Mehrdad Rashidi
(b. 1963)

In 2013 Rashidi was awarded the prestigious Grand Prix for Marginal Art at the Biennial of Naïve & Marginal Art in Belgrade. His work is represented in several museums which include: The Collection de l'Art Brut, Lausanne, The American Folk Art Museum, New York, and The French Museum of Modern Art, Pompidou, Paris. The artist has also been nominated for the 16th Contemporary Art Foundation Drawing Prize, he is amongst the three finalists, the winner will be announced at the Salon de Dessin, Paris, on the 23rd March.

Jon Sarkin
(b. 1953)

Jon Sarkin (b. 1953) is an American artist, based in Gloucester, MA. His art is an unmediated outpouring of creativity emerging from a mysterious psychological space we all possess, but which is usually inaccessible. The door that world was unlocked for Jon by a catastrophic event, but what was lost was also accompanied by a new ability to communicate powerfully through visual art. The door to this other place for Jon remains open, and through it he continues to share his unique vision of the world.

Sarkin is best known for his frenetic and visually arresting images, which combine word and image. These paintings and drawings cross-hatch and scrawl their way through pop culture, rock ‘n’ roll, mundane life, and the realms of the unconscious.

Sarkin became an artist only in his mid-thirties after an epiphany of sorts, which is usually attributed to a catastrophic brain injury he suffered as a result of complications from an operation to ease pressure on his acoustic nerve caused by a swollen blood vessel. Like the explosion in his skull that brought about this change in his life, there was no gentle, or hesitant creative beginning, and art began to pour out of Sarkin, as it were, from the offset in a torrent of words and image.

His work is in many public and private collections, including The American Visionary Art Museum, the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, MA, and the Musée National d’Art Moderne (Centre Pompidou) in Paris, France. The rights to his life story have been acquired by a Hollywood film production company, whilst the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Amy Ellis Nutt has written a book about Jon and his experience, and his subsequent becoming an artist: 'Shadows Bright as Glass'. Colin Rhodes’ book, The Art of John Sarkin was published by the Henry Boxer Gallery in 2022. 

Donald Pass

Pass is a good example of an artist whose life and creativedirection have been changed utterly by compelling epiphanies.The most important of these occurred in 1969 when he was already a successful painter living in Chelsea, having rubbed shoulders with the likes of Stanley Spencer, Augustus John and L. S. Lowry.

According to Pass, one day he saw through the window of his London home "a most beautiful face which appeared to be all gold. It seemed to expand through the window and embrace the whole room". Unsettled by this experience he found himself soon after in the churchyard in Cuckfield, Norfolk, where he intended to make some drawings. He sat opposite the grave of a pilot, whose commemorative stone was in the shape of the Royal Air Force wings insignia: "Everything began to change anda tremendous darkness surrounded me."

"The whole landscape, churchyard, near and distant fields,seemed filled with thousands of figures Stretching to the horizon. In the blackness was a tremendous light; large winged figures with faces like lions..."

"A veil had been lifted and I would never again see anything inthe same way."

After this Pass turned away from the fashionable career he had begun to carve out for himself and for a long time found himself with few supporters. A notable exception was John Rothenstein who discovered the artist toward the end of his life, even acquiring work for the Tate Gallery. In his drawings and paintings Pass strives to reveal something of the great mystery which underlies existence; of the spiritual presence embodied as image. His visionary art speaks simply of extraordinary things beyond understanding.

Donald Pass's work is represented in museums in Britain, Eastern Europe and also The American Visionary Art Museum, Baltimore. In 1999 he won the prestigious "Art of theImagination" Award at the Mall Galleries in London. His Resurrection paintings were featured in the "Golden Blessings" show at the American Visionary Art Museum.

'A spark of genius, a very rare talent'. Sir John Rothenstein.Director of the Tate Gallery, 1938-64.

Margot
(b. 1982)

In 2022 the artist was awarded the prestigious Grand Prix for Marginal Art, this is to be followed by museum shows, one in Belgrade and the other at The Museum of Naive & Marginal Art in Jagodina, both which open this March, where over one hundred drawings will be exhibited. An extensive illustrated catalogue will also be produced to accompany these shows.

Her art is represented in the permanent collection of The American Folk Art Museum in New York, The Museum of Naive & Marginal Art, and many private collections worldwide.

The work of Margot (b. 1982) provides access to a profoundly interesting interior world. Self-taught as an artist, her pictures are a compelling synthesis of bold compositional structure and complex pictorial web of detail into which viewers are enticed and invited to lose themselves in imaginative wanderings. As such, Margot’s pictures speak clearly from a distance and, whether large or small in scale, they are enveloping close up. They are at once like the decorated facades of great, spiritual buildings and the packed, illuminated pages of ancient books. Within the architecture of the overall composition there is teeming life jostling cheek by jowl, displaying a horror vacui that is characteristic of much mediumistic, visionary and outsider art, from the likes of Augustin Lésage and Madge Gill, to Alex Grey and Adolf Wölfli.