About us...

 

 

Garden in Salisbury, by Brian Ashbee. (Acrylic on canvas.1983. Private Collection, Houston.)

Two works shown at the Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition, 1984.

 

Brian Ashbee (M.A.) studied Fine Art and Film at Newport College of Art and English and Fine Art at Gonville & Caius College Cambridge.

Brian has worked in a wide range of visual arts media for nearly 40 years, ranging from the most traditional to the most cutting edge. His paintings have been shown at several London galleries, including the Royal Academy of Arts, as well as featuring in magazines (covers and feature articles) and his moving image work has appeared on BBC2, Southern TV and Anglia TV as well as the Tate Modern on the South Bank, London.

As a sometimes acerbic commentator on contemporary art, his articles appeared regularly in Art Review magazine, between 1996 and 2001, as well as Artists Newsletter. The most celebrated of these, a satirical piece on the language (ab)used by art critics was quoted by Brian Sewell in the Evening Standard, was reprinted in The Guardian's Editor magazine and lead to an interview on Radio 4's Word of Mouth.

During the past twenty years Brian has combined his own creative work with teaching, most recently at the National Film and Television School, Beaconsfield then from 2000 at the Moving Image Studio of the Department of Architecture at the University of Cambridge.

Here, in addition to teaching a range of subjects from animation, video art and movie-making (documentary and fiction) Brian wrote and directed a number of documentary films for the university.

His recent video work on 'Vala' (part of a major research project, New Media for a New Millennium, involving BT and universities across Europe) has been warmly reviewed around the world from Scandinavia to Tokyo to the London Design Festival in 2007.

 

Krishna Ashbee trained as a Dispensing Optician and for many years ran a successful business on the South Coast.

Since moving to France, she has brought up a daughter and discovered considerable talent as a video artist and editor working for her husband. She has also extended her skills in the kitchen, and, while still delighting the palettes of her carivorous family, has created a range of imaginative vegetarian dishes which give the lie to the commonly held notion that veggie food is boring. In the garden, she has developed more sustainable and eco-friendly methods of vegetable production, including her own recipes for liquid plant feed and compost.

Somewhere along the way she trained as care worker and returned to London for some months to initiate and raise funding for a project to improve social care for the elderly in North London, which led to the establishment of a day care centre in Mill Hill, funded by the London Council of Barnet.

 

e-mail

enquiries about courses and accommodation to:

email: enquiries@artsinthegarden.net

telephone Brian or Krishna at:

from outside France: 00 33 2 33 90 12 82

from within France: 02 33 90 12 82

mobile: 06 03 67 67 42