Publishers of original digital art prints
Artists
Michael Frith
Michael Frith was born in 1951 and studied graphic arts at the Canterbury College of Art.
Frith is one of this country’s finest watercolourists, with an ability to produce an emotive and vivid image in a few, apparently effortless strokes of the brush, yet managing to convey a message with great beauty.
He has been commissioned by newspapers around the world and has produced drawings for national and international television news. His enormous talent is clearly demonstrated in his portraiture work. His magnificent five feet high portrait of Robert Maxwell, which hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, is a testament to his extraordinary skill. Amongst his portraits are those of Sarah Miles, Stephen Fry and a double portrait of Kingsley and Martin Amis.
Frith’s work is included in many private collections and he has exhibited at various galleries, including the National Portrait Gallery, the Illustrator’s Gallery, Smith’s Gallery, the Mall Galleries and numerous galleries near his home in West Sussex. His work also features in a number of public collections - The National Portrait Gallery, Bank of England, LIFFE and the Masterworks Foundation in Bermuda.
Frith is fascinated by Contemporary Artworks' revolutionary approach to printmaking, particularly the spectacular results from the inkjet printing process and the enormous freedom the artist is given by this method.
Brian Grimwood
Brian Grimwood was born in 1948. He studied art at Bromley Technical High School.
He gave up his initial career as an art director in 1969 to concentrate on painting. His distinctive style caught people’s imagination: polished, graphic illustrations - black outlines and fills of flat colour - and he has been commissioned by most of the UK’s and Europe’s major publications.
In 1982, Grimwood’s work underwent an abrupt and significant change, when the art director of a British magazine went to collect his painting for the front cover and chose to use the initial sketch instead - just a few quick lines and washes of colour. Launching into a new loose and fluid painterly style, Brian’s work has made a huge impact on this country’s current generation of illustrators. His client list includes some of Britain’s top corporations - Barclays Bank, Marks & Spencer, W H Smith, Gordon’s Gin, BT and Habitat to name but a few.
Grimwood is excited by Contemporary Artworks’ innovative approach to printmaking, particularly in the way that it perfectly translates his fluid, expressive style, whilst giving him great control over the image’s colour, size and composition.
Grimwood’s work has been exhibited in a number of group shows and five one-man exhibitions, the most recent of which was held at the Coningsby Gallery in London.
David Case FCSD
David Case was born in 1952. He studied graphics and illustration at St Martins School of Art in London.
Over the last 20 years, Case has headed the art departments of a number of national magazines and newspapers and has been a regular recipient of international and national design awards, including ones for the Best National Sunday Newspaper and Best National Daily Newspaper. In 1996 Case was elected Fellow of the Chartered Society of Designers.
Case has been diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis and retired as Design Director of the Financial Times in 1998 and now concentrates on printmaking.
His fascination with the computer as a tool for artistic creation began in 1986, when he introduced computers in the art department of the Financial Times, the first publication in the UK to use computers to create graphic images. He uses the computer as a drawing and painting tool. He also uses the extended eyes of the computer, the scanner and digital camera to record textures and images from nature and the city to fuse into his work as collage. Case works in the styles of twentieth century art - the greatest explosion of artistic experiment, quality and success in the history of art.
David Case co-founded Contemporary Artworks with his partner, Kiki Case, to publish art generated by the unique conjunction of the sophistication of the computer, the revolutionary inkjet printing process and artists of outstanding merit.
David Holmes
David Holmes was born in 1933 and studied at the Ealing College of Art and the Central School of Art in London.
As an award-winning artist, his commissions include work for Macallan Malt Whisky, New Yorker, Penguin Books, The Singapore Tourist Board, the Salvation Army and The Royal Mail.
Holmes works predominantly in water colour and is fascinated by the opportunity that Contemporary Artworks is giving him, of combining traditional painting techniques with modern technology.
Holmes has spent most of his working life as an art director and designer and was co-founder of his own very successful advertising agency, Holmes Knight Ritchie. A prominent figure in the advertising industry, he lectures on the subject in the UK and abroad.
He has exhibited at Smiths Gallery, Littleton Gallery Southbank, Howards Gardens Gallery (Cardiff), Harrods Art Gallery, The Sunday Times/Singer & Friedlander watercolour exhibition, The Guardian Newspaper Gallery.
His paintings are in private collections in the UK and abroad.
Darren Raven
Darren Raven was born in 1969. He graduated in 1998 from the Royal College of Art with a Masters degree in illustration.
As a student, he discovered the computer and its drawing applications and was inspired by the freedom that they brought to his work. His collaboration with Contemporary Artworks is a natural progression to this.
Raven creates spontaneous, symbolic and iconic images that draw from natural forms and popular culture (television, comic books etc), creating visual/cultural anagrams of the world that surrounds him.
He is also investigating the way other media, such as photocopiers, fax machines and various printing techniques alter his hand-drawn images. The computer and inkjet printer is the next logical step.
He has already been commissioned by a number of companies, including MTV Network Europe, Friends of the Earth, The Independent and the Financial Times.
Nick Baker
Nick Baker was born in 1940 and studied at the Ealing College of Art, followed by a two year commercial design course at the London School of Printing.
Baker started his career as an advertising art director. His first cartoon was published in the Evening Standard in 1966. In 1973, he became a full-time humourous illustrator, contributing regularly to such publications as Private Eye, Punch, the Financial Times, The Guardian and The Oldie.
His wide body of work covers a range of styles and subject matter, from humourous illustrations to on-the-spot drawings, such as the ones he did in Hong Kong, during the last weeks of British rule. Using pen-and-ink and washes, his work is always imbued with his own lively insight.
Baker has written and illustrated three children’s books published by Methuen. His work has been shown at a number of galleries, including the National Portrait Gallery, Waterman’s Arts Centre, Blackheath Gallery, Coventry Gallery, the Mercury Theatre (Colchester) and the Riverside Gallery (Richmond).
Glyn Goodwin
Glyn Goodwin was born in 1960 and graduated from the Norwich School of Art in 1982, with a degree in graphic design and illustration.
Since then, his work has appeared regularly in newspapers and magazines, as well as in advertising campaigns and, in 1994, he won The Swan National Poster Award. He has created
opening graphics for the BBC and was commissioned by BA to produce five tail-fin designs, which were unused. In 1997, he designed the Amnesty International calender.
Around this time, Goodwin became interested in printmaking and began to produce etchings and monoprints. He then started investigating the opportunities that the computer could offer him as an artist and a collaboration with Contemporary Artworks gave him the perfect environment for this.
Whilst much of Goodwin’s work is owned by private collectors, a number of public collections feature his work, including The Horniman Museum, The V&A, The Financial Times, the Medici Society and the National Advertising Archives.
He has exhibited at The Gallery Norwich, The AOI Gallery, The Smith Gallery, Gallerie Singleton and The Burley Gallery.
Keith Albarn
Keith Albarn was born in 1939 and studied art and architecture at Nottingham before moving to London to specialise in sculpture.
After working freelance to finance ‘environmental art’ projects such as “Interplay” at the ICA in London, Albarn formed Keith Albarn and Partners, an art laboratory and design consultancy.
Albarn worked on a wide variety of design commissions, ranging from glass fibre structures for a number of major events in the Sixties to designing the award-winning “Tumbli” toys and
learning aids.
The seventies saw a shift into exhibitions and books. Albarn formed the group Vertex to research, design and build such exhibitions as World of Islam at the ICA and Illusion in Art, Nature and Science (ICA and New York) . He published a number of books, including Language of Pattern (Thames and Hudson, 1974) and Diagram - the Instrument of Thought (Thames and Hudson, 1977).
In 1973, he became a course leader in Fine Art at the North East London Polytechnic and in 1981 he was appointed Head of the School of Art and Design at the Colchester Institute. His involvement with the academic art world continued through to the nineties, when he set up the first School of Design in Mauritius.
Albarn now lives in London and early ‘retirement’ has allowed him to pursue his interest in art and technology. He is developing his understanding of the rules of the cosmic game (Does God count?) by creating works of art from patterns and numbers in art and nature. Albarn is currently following the rules of this cosmic game in a series of computer generated art works on the “Edge of Chaos”, which gives an insight into the evolution of form and reconnects as a way of thinking with the age-old traditions of experimental philosophy.