ART from HEART is excited to announce the Winners of the Artist of the Season featured in our SPRING 2025 edition!
3 Artists, 3 Mediums, 1 Country:
Oliver Hurst - Figurative Painting - UK
Minu Achrekar- Abstract Painting - UK
Anne Lydiat- Digital Photography - UK
The competition is open to multimedia artists worldwide and was created to showcase, promote and raise the visibility of the work of emerging and mid-career artists. The winners are featured on our website and social media platforms and considered for any upcoming curatorial projects by ART from HEART. Artworks are selected based on creativity, originality, quality of work, and overall artistic ability.
Apply NOW for an opportunity to get featured as Artist of the Season in 2025
Increase your outreach, visibility, & artist profile!
Artist Oliver Hurst - Figurative Painting - Bath, UK
©Oliver Hurst, Capriccio Series, 2024, All Rights Reserved
Left to Right: Capriccio IX, Oil on canvas; Capriccio V, Oil on canvas;
Capriccio VI, Oil on board
©Oliver Hurst, Capriccio VII, Oil on board, 2024, All Rights Reserved
Artist of the Season Winner Oliver Hurst creates oil paintings on board or canvas, drawing inspiration from the rich history and masterful painters of the 18th and 19th centuries.
I have a strong interest in history’s societal and political swells and deflations, from which came the inspiration to start a series of paintings I’ve named ‘Capriccios’. It is a merging of my love of 18th and 19th century painting styles and my interest in social history and what its future may bring.
The central focus of Oliver's paintings is ruins. Drawing inspiration from similar structures in Rome and across Europe, these ruins may symbolise tragically fallen enlightened civilisations or, conversely, self-destructed and doomed empires. Regardless, they depict scenes of people grappling with the circumstances that have befallen them, for better or worse.
Oliver Hurst graduated from Falmouth College of Arts in 2006 with a degree in Illustration. He lives and works in Bath, with his partner Urszula and their cat.
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Artist Minu Achrekar - Abstract Painting - Leeds, UK
©Minu Achrekar, Alcohol inks on synthetic paper, 2025, All Rights Reserved
Top Left to Right: Red Lit Skies; Under the Copper Sun
Bottom Left to Right: Strong and Silent Waters; A Sunny Day Out
Artist of the Season Winner Minu Achrekar creates abstract landscapes which are a combination of nostalgic charm and fanciful reality. Her paintings, inspired by the beautiful countryside landscape around her home in Yorkshire, aim to conjure escape and relief using Nature as a balm for the soul!
Minu often uses motifs of trees, paths, little houses as a metaphor for the individual, the journeys they can make to get to a better place, the houses representing safety in every calamity. She also often features the sun/moon in the sky, and its reflection reminding us of a guiding presence in our lives on earth and above.
I often choose alcohol inks as they are vibrant, transparent and very exciting to work with. My art is heavily process led. I work without brushes. Over the last 5 years, I have developed a number of techniques for eg tilting, blowing with hairdryers and using syringes with high strength isopropyl alcohol. Each painting is like a dance between the inks fluid dynamicity and my response .
Minu's artworks stem from photographs that percolate through providing a synthesis of what’s seen and what’s felt. Working with inks has taught her to make swift decisions to accept small imperfections or courageously make changes which could take the painting in an entirely new direction.
She wants people to view her paintings and connect with their inner child, embracing the imagination and playfulness of simpler times. Her goal is to celebrate beauty and foster feelings of safety and happiness in the world. Using nature as a healing tool, she aims to evoke memories of those simpler times and promote a sense of nourishment and joy.
Minu Achrekar is based in Leeds, Northern England. She has exhibited in 4 solo and several group exhibitions and has raised thousands of pounds for charity through the sale of her artworks. In 2024 she won an award for Pride in Place. Her painting was chosen to be in the calendar for Leeds Civic Trust, August 2024.
Minu is pursuing a Master's in Fine Arts with the Milan Art Institute and has recently completed mixed media series ‘Experiencing Venice’ and a ‘Journey to the Tropics’. Minu takes part in Art fairs in London and group exhibitions in the UK and abroad. She has been selected for the Fusion Art Fair in Harrogate and the prestigious Affordable Art Fair Hampstead, London, May 2025. Her paintings are in private collections in Canada, USA, Australia, UK, India, Europe.
Minu has also been interviewed to discuss her art for radio and newspaper. Minu holds workshops where she teaches painting skills and takes a limited number of commissioned projects .
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Artist Anne Lydiat - Digital Photography - UK
©Anne Lydiat, 'Of Mutability' Series, Digital Photographic Print, 2024, All Rights Reserved
©Anne Lydiat, 'Of Mutability' Series, Digital Photographic Print, 2024, All Rights Reserved
Artist of the Season Winner Anne Lydiat mesmerising photographs from the Series 'On Mutability' are the result of her several voyages above the Arctic Circle, firstly, sailing from Bergen up the coast of Norway as far as Murmansk (Russia). The following year she flew to Svalbard and then sailed onto Pyramiden, an abandoned Russian coal mining settlement. In 2016 she sailed onboard North Sailing’s silent electric-powered expedition vessel the ÓPAL to Scoresby Sund, known for the stunning natural beauty of towering cliffs, icebergs and glaciers, situated on the east coast of Greenland.
I was awestruck both by the surprise encounter with a polar bear, and the immensity of the icebergs that had calved from glaciers during the summer months and drifted southward along the coast. Many were grounded, some forever frozen in ice and others moving along with the ocean currents, all eventually destined to melt and disappear over time.
The digital photographs (originally colour and then converted to black and white) were made on the 2016 trip around Scoresby Sund. Lydiat then had them printed onto poster paper with low-grade b/w inks. The images were then exposed to the sun’s UV rays, both inside through glass and outside in the elements, over differing periods.
These unique faded, dematerialised photographic images are intended to act as a metaphor for the effects that climate change is having on the Arctic seascape and ultimately our rising sea levels. They represent a tipping point, a moment of significant and irreversible change.
Solo exhibitions include: ‘‘WAKE - In the Wake of Louise Arner Boyd’, Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), London, (2023/2024); ‘Poles Apart’, Hastings Arts Forum, St Leonard’s on Sea, (2023); ‘A Maiden’s Voyage’ and ‘A Ship of One’s Own’, Cookhouse Gallery, Chelsea College of Arts, London, UK (2015); ‘Permission to Speak’, Freud Museum, London (2002) and ‘WITHOUT’, Beguinage of Sint Elisabeth, Kortrijk, Belgium (1999).
Group exhibitions include: ‘The Humming of the Sea’, Hastings Arts Forum, St. Leonards on Sea; ‘There Not Here’, St Andrews Mews, Hastings and ‘Difference & Repetition’, Electro Studios, St. Leonards on Sea (all shown as part of PhotoHastings 2024); ’What Has To Be Done’, Today Art Museum, Beijing, China (2017); ‘New Visions of Printmaking’, Triangle Gallery, Chelsea College of Arts, London, UK (2018) and Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei, Taiwan (2017); ‘We are not amused’, BACA Art Centre, Beijing, China (2018); ‘What Has To Be Done’, Today Art Museum, Beijing, China (2017); ‘Octet’, The Crypt Gallery, Hastings, UK (2016); ‘Points of Departure’, Estuary Festival 2016, Tilbury ‘, Passenger Terminal, UK (2016) and ‘Power of the Sea: Making Waves in British Art 1790-2014’, Royal West of England Academy, Bristol, UK (2014).
Lydiat has taught Fine Art in various UK art schools and given lectures in the USA, Norway, Japan, Taiwan and China. She presented at the Women of the World (WOW) Festival in 2016 and 2017.
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Ig @anneonrock
Apply NOW for an opportunity to get featured as Artist of the Season in 2025
Increase your outreach, and visibility, & raise your artist profile!
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