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A Summer Exhibition on Steroids!
Delighted to be chosen to exhibit at Yardley Arts Summer Exhibition 2026. Yardley Arts CIC is a wonderful gallery space in the village of Yardley Hastings in Northamptonshire. Once an old school hall it has large rooms, good light, a sculpture garden and is owned and curated by Polly Parrish. This was the gallery's first Summer Exhibition and the quality of art, sculpture and photography was sensationally good. Definitely a Summer Exhibition on steroids! I was thrille
maura255
Sep 21


I'VE GONE BIG!
Since I secured a second, huge studio (code name The Factory) in an old barn at Broughton Grange in Kettering, I've been fulfilling my dream to create large paintings. You can see these in the Select Series and Portfolio under Women in the World and Art for Planet Earth. Fortunately I have an old Irish table used for placing coffins before the funeral!
maura255
Sep 21


My studio is Open for visitors!
Every year I open my studio in Kettering for September as part of Northants and Rutland Open Studios. It's a fantastic opportunity for visitors to view my work and for me to talk paint and my creative process. This year has already seen two paintings gone to their forever home!
maura255
Sep 18


THE BRUSH LEADS THE WAY
My solo exhibition The Brush Leads the Way at Lumina Gallery and Community Hub in Northampton was a great success and a lot of fun. Sadly all the T shirts were sold, but I'm in the process of designing some more which will be on the store soon. A big thank you to Jack Savage, Director of Lumina Arts Alliance, for helping me to organise the exhibition and doing lots of PR. You can see a picture of me and Billie Stevenson, the curator of the Alfred East Gallery in Kett
maura255
Sep 18


Women War Photographers
You can view the fourth painting in my 2026 series Women in the World at my group exhibition Life as we See it at the Northampton Museum and Art Gallery during the month of September. Women War Photographers honours the women who have stepped into conflict not as combatants, but as witnesses. Moving through collapsing landscapes fractured by war, their cameras become both shield and testimony, recording moments the world might otherwise never see. As my heroines I h

Jack Watto
Sep 18


WOMEN IN THE WORLD GOES TO MANCHESTER
I was delighted to exhibit my Women in the World paintings at the Goose Green Gallery in Altrincham for the month of August this year.

Jack Watto
Sep 18


Mind Climate Exhibition, Lamport Hall August 2025
I was pleased to be part of the group exhibition Mind Climate which featured four artists whose work focussed on ecological issues and revealing the often unseen undercurrents and shifts in perception and how our inner worlds are deeply connected to the people and the environment around us. I exhibited two works from my series of eight paintings ‘Art for Planet Earth’ – Protesting with a Paintbrush – about the current environmental crises and social issues facing our world: B

Jack Watto
Sep 8, 2025


The Creative Process
Every artist, writer, photographer, sculptor has a creative process. Carl Jung said that art was an innate drive that seizes the artist and makes them its instrument. I think that for many artists it can be quite a tricky thing to describe. Here’s me in the studio chatting about my creative process with two of my recent abstract paintings in the background.
Dylan Jake
May 27, 2025


Loss of Biodiversity – Art for Planet Earth touring exhibitions 2024/5
ONE PAINTING. ONE STORY. A GREEN DESERT. It’s a heart break. Evolution has taken millions of years to create our tropical forests and it is taking human beings five minutes to destroy them. All the animals who live in these forests are totally dependent on this ecosystem: jaguars, tapirs, parrots, toucans, orangutans, golden tamarin monkeys, snakes, frogs, and many more. In this painting the animals are staring at the lumberjack with an axe and chainsaw who’s about to chop do

Jack Watto
Feb 12, 2025


Melting glaciers and warming oceans – from Art for Planet Earth touring exhibitions 2024/5
You may be interested (or, more likely, horrified) to learn that in 2017, at the bottom of the Pacific’s 10km deep Mariana Trench, considered the deepest part of the world’s oceans, a robotic submersible found, wait for it ... a tin of Spam, a bottle of Budweiser and plastic bags! Additionally, scientists discovered “extraordinary” levels of toxic pollution in the crustaceans living in the pitch-black waters of the Trench which go all the way up the food chain to whales, dolp

Jack Watto
Feb 12, 2025


THIS COULD BE THE STORY OF YOUR TOWN
We’re so lucky aren’t we? We turn on the tap and water comes out. We flick a switch and the light comes on. Rubbish gets collected. Supermarkets are full of produce which trucks deliver along functioning rail and road networks. Most of us can heat our homes, feed our kids and fill up our cars. Our infrastructure works. At the moment. But things are unravelling: the planet is warming up year on year through man-made climate change; we have appalling levels of sewage in our wat

Jack Watto
Feb 12, 2025


Oceans and sea creatures in crisis – from Art for Planet Earth touring exhibitions 2024/5
Six out of thirteen of the great whale species are currently classified as endangered. This painting is a story about our beautiful gentle giants of the sea – the flash of a tail, a plume of vapour, breaching the surface – an unforgettable sight of these magnificent creatures. But in my painting the whale on the left is swallowing plastic pollution as it feeds. The middle one is trapped in fishing nets. On the right you can see barrels of toxic waste. The whales are at risk f

Jack Watto
Feb 12, 2025


Burning of the Amazon Forest – Art for Planet Earth touring exhibitions 2024/5
Who is burning down the Amazon rainforest? The story in this painting is just one of the ways humanity is destroying the planet: the torching of a rich and complex ecosystem. On one side there’s an evil looking bloke who’s the culprit, representing the money and profit to be gained by this devastation. A box of matches, a flaming stick, burn it down, hey ho, who cares? On the left is what’s lost in this mass of smoke and flame: an indigenous man looking at the loss of his hom

Jack Watto
Feb 12, 2025


Gaia’s Sorrow – a message of hope from Art for Planet Earth
Common experiences of astronauts were a feeling of awe for planet Earth, a profound understanding of Earth’s fragility, the indivisibility of human, plant and animal worlds and a sense of responsibility for taking care of our home, this glowing, blue jewel in the darkness of space filled with stars, planets and swirling nebulas. The woman in the painting is cradling the Earth, highlighting its beauty and vulnerability, and gazing down with sorrow, concern and tears for the th

Jack Watto
Jan 1, 2025


Migration – from my exhibition Art for Planet Earth
Migration is very much in the news nowadays but it’s been an issue for hundreds of years: even the Romans also had debates about what to do with migrants. Now people are fleeing not only war, oppression and famine, but the effects of climate change have increasingly become a significant driver of people seeking asylum, often referred to – somewhat clinically – as ‘environmental displacement’. In this painting I needed to express the link of migration to global problems and ‘t

Jack Watto
Jan 1, 2025


The effect of burning fossil fuels – then and now. From my touring exhibition 2024Art for Planet Earth.
I doubt many visitors to my exhibition will remember the pea-soup smog that enveloped London in 1952. This painting is a story about how much pollution is pumped into the atmosphere by coal burning power stations – then and now. The noxious smog in ’52 brought home that the pollution wasn’t escaping and people died from the toxic fumes. Today burning fossil fuels and releasing their carbon content is one of the major contributors to air pollution and climate change, heating t

Jack Watto
Jan 1, 2025


The story of Kali Yuga
We all love a good story. And the tale and archetypal imagery of Kali Yuga, the time of darkness, from Hindu cosmology is as relevant to our world now as it was when it was told in 3rd century BCE. The Four Yugas describe the cycles of the divine, celestial, gods’ and earth’s ages through millennia – the Dark Ages, the Age of Enlightenment, the Golden Age, the Iron Age as we might call them. And here we are in the Kali Yuga, the modern Dark Ages, as described in my painting.

Jack Watto
Dec 7, 2024
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