Emily Ball

Emily Ball is a painter, author and teacher based in Sussex, and the founder and director of the contemporary painting school Emily Ball at Seawhite. For Emily, painting is physical, direct and a way of creating visual poetry. She works from flowers, landscape, faces and the figure, building a vocabulary of marks from life before improvising with them in the studio.

SAMSUNG CAMERA PICTURES

Emily Ball was born in 1967 in Colchester Essex. She went to Exeter College of Art where she gained a BA in Fine Art Painting in 1989. She continued developing her painting, doing residencies, undertaking public commissions and exhibiting in the South East for the next 10 years. Alongside her painting she established privately run courses in Contemporary Painting and Drawing in West Sussex. In 1999 Emily gained an MA in painting from The Surrey Institute of Art & Design, Farnham. She had her first child in 2001 and second in 2004 and during this period produced ambitious and successful paintings. Emily’s drawings have been exhibited in both the Derwent Drawing Prize 2020 and the Trinity Buoy Wharf Prize 2021. She has exhibited at the RA Summer Exhibition and been a prize winner at the National Open Art Exhibition (NOA), judged by Maurice Cockrill RA, Jennifer Durrant RA and Nicholas Usherwood, art critic.

In August 2005, in recognition of her reputation and talent as a painter and teacher, Seawhite of Brighton (supplier’s of art materials) gave Emily a large studio space in which to paint and teach within their premises. In 2009 she published her first book ‘Drawing and Painting People – A Fresh Approach (reviewed by Matthew Collings and now in its eighth edition). Emily curated her book launch exhibition showing the work of the artists interviewed and included in the book. These included Rose Wylie, Roy Oxlade, Georgia Hayes and John Skinner. The show was opened by Matthew Collings and Emma Biggs. In 2012 her second book was published ‘Emily Ball – Painting’. This book is a 25 year retrospective look at the development of her own work. Now, in 2022, she is director of her Painting School ‘Emily Ball at Seawhite’, and has a team of artist tutors running courses at the studio and online. The school has grown, as has its international reputation. Students from all over the world to attend courses and Emily also travels to Cape Town in South Africa, Portugal and nationally across the UK to teach painting. Emily is a short course tutor at West Dean College near Chichester.

Related Artists

View All Artists

Susan Nemeth

Susan is a porcelain artist, based in London, whose practice began over 50 years ago. She trained at Bournville School of Art, Wolverhampton Polytechnic and the Royal College of Art.

View Artist

Dylan Bowen

Using techniques such as pouring, trailing, and brushing slip onto wheel-thrown or hand-built forms, Dylan creates energetic, gestural ceramics.

View Artist

Liz Hough

Liz Hough takes inspiration from the rugged Cornish landscape, especially that which surrounds her home in St Ives. St Ives has a celebrated history of drawing artists who work to abstract the Cornish landscape.

View Artist

Stephen Murfitt

Stephen Murfitt is a celebrated ceramic artist whose work is defined by its expressive forms, intricate textures, and innovative firing techniques.

View Artist

Jack Durling

Jack Durling is a Brighton-based sculptural ceramicist known for creating intricate animal sculptures that highlight natural behaviours and conservation themes, inspired by his childhood in Dungeness and the South Downs.

View Artist

Adam Knoche

Adam Knoche is a ceramic artist based in the United States whose work investigates themes of transformation, impermanence, and the dialogue between form and environment. His sculptural vessels and installations, often marked by raw surfaces and colourful glaze technique

View Artist

Chris Keenan

Chris is an accomplished ceramicist with many years of experience working primarily in porcelain. His practice centres on creating finely thrown, functional vessels that combine clarity of form with subtle surface qualities.

View Artist

Jane Cairns

Jane Cairns is a London-based ceramic artist whose work captures the beauty in the overlooked and the ordinary.

View Artist

Louise Bell

Louise Bell is an East Sussex based ceramic artist known for her unique, hand-built animal sculptures, using folk-art influences, layered surfaces and symbolism to explore themes of nature, hope and endangered species.

View Artist