Our Collection of Modern Paintings & Contemporary Paintings for Sale

Mark Mitchell also carries work by living artists. This collection of contemporary paintings currently includes oils, watercolours and acrylics by Terry Watts (1946-), Martin Swan (1951-), and Stephen Rose (1960-). Watts is London- based and trained; he is a landscapist who works mainly in acrylics, using them for the effects either of oils or of watercolours. He came to painting via photography and drawing, and uses the experience gained from both to construct his rural panoramas, with their enhanced perspectival viewpoints and low horizons. The resultant vast sweeping skies, with their brooding cloudscapes and subtle depictions of climatic effects, give a contemporary vision of the sublime in nature, and catalyze anew our pantheistic response to the landscape of Britain. Watts’s paintings have very specific locations; but they are not photographic portrayals of a place or a moment.

They are, rather, accreted glimpses or snapshots, combined into a single generalized impression of a particular landscape. His work can be found in private, public and corporate collections around the world. Martin Swan is a member of the Royal Society of Marine Artists. After beginning as a landscape painter, he was drawn into the world of seascapes and sailing boats. He specializes in portraits of racing boats on the Solent from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as well as marines, and is also returning to landscape painting.

Although he works in a very traditional field, his style is fresh, modern, and full of vibrancy and movement. Stephen Rose was trained in the Royal Academy Schools and at the British School in Rome, and has won numerous prizes for his work. He paints landscape, portraits, nudes and subject pictures in oils and watercolour, but his specialism is in still life, and in the recasting of the Old Masters in contemporary form. His arrangements replace the ephemeral pottery and rush containers of Velásquez, etc., with supermarket plastic boxes and bags and foil containers. They are imbued with metaphorical significance, subtly suggesting a memento mori or an apocalyptic hinterland.