Selectors

Stephen Chambers RA | Artist & Royal Academician

Stephen is a painter and printer living and working in Berlin, Burgundy and London. He has held numerous solo exhibitions around the world including The Royal Academy, London, The Pera Museum, Istanbul,  Ca’ Dandolo, Venice (57th Biennale), and Hastings Contemporary, UK. 

He has designed three sets for The Royal Ballet, Covent Garden, and produced various artist books, including collaborations with Moro, the London restaurant, and the French poet Jacques Jouet. His work is in various museum collections including Metropolitan Museum, NYC, The British Museum, London, Tate, National Gallery of China, and Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. He was elected a Royal Academician in 2005. 

Katherine Oliver | Founder & Director of Oliver Projects

Oliver Projects founder Katherine Oliver has amassed over 20 years’ experience in the art world at leading public institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, the Barbican Gallery, London, and the Royal Academy of Arts, London. In 2019 she left her role as Art Sales Curator at the RA and launched Oliver Projects, a nomadic gallery specialising in contemporary works on paper, with an online shop and exhibitions programme. Katherine has also provided consultancy services for clients including private collectors, non-profit institutions, commercial galleries, and several renowned artists, both in the UK and internationally. Oliver Projects was proud to celebrate its fifth anniversary in the summer of 2024 with a group exhibition of work by fifteen contemporary artists held at the RWS Gallery on Whitcomb Street. 

photograph by Yolanda Chiaramello

Charles Williams PRWS | Artist and President of the Royal Watercolour Society

Charles Williams is a painter and writer. He exhibits his work in London, Europe and the USA, and has published ‘Basic Drawing: How To Draw What You See’ in September 2011 and the follow-up, ‘Basic Watercolour’ in July 2014 (Robert Hale, London). Mainly a painter, he works in oil, watercolour, bronze, ceramics and graphic mediums, and his interests are in the figurative, narrative tradition, although the work is informed by a fascination with formal elements of 2D and 3D design. 

Lottie Cole RWS | Artist

Cole's paintings reflect her interest in Art History, provenance and the role women have played in both. She regularly looks to women artists & collectors of the past for affirmation, guidance and inspiration. She paints homes, not least because they are a realm of women, an area unlike most others where they are authored by women. Though people are rarely seen in her paintings, she believes the domestic interior contains considerable biography & human emotion from grief to celebration seen through the objects on the mantlepiece or the paintings on the wall. 

Cole began a Foundation at Wimbledon Art School and went on to study Art History at St Andrews University.  She enjoys reading a picture, and as such likes her work to operate on different levels - the first simply an interior - the second the decoding of allusions and objects. While there is an obvious preoccupation with content in the pictures, focus is given to the emotional impact of colour and physicality of paint. Cole works equally in oils as well as gouache & watercolour as they convey light and mass so readily.

Mark Entwisle RWS | Artist

Mark took a foundation course at the Cambridge College of Art and Technology, specialising in print making, followed by a degree in illustration at Brighton, graduating in 1984. Some of his first commissions were for major publishers such as Penguin, Random House and Heinemann. He created book covers for Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Aldous Huxley and PG Wodehouse as well as many others. He also designed posters for the National Theatre production of Wind in the willows and record covers for Chris Rea.

During his 15 years as an illustrator Mark continued to feed his need to paint and began showing at galleries in Bath and London. “ In 1999 I was ecstatic to have a portrait accepted for the BP Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery “, he recalls. “ I had another accepted the following year and received a commendation in 2002. This led to my first portrait commission and marked the start of my career as a portrait painter “. Mark continues to exhibit widely both as a solo artist and at carefully chosen group shows. He is immensely proud to have been recognised with a number of respected art prizes, most recently winning the Sunday Times Watercolour Competition 2020.