with the world beyond immediate experience.
Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. She currently lives and works in Sussex, where the surrounding landscape continues to inform and shape her practice.
Nichola Campbell
Nichola Campbell is a Sussex-based artist working in Indian Inks, an ancient and luminous medium whose intensity suits her instinctive, memory-driven approach to painting. Her practice spans four distinct bodies of work - intimate “Framescapes,” where landscape flows seamlessly across painted wooden tray frames; panoramic triptychs exploring the Sussex coast and Downs; bold wood panel paintings; and richly detailed collage works celebrating the natural world.
A consistent presence in Sussex galleries for over a decade, Nichola has built a devoted following of collectors drawn to her distinctive vision of the Sussex landscape - painted always from memory and feeling rather than direct observation.
She works from her studio near Ditchling Common, drawing constant inspiration from the chalk downs and shifting light of the South Downs National Park.
Marcus Cherrill
Marcus Cherrill is a Sussex-based contemporary artist whose atmospheric acrylic paintings explore the changing light, colour, and quiet rhythm of the East Sussex coastline and downland. Working primarily from direct observation and repeated visits to locations across the county, his paintings balance representation with restraint, simplifying forms and layering colour to evoke a strong sense of place and memory.
Alongside his growing artistic practice, Marcus brings more than thirty years’ experience as an educator, trainer, and consultant — a background that continues to influence the reflective and observational nature of his work and the relationships he builds with visitors, collectors, and galleries.
Following a successful Eastbourne Artists Open Houses at Easter 2026, where several original works sold and new collector relationships were established, Marcus continues to develop his exhibition profile. His work will feature in ArtWave 2026, alongside a forthcoming solo exhibition at Star Brewery Gallery, Lewes, in late July 2026.
Grant Dejonge
As a painter Grant Dejonge’s work has changed significantly over the years. From his early London based work, painting the streets around his Camden home, to the club backdrops that earnt him money in the 90’s. His work has always been colourful and immediate.
After moving to Plumpton with a young family, his eye fell upon the scenery and beauty of the South Downs and the particular countryside around his home. Over the years he has honed his style and now produces paintings that celebrate the places and spaces he frequents as he walks the paths that criss cross this intricate landscape.
The paintings for this show are inspired by the chalk paths that are peculiar to the South Downs, and alongside the chalk streams offer a unique diversity of nature and a gentle beauty. The chalk paths in the paintings are each a journey, a stroll into the horizon.
Jackie Fretten
I spent my childhood between the stark beauty of the Yorkshire Moors and the industry of British Steel, I then chose to seek my fortune in London.
I worked predominantly in the media industry, and for the most part as a TV producer at Saatchi and Saatchi; afterwards I spent a couple of years studying garden design.
Relocating to Lewes,18 years ago, became my opportunity to focus on developing my art practice.
My Practice : Painter and Printer
Casting a curious and playful eye around my home and surroundings, my work is rooted in the place I live, exploring both the observed and the re-imagined through colour, composition and surface.
Mark Glassman
My recent series of paintings have built upon my previous body of work exploring my local beach around Seaford and Newhaven becoming increasingly abstracted and acting as a distillation of personal experiences.
The beach and the sea has become something of an obsession and a metaphor reflecting patterns, shapes, forms, and colours in myriad ways. Paint is spattered, thrown, brushed, diluted, and washed over to express different aspects of the sea and the beach and the elements surrounding it.
The hardness of the rocks and cliffs, the softness of the pebbles and sea are contrasted to create different moods, feelings, and expressions.
Many of my paintings are worked on over a period of months and are layered revealing some of the elements and processes beneath the surface creating depth and diversity.
Allan Grainger
​Allan is a Sussex landscape artist using a lens-based medium to create work that considers place, art and memory.
The picture Mount Caburn is from Allan’s recent portfolio, titled Chalk Paths. Each work is formed by multiple images within a single frame creating landscapes that are reimagined.
His South Downs work is held in the Towner Gallery, Eastbourne collection. It was shown in the exhibition ‘Blink’ about climate change, curated by Caroline Lucas. The work Downland Gloaming was part of a major exhibition at the Pallant House Gallery, Sussex Landscape: Chalk, Wood and Water. Allan exhibited work at Petersfield Museum & Art Gallery for the Sussex Downs Open.
His work is engaged with psychogeography, drawing inspiration from earlier 20th-century artists and writers who captured the South Downs, including Eric Ravilious, Paul Nash, and the poet Edward Thomas.
Allan lives in Saltdean, and primarily works across the South Downs National Park.
Aparna Green
Aparna lives and works in London. Her work explores the entire habitat, tracking the quiet, overlooked histories written into the land. At her studio in Beckenham Place Mansion in South London, she documents how these living ecosystems adapt to the seasons and human presence. By bringing these changing landscapes to life through detailed ink work and atmospheric paintings, she hopes to inspire a deeper, more intentional connection to the diverse world around us.
Lisa Hamilton
Lisa creates handcrafted jewellery in gold and silver including citrines, sapphires, rubies and other wonderful gemstones. She uses traditional bench techniques such as filigree, reticulation, forging, alloying, stone setting and sand casting. Her inspiration comes from the Sussex countryside, particularly native wildflowers and healing plants. She continues to draw and paint plants and this informs her designs. After completing a degree in Three-Dimensional Design at Brighton, Lisa was fortunate to secure an apprenticeship with goldsmith Jacqueline Mina OBE. She now sells her work at selected exhibitions throughout the year, her designs will feature in Artwave 2026 ‘Made in Isfield’. She specialises in redesign, working with customers unworn gold and gemstones, recycling and reworking jewellery to commission. Lisa is keen to share her techniques and teaches traditional studio jewellery making parttime in Streat, East Sussex.
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Susie Hartley
Navigating shape, form and texture my sculptures represent and interpret the human form. My twisted and fragmented figures celebrate the strength and beauty of the female form and I have a classical style in my work, drawing inspiration from ancient fragmented sculptures.
My work consists of simplified form and flowing lines and my partial figures are made working both from life and intuitively. I regularly attend life drawing sessions - working in charcoal - to capture the ‘essence of a pose’. I then use the drawings as a starting point for my figurative sculptures and continue developing the forms in my art studio in Lewes, East Sussex.
I want to create sculptures that depict energy and movement within the human form, sculptures that have a tactile quality that draw you in so that you can experience new qualities and appealing forms from all angles.
Suzanne Hennegrave
Suzanne is a contemporary abstract painter and art educator. She paints in oils and mixed-media, from memory and experience, and her work is developed using artistic intuition. Much of her inspiration comes from the beauty of her surroundings, living in the South Downs National Park. Her greatest loves are atmospheric weather and fleeting light and this she tries to capture in her work, through her own emotional response.
Nigel Hunter
I make sculptures in conversation with the quiet. My work is rooted in subtle beginnings - seeds, shells, buds, the phases the moon, the whisper of wind. I’m drawn to what might go unnoticed: the way a river curls around a stone, or the delicate architecture of budding plants. I aim to create spaces of stillness, where viewers might sense the patience of growth and the silent power of small things. Each piece is a kind of offering or listening: to the rhythms of nature that don’t shout but shape everything. I work in materials that carry the memory of the earth, and my process mirrors an abstraction of natural growth—slow, layered, and intuitive. I hope the sculptures are essentially tactile and just waiting, sitting quietly.
Shona M Macdonald
Shona is a sculptor and mixed-media artist based in West Sussex. She creates sculptures from driftwood fragments gathered along the coastlines of northern Scotland, which are then cast in bronze. Alongside her sculptural practice, she works in oils, collagraph, charcoal and ceramics. Her work explores themes of trauma, fragmentation and repair through symbolic animal forms, drawing on folk tales and mythology to reflect the inner landscape of the human psyche. She is fascinated by the marks carried by driftwood, each fragment holding the quiet evidence of its journey through the elements, echoing the ways our own lives leave traces upon us. Never altered from their found form, the fragments are gently recombined into new sculptural beings, their contours shaped by wind, sea and time. Through this process, weathered materials become objects that speak of vulnerability, endurance and the possibility of transformation. She holds a BA (Hons) Fine Art from Middlesex University and an MA in Sequential Design & Illustration (Distinction) from the University of Brighton.
Jax Martin-Betts
‘The Energetic Artist’
Energy is my companion inspiration and helps me find my rhythm.
I draw the female form all the time as part of my practice. My medium is charcoal which translates to oil paint so well. I explore the journey of the line within and without the body. I enjoy the sensitivity created with pastels too and use dynamic mark making to capture beauty in a moment.
My oil paintings circle around a few different themes.
I love painting landscapes and the sea as I have a close affinity with Cornwall.
These are often started ‘en plein air’ and finished in my studio.
I use my enjoyment of colour to guide me into finding that essence of place.
I also paint the female form and heads. These may start from a live model or from research combined with imagination.
I exhibit in galleries in Sussex and Cornwall.
Neeta Pedersen
Danish/British/Indian artist Neeta Pedersen’s vision comes from her unusual heritage, her extensive travels and her rich visual imagination. She has studied film at the New York Film Academy and hold a BA (Hons) in Animation from the University of Westminster in London.
She has developed a strong style of her own and has created a substantial body of original work expressing herself in many media including paintings, sculptures, digital art, animation and she uses her designs to produce bag, scarves, cushions and mugs.​
​​Since 2006, Neeta has been working as an artist, illustrator, graphic designer and website builder.
In February 2020 she became the owner and director of the Star Brewery Gallery in Lewes and has curated a wide variety of successful exhibitions by established and up and coming artists.
Serena Penman
Trained at the Ruskin School of Art (Oxford) in drawing, painting and printmaking and was a founding member of the Oxford Printmakers’ Co-operative.
Moved to Sussex c.1980 and began to concentrate on landscape and watercolour painting - encouraged by winning international competitions (TH Saunders & Bockingford), the Royal Watercolour Society travel award and election to the Sussex Watercolour Society.
Paintings and prints are in the Towner Gallery, Eastbourne; Hove Museum; various hospitals, and private collections.
Exhibited with Francis Kyle and Abbott & Holder galleries in London and numerous galleries around Sussex.
Contribute regularly to Sussex Watercolour Society shows and to Lewes ArtWave.
I enjoy working for commission and have illustrated a number of books.
I’ve taught painting classes and summer schools for many years in and around Lewes.
David Rice
I’m a painter with a connection to both the natural world and urban environments, seeking to uncover the beauty in the everyday. I have exhibited at galleries throughout the UK and Europe, having originally worked as an art director. This background in visual communication has profoundly influenced my approach to painting, allowing me to bring a strong sense of composition and design to my work.
My landscape paintings are primarily inspired by the South Downs, in the rolling hills and quiet woodlands.
In addition to my rural landscapes, I also explore urban scenes, looking for the poetry in city life, and the moments that often go unnoticed.
For me, art is about finding the extraordinary in the ordinary. Whether it’s the expansive landscapes of the South Downs or the intimate details of an urban street, I strive to reveal the hidden narratives and quiet magic that surround us every day.
Kate Rosie
Working in collage has always been another textured layer of my working practice, alongside semi-abstracts, abstracts, and still life paintings. Intuition plays a part in decision making with a sense of playfulness, as one adds and subtracts throughout the process in order to get to where the work needs to be.
In this piece I began by looking at past sketchbook studies as I explored the concept of an exaggerated element which would dominate the frame, so that it carries the most visual weight. By doing so it allows the remaining elements to support the focal point and not distract from it.
All my art is based on an emotional response to my subject, and the understanding of colour contrast, value, and harmony in bringing an expressive energy and atmosphere to my work.