Artist of the Week - Tina Ashton

This week we have Tina Ashton as our Artist of the week.

"Let Autumn Begin" by Tina Ashton

Tina Ashton was born in Caerphilly, South Wales in 1961 and amongst her memories of education, at a welsh speaking shcool, she remembers enjoying art and recalls winning prizes in creative competitions. However, she also remembers her disappointment when discouraged from studying Art for school qualifications in favour of more academic subjects. Tina’s career then took a very different path commencing with several years service with the Royal Air Force in Air Traffic Control followed by a long career in administration. In time Tina’s career also took a back seat to married life and bringing up two sons.


Many years later at the age of 39 Tina gave up her career and returned to full time education to study Art and Design. Creating art and particularly painting again was a “very personal and emotional awakening” she recollects, and indeed she hopes it is just the beginning of a long creative journey.


In 2003 Tina was proud to win the prestigious Malcolm Kendal Award in recognition of her talented contribution towards a motivated and artistic awareness. In the years to follow Tina went on to exhibit her work regularly across the UK, amongst them several solo exhibitions and a group exhibition at one of London’s Cork Street Galleries.


During the past 10 years much of Tina’s collection of work has been dominated by her modern portraiture in Acrylic. These bold, colourful portraits of today’s woman have proved very successful for her, although they are constantly evolving and are just a small part of a much wider body of work these days.


More recently, from her studio on the edge of the Buckinghamshire countryside, Tina has been painting on the theme of Love and Romance and her collection of semi-abstract paintings inspired by Lovers has been selling to private and corporate collectors across the world. Tina has a love of all things romantic and particularly old black and white movies which has fed and inspired this series of work, although the strong colours and loose fluidity of these new works are a much more modern statement. “I believe one of the greatest challenges for an artist is to display on canvas the special and intimate moments that lovers share and I hope that I go some way towards achieving that” Says Tina

Click HERE to see more of Tina's artwork on Affordable British Art