I Spray for You

Kim Baker's solo exhibition features new paintings that explore the different elements of nature, and a darker, magical side. Incorporating roses, flora, birds and trees, Baker is interested in the use of colour in nature and flowers and the fantastic contrasts; with murky dark green backgrounds and bright flashes of colour combining to create a dramatic scene.

A visit to the Tropical Garden exhibition at London's Kew Gardens inspired these new works, where  the combination of nature and the man made resulted in spherical bouquets, shapes, arches and arrangements of flowers, that together created a magical environment. Baker has since incorporated this experience into her work; roses look as if they have been plucked and displayed but they are also about the combination of manipulation, landscape and still life.

This new series can also be seen as a continuation of the artist's earlier Dark Gardens series; partly inspired by a quarry she visited whilst at art college: 'I came across a quarry amongst woods, there were 4 or 5 deep large craters surrounded by trees and rocks, creating an odd dramatic landscape. This sparked my ongoing interest in the different elements of the landscape and how things can be subverted and manipulated to combine observation and subconscious thoughts into a painting'.

Kim Baker lists influences as diverse as de Kooning, Caravaggio, Sickert, Howard Hodgkin, Ivon Hitchens and the 17th Century Dutch Masters.

Kim Baker graduated with a BA (Hons) Fine Art degree from Birmingham University. She has exhibited widely, including group and solo exhibitions and art fairs in London, Newcastle, Reykjavik and New York, and in 2009 she completed a residency at the Signy and Olaf Willums Art Foundation in France. Private and public collectors of Kim Baker’s paintings include Birmingham University, Whitbread Group plc, Bow Arts Trust and Midland Arts Centre, and she has recently been commissioned to create eight paintings for the Four Seasons Hotel in St. Petersburg. Her work has been featured in Art Monthly, Time Out and S Magazine.

Private View: Saturday, 8 September, 2-8pm

Kim Baker: Rose Garden is open to the public at Opus Fine Art, Sheep Street, Stow on the Wold GL54 1AA from 10 September - 9 October.

Leeds born mixed media artist Palvinder Nangla looks at urban decay as a source of inspiration, using discarded and found objects which no longer have a place in our consumer society but all tell a story of their beginnings and their end. To give these objects a new purpose, Palvinder Nangla lifts them out of waste into the realm of preciousness, making this his distinctive signature. It is his belief that not enough importance is given to the smallest components of what we call reality. His work concerns the re-discovery of these elements – more importantly, their intrinsic value, which he finds to be very often overlooked.

Palvinder Nangla completed the MA program in Mixed Media Textiles at the Royal College of Art in 2007. His way of pushing embroidery and surface embellishment to the limits, whilst allowing communication to take place between the viewer and the piece, was recognized for its excellence when he received the Texprint Chairman's Prize Award. In his textile based work, fabric becomes a canvas onto which visuals and textures lure the viewer in a world of fantasy and confrontational issues. His artwork sometimes tells a very personal story; sometimes it is socio-political, others just a pure aesthetic exercise for his own pleasure. Nangla produces what could be rightly called a diary of thoughts and emotions, going through a psychoanalytical unconscious mental process while consciously trying to make sense of this life. His mixed media pieces speak in the most detailed manner about what he feels needs expression in a given moment and requests emotional response from the viewer in a subtle and implicit manner.

Palvinder Nangla has been familiar to textiles and embroidery from a very young age. By the helpful hand of his grandmother who encouraged and supported his artisitic aspirations, he learned the art of embroidery. His British-Asian background is a great influence in his mixed-media work, celebrating multiculturalism and humanity as a whole. With the female figure as a bonding element, he threads cultural symbolism by celebrating feminity and the magical multifacetted elements in womenhood. Through his unique approach to artistic expression, Palvinder Nangla inspires people to have the courage to search and find.

Private View: Saturday, 23 March, 2-5pm

Lost & Found is open to the public at Opus Fine Art, Martin House, Sheep Street, Stow on the Wold GL54 1AA from 25 March to 23 April.