In his early teens, the Bradford artist, Mike Joyce, was discouraged from painting in art classes by a school teacher. But the instinct to draw and paint never deserted him and in recent years, particularly after retirement, he has actively pursued watercolour painting. He now has had the satisfaction…
A first -of-its kind study links gallery visits with lower stress levels and better wellbeing. Text by Galvin Haines, originally published by Positive News, October 28, 2025 “Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.” So Pablo Picasso supposedly once said, while pontificating on the power…
Robert (Bob) McBurney, born 1939, lived and worked in Bradford in his teens and during his formative years as a photographer. In his recent retirement years he has developed his talent for painting in oils in an abstract style, as well as with creative writing. In his early teens…
John Aldam Heaton (1830 – 1897) was a designer of textiles, furniture, wall-paper, stained glass, as well as a watercolour artist. Although not born in the Bradford district, his time living at Harden, near Bingley between 1860 and 1876 was a particularly formative one for his career as a designer.…
Heather Swain is a printmaker who works from her home studio in Baildon. The landscape of the Bradford district and beyond is an important creative influence for her work: Ways of seeing and expressing the environment and the subject are a constant inspiration. I live in West Yorkshire and work…
Ethel Mary Kitson (1894-1962) was a talented watercolour painter and was married to a fellow Bradford-born artist, Fred Cecil Jones. Ethel was born in the Laisterdyke area of Bradford to parents, William, a timber merchant, and mother, Sarah. She was their only daughter and youngest of four children. It…
For over 50 years (David) Mark Thompson, has practised as a Yorkshire based artist capturing the landscape, architecture and people of the Dales, and beyond, in watercolour, pen and ink, etchings, oils and photography. Mark was born in Bradford in 1957 in the Bolton Junction area of…
Victor Wedderburn, born 1954, in Jamaica, is a self-taught social-documentary photographer whose photographs captured the life of Bradford’s African Caribbean communities in the 1980s. Victor’s parents moved to England in search of a new life in the late 1950s and Victor in 1971 joined them in Bradford, where…
Since retirement from his post as Head of Design at a local secondary school, the Keighley-born artist, Kevin Bell, has built a strong reputation and following for his nostalgia paintings of Keighley and district. Now resident in Cumbria, he has retained strong links with his birth town and has…
Artist, Jim Smith, was born in 1959 in West Bowling, Bradford. He was one of six children from a working class family. He showed an early aptitude for art and after leaving Fairfax School he attended an art foundation course at Bradford School of Art. However, he decided to…
