Beatrice (b.1990, UK) studied English and Classics at Leeds University and then spent two years studying at Leith School of Art in Edinburgh and The Royal Drawing School in London. Her work is in private collections around the UK, Europe, Japan and the USA. She has curated two exhibitions, individually during lockdown and for Bowes Parris Gallery both focusing on the importance of drawing. Her sell out second solo exhibition was presented at Blue Shop Cottage in October 2020. She lives and works in London.
Beatrice Hasell-McCosh‘s work uses natural form and the tradition of making work directly from landscape as the lens to explore emotional themes, identity linked to place and human connection. Drawing is vital to her practise and she uses closely observed studies made from life to make large-scale paintings back in her studio. Beatrice works as much from memory as from the studies and, in playing with scale, the focus of importance gives way (from direct figurative representation) to a flattened abstraction of those shapes with aesthetic choices relating to composition, texture and gestural use of colour taking on the primary importance. With a degree in English and Classics reading widely around a subject is central to her practise. The titles of each large work cite the disparate elements of this research from literature to pop culture, song lyrics and art historical links.
Beatrice Hasell-McCosh‘s work uses natural form and the tradition of making work directly from landscape as the lens to explore emotional themes, identity linked to place and human connection. Drawing is vital to her practise and she uses closely observed studies made from life to make large-scale paintings back in her studio. Beatrice works as much from memory as from the studies and, in playing with scale, the focus of importance gives way (from direct figurative representation) to a flattened abstraction of those shapes with aesthetic choices relating to composition, texture and gestural use of colour taking on the primary importance. With a degree in English and Classics reading widely around a subject is central to her practise. The titles of each large work cite the disparate elements of this research from literature to pop culture, song lyrics and art historical links.
Beatrice’s recent work is a series of monumental paintings around the theme of separation and emotions associated with enforced isolation. Notably her latest paintings don’t include figures or animals. She has continued with the concept of work presented in various parts (the subject of nature limited by an enforced human shape), a motif which began after a trip to Japan in 2018. Kintsugi and the idea of beauty in imperfection has been significant in her thinking since then and it is seen in a number of her works where the different elements of the triptych or diptych are uneven. As a twin she is also naturally attracted to multiple parts that make up a whole. Her influences are wide ranging, from music to Disney productions set design, comic book strips, 1950’s adverts, Chagall’s stained glass, the freezing of a moment in poetry and the traditions of tapestry and wallpaper making.
As humans shrunk away from each other at the start of 2020 the reassuring continuity and cycle of nature became completely absorbing to the artist who, over a period of 6 months, watched and drew from the same spots continuously seeing plants grow up, crowd together (in antithesis to human society) blooming and dying and being replaced with the new. During this period she began working in much larger scale and in changing size so dramatically from the original imagery the painting becomes a much more physical space which can be experienced and surround the viewer. Reality becomes simply the material fact of the paint rather than the subject. Recently she has been working on large works on canvas to be installed as murals.