Harry Pye's RA show

Le Document's Art Exhibition of the Month is taking place at The Front Room Gallery in Bellevue Road, Ramsgate. The show opens on Friday the 20th August and closes on Sunday 12th of September. The gallery is open on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays from 11am till 6pm. Le Document begged 10 artists in the show to tell us a bit about themselves – they told us this ...

Felicity Allen

Felicity Allen: In part the work is about exchanging personal recognition with my sitters (as opposed, for instance, to algorithmic surveillance or the standardisation of selfies), so I like to paint people whose social status renders them individually unrecognised (eg asylum seekers), along with others who are more securely visible. For me, a sitter is part of a particular series so I invite people accordingly. I usually ask someone to do a minimum of two full days sitting – more is more interesting. I’m excited by difference and the problem of translating whoever it is into watercolour paint.

Russell Charter

Russell Chater: Whitewashed windows have long fascinated me and speak to ongoing interests in display, concealment and the fundamental concerns of drawing and painting: sign and symbol; gesture and mark making; the artist’s hand; surface and depth; the frame; transience – and our need to leave a trace. Recent paintings reference altarpieces, which further highlights spiritual, as well as spatial / architectural, readings. Here, the wash presents a kind of conflation as much as obfuscation, with the sweep of (art historical) time and space caught up in its swirls. Works oscillate between reverence and irreverence, the graphic and the gestural. Gold leafed edges, meanwhile, further 'frame' the works.

Ben Dickson

Ben Dickson: I am a Portrait Artist working in Designers Gouache and printing using lino. Using a bold graphic style that uses flat colour. The portraits aim to reflect the vulnerability of the subject and the lives that they have led. I like making the work which talks for itself and I don’t need to explain it in any great depth.

Lisa Hawkins

Lisa Hawkins: My work is about the interplay of our interior and exterior realities and how it feels to "be in the world".  I am mainly inspired by landscape and strive for a sense of connectedness, attempting to interpret this feeling through mark making and colour which I use instinctively. During 2020, when we were locked in our homes, I turned to painting interiors and "The upstairs window" was created during that time. The watercolours are spontaneous works tending more towards the abstract, through which I explore the senses through colour, memory and imagination - I am synaesthesic and often the interplay between these senses become blurred.

Hugh Mendes: I have been making paintings based on obituaries and political stories in the newspapers since my MA graduation in 2001.Recently paintings based on obituaries have come to dominate my practice, especially those of other artists. This includes re making other artists self portraits to form the basis of the work. Still using a newspaper format but inventing the paintings based on historical artist’s self portraits, such as obituary paintings of Rembrandt and Van Gough and in this case JMW Turner. This has meant engaging in the history of art and the practical use of oil paints, especially within the western cannon. Also studying how various artists have seen and depicted themselves.

Carson Parkin-Fairley: Storytelling is central to all of my work. The icons I make are shrines to treasured people and places, telling stories of their life through the symbols that surround them. In this exhibition, I have included an icon of my favourite artist, Niki de Saint Phalle, and the plethora of symbols tell the tumultuous life she lived. I also have a love of words and their particular significance to people at certain times. This lyric by Tierra Whack, the focus of my larger piece, was particularly pertinent to me during lockdown. A human's essence is versatile, ever-changing and adapting - we are never the sum of our emotions - this lyric seemed to encapsulate my thoughts and became somewhat of a mantra for me.

Julia Rogers

Julia Rogers: I am curious about getting under the skin and finding the 'other' within us. I use the human form as a starting point to distort and express something more that isn't always apparent on the surface. The figures similarly are tightly bound by the confines of the canvas without room to move.

Helen Smith

Helen Smith: Vulvic lips, vagina dentata, and phallic tongues constitute the anatomy of Venus’ polymorphic smiles. Infectious and contagious beams, malicious grins, and venomous sneers. Each of her visceral ‘traps’ resembling sutured wounds, drawing smiles on her face. With her carnivorous eating habits, mechanical traps, and complex swallowing apparatus she devours her prey. Her hinged ‘traps’ covered in soft downy hair snap shut, digest, and assimilate any trespasser. An undercurrent of violence and cruelty lay bare her eroticism and the anxiety of desire. It is a terrain of contradictions: the seductive and the repulsive; and the beautiful and the grotesque.

Jessica Voorsanger

Jessica Voorsanger: I have been working on a series of compilation paintings for the last few years that encompass collage, vintage fabric, found embroideries and painted interventions. They are a continuation of my interest in collage, pattern and colour. Up until recently my focus for the last 20 years has been on popular culture and celebrity. There has been a gentle shift in the work where the focal point has stopped being about celebrity and has become about the colour, pattern and texture. In this work, the birds have become the celebrities of the moment.

Julian Wakeling

Julian Wakeling: Street photographers like myself, for all that we may stroll and observe, are not flâneurs. We’re not interested in the world per se so much as in what it can provide us in the way of images. We are not sophisticated idlers, rather we are hunters. But our hunger is not to experience life, only the act of photographing it, and the pictures that result.