Oxmarket are delighted to welcome Fiona Bell Currie for a solo exhibition in the Wilson Gallery.

Fiona Bell Currie migrated from Cheshire to Goldsmiths’ College in the 1970s to train as an art teacher. She worked in various London schools ending up lecturing in Observational Drawing in the Technical Illustration Department at Ravensbourne College. Fiona illustrated many cookery and garden books and magazines, worked for Kew and the RHS, and created artwork for Crabtree & Evelyn, Sainsbury’s, Boots and Waitrose packaging. She brought out homeware ranges for the National Trust. Juggling illustration with teaching she also designed gardens.

After forty years in London, Fiona escaped to Chichester in 2019.  She’s very happy painting with two cats in her studio and loves teaching adults painting and drawing at Lavant on Thursday mornings. In 2023 Fiona was selected to take part in SkyArts Portrait Artist of the Year. An unforgettable experience, particularly meeting Dame Joan Bakewell and Tai-Shan Schierenberg.

Over the last 18 months Fiona has revisited the same local sites under very different skies and recorded them in gouache. Her love of Sussex is plain to see in her paintings from the Trundle, around Bosham and in the very special Bishops Palace Garden in Chichester. Reflecting her earlier work in plants and fruit, she’s been painting plums in acrylics, seeing how dark one can go without losing form and suggesting air in the lovely garden at Fittleworth House.

Like most artists she is obsessed with light, colour and tone. Her day to day paints are water based and quick drying. Teaching adults really focuses her own practice.