upcoming studio closure: saturday 21 december - sunday 5 january. We will reopen from monday 6 january.
masterclasses Coming up in february half term:
Atelier drawing, creative writing and oil painting
Our Team
Who We Are and our art
Noel Basualdo
Founder and Director
I am passionate about art and making fine art education available for everyone. I funded Hackney Fine Arts in 2015 and it's sister Community Interest Company in 2019, to teach adults, teens and children drawing and painting. I am a great believer in the equalising power of art and bringing communities together.
Throughout my life as a student and teacher, I noticed how little traditional drawing and painting techniques were being taught and how eager art students were keen to learn them. I created this art school to share what I've learnt and to equip our students with the essential toolkit to make the art they always dreamed of making. In the past, I have worked in the Further Education Sector, where I lectured Fine Art to young adults. I have 6 years of experience teaching art to students enduring life long mental health illnesses, where I learned about the holistic power of the artistic process and the wellbeing benefits it brings to people, regardless of their age. I apply that knowledge into the ethos of Hackney Fine Arts as I believe everyone's mental health benefits by making art.
I was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina and settled in Hackney in 1999, where I found my home within it's eclectic and diverse community. I have lived, studied and worked in three continents, South America, Africa and Europe; where I have showed my work collectively and independently. I hold an Art & Design Postgraduate teaching qualification from the Institute of Education, a first class BA from The Cass School of Art and an Art & Design Foundation from City Lit. I was born into a family of artists.
www.linkedin.com/in/noel-basualdo-81699342
Edith Dormandy
Manager and Teacher
Edith is a practicing artist who explores mourning and intersections of the personal and political. After graduating from UCL with a first-class BA Hons in History of Art, Edith trained at LARA (The London Atelier of Representational Art) and gained a Diploma in Fine Art, partially paid for by the ARC First Place Scholarship which she won in 2018. She now works as an artist, exhibiting regularly and teaching drawing and painting privately and at Hackney Fine Arts. See her instagram for recent work and information about upcoming shows.
Instagram @edithdormandy
www.edithdormandy.co.uk
Lex Shute
Manager and Teacher
Lex Shute read Sociology at the University of Greenwich where her studies in Anthropology informed her subsequent art practice. Shute studied Fine Art at the University of the West of England, gained a Postgraduate Diploma from Chelsea College of Art and a Masters degree in Painting from the Royal College of Art. Solo exhibitions have been Future Proof, Opus Gallery, Newcastle (2011) and Of Truth of Clouds, South Hill Park Arts Centre, Berkshire (2013). Recent group exhibitions include In (Matters of the Soul), ASC Gallery, Trace Elements, The Factory Project, and The Collector’s Room, JGM Gallery. She has been shortlisted for the Lynn Painter-Stainers Prize, the Rising Stars Prize, won third place in the Woolgather Art Prize and in 2019 was awarded a place on the Travers Smith CSR Programme. Her work in painting and sculpture addresses the relationship between spiritual discourse, feminism and the natural world. With an interest in fictional realities and sci-fi utopianism, Shute explores the correspondences between trans-historical belief systems and cultural practices to propose an alternative society with alternate power relations.
Polly Townsend
Manager and Teacher
Polly Townsend’s paintings draw on solitary journeys through many of the most remote and hostile landscapes in the world. Recent works are inspired by visits to Kashmir and Kyrgyzstan and, as well as completing artist's residencies in Death Valley and The Badlands National Park, she will later this year be Artist in Residence in Antarctica. Her paintings present a view of the world beyond the familiar, of places vast in scale, apparently desolate and mostly uninhabited.
Townsend treats the land as a singular subject, a still life; disembodying the form whilst remaining faithful to original patterns, colours and light. This objectification helps probe the gap between the tender and the unnerving; the beautiful and the bleak. The use of titles and the blank space/void further highlights the current state of landscape – one of flux, impermanence and a challenging passage of time.
Townsend produces small works on site using a collapsible easel, sketchbooks and photography, building up larger canvases in her London studio.
Jeremy Burns
Manager and Teacher
Jeremy is an Artist and Art Tutor currently living and working in London. His artwork comprises mostly of colourful abstract oil paintings, although he also frequently works from observation. For 9 years he has been teaching observational drawing and painting workshops in London, and has now moved some of his classes online. Aside from art, Jeremy is a musician, and has been composing classical sounding music on the guitar for most of his life. Music was his first real passion and it strongly influences his abstract artwork.
Artist Statement
What I'm really looking for when I paint is balance. Most of the time I begin a painting without a plan, and allow the process to determine the outcome. Sometimes I'll sketch out vague figures, and other times I'll just make marks until there's something in front of me that I can build on.
Usually it all goes horribly wrong and I have to destroy the painting several times until it ends up looking nothing like the initial marks would have suggested. Through constant trial and error of placing, adjusting, removing and rearranging the colours and shapes, the direction of the painting starts to become more clear.
Drawing influences from cubism and futurism, my work is in essence very musical. Instead of melodies, it's colours and shapes creating the harmonies and areas of tension and release. I often feel like there's an element of ambiguity and mystery to the work, but maybe that's because the best bits tend to happen by accident.
Jake Lamerton
Manager and Teacher
Born in Canterbury, Jake studied painting at the Slade School of Art. He currently uses painting and drawing to process the landscape in which he grew up. His work addresses tradition, the paranormal and nationalism.
www.Jakelamerton.com
Instagram @jakelamerton
Maria Socias
Supervisor, Manager and Teacher
Maria Socias is a Spanish visual artist and medical illustrator based in London, with a background in Fine Arts, drawing and medical art.
She graduated with a Bachelor in Fine Arts from the University of Barcelona (Spain) and a Masters in Drawing from London Metropolitan University. She is currently studying a Postgraduate in Medical Art with the Medical Artists' Education Trust.
Jess Page - Jarret
Manager and Teacher
My work is predominantly focused on intricately capturing the places and people I encounter. I work with a considered, patient, technical approach to create a convincing final result. I aim for each image to be multi layered so that both realism and nostalgia are tangible.
My education at Camberwell College of Arts involved consciously refining my understanding for complex three-dimensional forms by constantly practicing drawing from life.
Working directly from life, en plain air remains key to my practice and whether working in pencil, charcoal, oil or watercolour, I can be found with my transportable easel in the landscape or the city streets.
Stefano Ronchi
Teacher
The main feature of my work is the meticulous attention to detail in microcosms crowded and dense with situations, through a miniaturist approach, supported by the use of a magnifying glass to define every square inch of the painting.
Urban contexts are dismembered in a dream-like swarm of architecture, forms and social relations are disrupted, provocatively juxtaposed with no apparent order.
Childhood memories and paranoid nightmares are recomposed with graphite or color on canvas and paper, often through pareidolia, returning a duel between the freedom of the absurd and arbitrariness of the rule.
A butterfly in the bin. Paradoxes, ugliness, drifts of our social system hidden inside the simple beauty of things. If you have the time to see this in my paintings, then you have the time to see it in real life. Think, act accordingly. Stay punk-surrealist.
The masters that have most influence on my work range from Leonardo to The Clash, Brueghel, Dali, from Hieronymus Bosch to Korn.
Kate Kirk
Teacher
Kate studied printmaking and illustration at Aberystwyth University and completed the Drawing Year at the Royal Drawing School. She produces prints and paintings based on observation, and has a keen interest in functional wheel-thrown ceramics.
Andras Nagy-Sandor
Manager and Teacher
Andras Nagy-Sandor (1993) is a Hungarian artist based in London, UK. Having graduated from MFA Painting at the Slade School of Art In June 2022, Andras is now preparing for his debut solo show in The Room London, opening on the 1st of November.
The main focus of Andras' practice is unpicking the aspirations and ambivalences within his masculinity through the symbolism of armours as a link between painterly, emotional and conceptual dichotomies. The aesthetic of Andras' armours are narrative, in some cases pseudo-folkloric, however they do not need to be read as armours as they are the results of an intuitive design process, an embodied sensemaking approach that is based on Andras' imagination and memories. They are gestures, edges, shapes, colours, patterns, paint, materials with a conscience enveloping figurative moments, interactions between body parts, characters, groups, anthropomorphic multiheaded beings that float between cultures and identities, folklore and sci-fi.
Andras has recently had his first solo exhibition at Fest; Tisztit Gallery in Budapest, Hungary and is the co-runner of ongoing initiative "project hu", which created a collaborative residency, artist talks and a touring exhibition over the past four years.
Michal Raz
Teacher
Michal Raz (born 1984, Jerusalem) is a London based artist. In 2013, she completed her B.F.A.e.d studies at Hamidrasha School of Art and Education in Israel, with high honors. In 2018, she graduated, with distinction, the M.F.A program from the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL London with Jeanne Szego Prize.
Michal's work has been exhibited in Israel, United Kingdom, Europe, India and America. Her exhibitions include Mane Katz Museum and Weizmann Institute Gallery in Israel, Fold Gallery, Number20 Art Gallery, Strand180 and Unit 1 Gallery, in London, Tao Gallery in Mumbai, Jüdische Gemeinde in Frankfurt, Museo Hahim Isaias in Guayaquil, Ecuador, The Museum of Refugees in Thessaloniki, Greece and many more.
Her work has been reviewed and collected internationally with works included in the Ambani Family art collection, Birla Family art collection, Hahim Isaias Museum collection, amongst others. She was also a finalist for the Concord Art Prize and the Red Mansion Art prize.
Artist Statement
Layering - augmenting what lies beneath, whilst simultaneously erasing it - is the fundamental principle in all of my painting, providing both its method and theoretical framework A finished work is a series of traces where one can glimpse vestiges of pop-cultural imagery, the austerity of high modernism, gestural painting, kitsch decoration; each stratum vying for our attention. The process relies on construction, destruction, deconstruction and reconstruction as the image is wrestled from conflicting elements.
I embrace the dizzying nature of contemporary experience, its endless stimuli constantly in throwing up unforeseen connections and conflicts that we are compelled to navigate.
Megan Menzies
Manager and Teacher
Megan Menzies (b. 1995, UK) is a London based artist. She received an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art in 2022 and a BA in Art History from the University of Bristol in 2016. Her practice involves drawing, painting and writing to explore memory, personal experience and storytelling. The memories, experiences and stories Megan chooses to work with and develop in her practice are often ordinary with a heavy, melancholic quality – they are what she calls heavy moments, where time thickens and small details are valued and intensified. They are moments of contemplation, imagination and sensitivity. Her work has been exhibited in galleries such as Arusha Gallery (Edinburgh) and Eve Leibe Gallery (London). She is a recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant (2021).
Bex Massey
Manager and Teacher
Bex Massey is a figurative painter living and working in London. She graduated with a BA in fine art from The School of Art, Architecture and Design in London in 2007, and later completed an MA in fine art at Chelsea College of Arts in 2013. Since obtaining her master’s degree, Massey has been awarded the Repaint History Prize for Womxn Artists (2021) and has been shortlisted for numerous awards, most recently The Macfarlanes Art Prize (2024) and Clyde & Co Art Prize (2024). Recent solo exhibitions include My deuce, My double, Seventeen, London (2024), The truth is out there, Roman Road, London (2022); We Didn’t Start The Fire, VOLT, Eastbourne (2020); and ÀhhÁÀhhÁ, Slugtown, Newcastle upon Tyne (2018).
Tom Mead
Teacher
(b.1997) is a figurative Artist, living in London.
Mead’s fractured paintings challenge pictorial space, deconstructing the process of painting to re-contextualise the reading of the completed image. An interplay between two and three dimensional work similarly compels a reconsideration in how the viewer engages and interprets the artwork.
An exploration of the visuals and ideology from childhood encompasses many of Mead's artworks, with an inclusion of toys and naïvely constructed environments being juxtaposed with ambiguous narratives where an undercurrent of existentialism and saudade permeates. As a result, a melancholic, warped form of nostalgia remains.
Tom won the London Graphic Centre Prize 2023, was a finalist of SkyArts Portrait Artist of the Year in 2019 and has made the shortlist for the Ruth Borchard Self Portrait Prize three times. Notable commissioned sitters include Theo Faberge, Professor Green, Jazzie B, Laura Linney, Axel Ruger, Sarah Healey and Courtney Pine.
Natalia Ostrowska
Manager and Teacher
Earned a bachelor's degree in traditional painting from the University of Arts in Lublin (Poland). She also studied architecture and urban planning which resulted in her special interest in land art. She participated in several international land art festivals.
"I treat painting as an intervention in everyday life.I look for the similarities between the structure of painting and daily matters. I strive for the same combination in spatial forms - a combination of geometric structures emphasizing the harmonies of nature."
James Otto Allen
Teacher
James Otto Allen is a London based artist and art teacher, specialising in commissioned portraits and narrative figurative pictures. He studied Fine Art at Camberwell College of Arts, Accademia delle Belle Arti, Viterbo, Italy and gained a BA in Fine Art from the University of Wales, Cardiff. He was awarded the Harry Holland Prize for ‘Best Figurative Artist’ on graduating and his work has been shortlisted for the BP Portrait Awards. James exhibits regularly with the ‘Royal Society of Portrait Painters’ and his work has also appeared in the ING Discerning Eye and Painter Stainers Company exhibitions.
Neil Raitt
Teacher
Neil Raitt’s surreal landscapes test limits of reality and artificiality. His paintings depict impossible horizons and forego the idea of an original relationship to a real or even specific place. Terrains, climates, disparate geographies are all mixed together becoming a portal to an emotional or psychological space. Their impossibleness acts almost as a parody or critique of traditional sea and landscapes and argues for the possibility of fresh perspectives. Free from nostalgia and lamentation of fading natural beauty, Raitt’s landscapes have a mythological quality conveyed both through the saturated intensity of his color and the particularity of his perspective.
Neil Raitt (b. 1986) received his MA from the Royal College of Art, London in 2013. Over the past ten years he has been included in solo and group exhibitions at Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, CA; Galerie Judin, Berlin, Germany; Nicelle Beauchene, New York, NY; The Cabin, Los Angeles, CA; Chez Valentin, Paris; Choi & Lager, Cologne; The Hole, New York, NY; and Lin & Lin Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan. His work has been exhibited at institutions including the Centre d’art contemporain La Halle des bouchers, Vienne; Villa Du Parc centre d’art contemporain, Annemasse; the DePaul University Art Museum, Chicago; and the Goss-Michael Foundation, Dallas. He was the recipient of the Northern Trust Acquisition Prize, 2016 and the Catlin Art Prize, 2014. His work is in the permanent collections of Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles, CA; DePaul Art Museum, Chicago; Saatchi Collection, London; and Frank-Suss Collection, London. Raitt lives and works in London.
https://anatebgi.com/artists/neil-raitt/
https://www.instagram.com/neil_raitt/
Erin Holly
Teacher
Erin Holly (b.1986) is a London-based emerging artist whose oeuvre confronts the politics of gender and sexuality embedded in our built environment.
Having graduated from the City and Guilds School of Art in London, Holly's artistic practice spans from the creation of small watercolours to public large-scale murals. Addressing a variety of themes Holly’s dynamic work provides a discourse on the politics of space and inclusion, trans identity, embodiment, and contemporary social categorizations. Drawing upon photographic source material from aspirational interior advertisements and catalogue images, Holly skilfully weaves together images of colourful homes with provocative visions of a utopian future. In pursuit of unveiling how capitalism has commodified the spaces we inhabit, Erin points to the transformative potential of the artistic imagination to create new ways of both being and seeing. Erin’s work powerfully destabilises the prevailing power structures that enforce binary gender relations and the forms of violence that often accompany them.
Although Erin’s artworks are primarily executed on canvas, she also creates commanding outdoor murals serving to activate public spaces and challenge normative conventions. As tangible demonstrations of Holly's commitment to social justice and the democratisation of artistic practice, Holly reveals art’s transformative potential to enact real-world change. Her murals and community-oriented works can be found all over the world, with projects based in the US, Switzerland and India.
https://www.jdmalat.com/artists/89-erin-holly/
https://www.instagram.com/erin_holly_/
Oliver Williamson
Teacher
Olly Williamson (b.1994) is an artist Based in London UK. He grew up in a village outside of Preston. Before accepting a place on the Royal Drawing School Postgraduate Program in 2022, he studied Fine Art at the Manchester School of Art in 2016.
Olly makes work about quiet situations of life; utilising intense observation and experimental structures of composition. His images reflect the underlying rhythms of the people and world he sees around him - hoping to make the everyday feel monumental. As well as his studio paintings and drawings, Olly makes large scale murals.
https://www.instagram.com/omw_painting/
Di Chen
Teacher
Di Chen is an artist based in London. Having graduated from the MFA Fine Art program at Goldsmiths, University of London, Di’s current practice combines speculative fictional documentaries, organic moving sculptures,
digital games, and sound. Di received their BA in Fine Art at the Central Academy of Fine Art in China, where they were trained intensely in a wide range of both European and Chinese traditional drawing and painting techniques.
Di’s work has been part of exhibitions and events in Swiss Church London, ICA London, Mark Leckey’s monthly NTS show, London/NTS Radio, The Bomb Factory Art Foundation, London, Frappant Galerie, Hamburg, TANK
Shanghai, and Space Ubermensch, Busan.
https://www.chendi.online/
https://www.instagram.com/chendi_chen_di/
Fipsi Seilern/Pang Artworks
Teacher
Born in the UK, Fipsi Seilern is a London based artist working across several mediums. She attended the Charles Cecil painting atelier in Florence, and has exhibited in London, Berlin, New York, Vienna, Stockholm and Murcia. Public interventions under the pseudonym PANG have shaped an ongoing dialogue between graffiti and classical painting. She graduated with an MA in Fine Art at City and Guilds of London Art School in 2020.
https://fipsiseilern.squarespace.com/
https://www.instagram.com/pang_artworks/
Nada Elkalaawy
Teacher
(b.1995) is an Egyptian artist living and working in London. She holds an MFA in Painting from the Slade School of Fine Art, 2018 and BA in Fine Art from Kingston University, 2016. Elkalaawy had solo shows at Taymour Grahne Projects (London), Galerie DuflonRacz (Bern), Gypsum Gallery (Cairo) and Super Super Markt (Berlin). Selected group shows and festivals include Marlborough Gallery (London); Half Gallery (New York); Woaw Gallery (Hong Kong); The Africa Centre (London); Kino Der Kunst (Munich); Sharjah Art Gallery (Cairo); Shubbak Festival (London); Southwark Park Galleries (London); Nahim Isaias Museum (Guayaquil) and Refugees Museum (Thessaloniki) amongst others. Her work has been shortlisted for the Sainsbury Scholarship for the British School at Rome, the Waverton Art Prize, the ACS Studio Prize, Contemporary British Painting Prize, the Dentons Art Prize, and the Sarabande Emerging Art fund. Her work is featured in Anomie’s forthcoming review of Contemporary British Painting, and previously in Vogue Arabia, the Evening Standard, Sky News Arabia and Jdeed magazine. Elkalaawy has been awarded the Pro Helvetia Studio Residency, PROGR (Bern); Montresso Art Foundation (Marrakech) and L’appartement 22 (Rabat). She also participated in public events and talks including COP26 commission project for Liverpool Arab Arts Festival; Ujamaa National Trust commission project and TASHWEESH festival, Goethe Institute (Cairo). Alongside her art practice, Elkalaawy co-founded artist group ‘K-oh-llective’, a platform that facilitates opportunities and collective conversations around art practices in Egypt and the Arab world. Her work is included in the X Museum collection (Beijing), Soho House collection (London) and private collections worldwide.
https://nadaelkalaawy.com/
https://www.instagram.com/nadaelkalaawy/