An exhibition of paintings by six artists based in the North of England.

JAKE ATTREE was born in 1950, he studied art at York School of Art, Liverpool College of Art and the Royal Academy of Arts.
Jake Attree is a figurative artist in the sense that everything he paints is based on something he has observed and almost certainly drawn. No matter how far the paintings may depart from the subject that inspired them, they nevertheless are rooted in and dependent upon those initial observations.
Attree has shown widely in the UK over the past 25 years and has also exhibited work in America, Holland and Germany.

Born Bohuslav Klos in a small town in Upper Moravia, Czechoslovakia, in 1947, BOHUSLAV BARLOW moved to England when he was eight. His work has it’s roots, to a large extent, in a history of post war displacement and childhood alienation that made isolation a condition of his life and which has fed into his unique art. After school he was to spend a year at Manchester School of Art before going on to the Central School of Art in London, where as a representational painter he was somewhat out of place with the prevailing abstract expressionists and those moving into pop art. Resisting the urging of his tutors to adopt these trends, isolation again became a feature of his existence.

GEORGE HAINSWORTH was born in Leeds in 1937. He attended Leeds College of Art followed by The Slade School of Fine Art where he studied under William Coldstream. He gained the Gulbenkian Scholarship in Sculpture at the British School in Rome. He went on to teach fine art at Leeds College of Art and subsequently lecture as Professor of Art at Leeds Metropolitan University.

IAN NORRIS studied fine art at Blackburn College of Art and has a growing reputation for expressive landscapes and seascapes inspired by the north west of England’s coastline and natural countryside.

Born in 1935 in Sudbury Suffolk, MALCOLM SCOTT has always been a painter. He went to sea in a British Tramp Steamer at the age of 17 and spent three years travelling around the world. “I well remember lying under a thousand stars, our ship the dear old King City moving like a minute dot on an Indian ocean as still as a huge silver mirror. Lying there on our backs trying to make some sense of it all; the stars obscured only now and then by the drifting smoke of our cigarettes.”
His work is in the municipal collections of the city of Leeds and Harrogate.

MARGARET SHIELDS was born and brought up in Middlesbrough. After attending Middlesbrough College of Art, she studied music at the Royal Academy of Music in London. She returned home to paint her familiar surroundings, mostly urban subjects, and in the evenings to teach piano.
In 1985 she moved to Saltburn and her work began to include sea subjects, particularly the many and varied ships, from North Sea Ferries to the intriguing vessels designed for the oil industry. In many of her paintings these are a backdrop against which she portrays the various activities of the seaside town: riding, beach-combing, sunbathing and battling the storms.
Frequent trips to Middlesbrough allow her to continue to paint urban subjects. She particularly enjoys the clash of old and new in modern city life and includes with relish the more prosaic elements of urban scenes.