We're delighted to be the first gallery showing some of Afsheen's work in what has turned out to be her most exciting and public year as an artist. Many Sky Arts followers will remember her as a popular finalist in the 2022 Sky Landscape Artist of the Year competition.

 

Afsheen is inspired by landscape. Her passions are composition and colour which combine to create her own signature style. Lately, she has dramatically shifted her technique from detailed, cross-hatched line work in pen and ink to much more fluid landscapes in oil. Today, her style is almost Synthetist – reminiscent of the bold flat areas of colour that Gauguin favoured and never disguising the reality of the flat surface and the paint marks on it. 

 

Brush marks are broad, confident and expressive – with lugubrious-looking foliage, lush bark, globular cloud shapes and heavy rolling rivers and lakes. We enjoy the composition, the pattern and the mood as much as the illusion of the scene.

 

Her work has been shown at the Lightbox gallery in Woking and the Mall Galleries, London. She also exhibited at the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in 2019. Her latest success as a painter seems doubly appropriate for someone whose main professional career, to date, has focused on workplace talent development. Inevitably, since the Sky Arts contest, her work is attracting much greater prominence, invitations and commissions. 

 

Originally from Pakistan, Afsheen has lived in the UK since 1994 and is based in Surrey.