Selectors

Bob and Roberta Smith RA | Artist & Royal Academician

Bob and Roberta Smith is actually one man. He used to collaborate with his sister but she retrained to become a group psychiatric specialist. Bob and Roberta Smith use words painted on canvases and made into signs, written in newspapers and sung in songs to say statements about art and free expression that have influenced generations of teachers and students of arts subjects to embrace the idea that the arts are a human right.

Bob and Roberta Smiths painting ‘Make Art Not War’ has become a ubiquitous classic image selling along side Andy Warhol’s Marilyn and Lichtenstien’s ‘Whaam’ in Museum shops. Bob and Roberta Smith has shown at Moma PS1 New York, Tate’s Britain, Modern and Liverpool. In 2019 Bob and Roberta Smith had major retrospectives in La Panacee, Montpellier, curated by Nicholas Bouriaud and The Harris Museum Preston.  Bob’s exhibition at Tate Modern of The Thamesmeadcodex has been extended until January 2026. Bob is a Royal Academician, and was awarded an OBE in 2017. Bob believes that ‘all schools should be art schools’.

Siphiwe Mnguni | Artist & Curator

Siphiwe Mnguni (b.1991) is a British – Zimbabwean artist and curator working across various mediums to explore the black female nude, delving into the intersections of body, womanhood, perception and identity. Her work centres and celebrates underrepresented people through abstract figuration and addressing its place in contemporary culture. Working across various mediums of painting, collage, photographer, set design and ceramics. She has extensive experience in a community centred art practice including championing a BIPOC artist and patient program for Hospital Rooms, an award winning art and mental health charity.

Mnguni has exhibited at the RA Summer Exhibition (2023), Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair (2023), Cristies (2024), London Art Fair (2025) as well as Oliver Projects where she is represented. She has also delivered workshops at Hauser & Wirth, The Courtauld Gallery and Kingston University, amongst others and her work has been featured on the BBC and Harper's Bazaar UK. She was a highly commended finalist for the 2022 Dentons Art.

Charles Williams PRWS | Artist and President of the Royal Watercolour Society

Charles Williams is a painter and writer. He exhibits his work in London, Europe and the USA, and has published ‘Basic Drawing: How To Draw What You See’ in September 2011 and the follow-up, ‘Basic Watercolour’ in July 2014 (Robert Hale, London). Mainly a painter, he works in oil, watercolour, bronze, ceramics and graphic mediums, and his interests are in the figurative, narrative tradition, although the work is informed by a fascination with formal elements of 2D and 3D design. 

Caroline Cornelius RWS | Artist

Caroline Cornelius is a UK based artist who has recently completed her postgraduate studies at The Royal Drawing School. Her work centres around the female form, the duality of ageing, and the fragility and fleetingness inherent in life, often reflecting on the complexity and beauty of maternal relationships.

Caroline approaches her practice with a reverence for colour, saturation and texture. She paints from memory to imbue emotion, character and an abstract sense of place. These qualities result in artworks that interrogate the visibility and invisibility of women enslaved by societies expectations of them. Embodied with a poetic expression of colour and a sense of the cinematic, her artworks are portals to a place and time that is both familiar and foreign.  

Since the inception of her art practice, Caroline has exhibited in the UK and Canada, most notably at The Royal Academy Summer Show 2021 and 2023. In 2022 she was accepted as an Associate Member of the Royal Watercolour Society. More recently Caroline completed a scholarship year devoted to the practice of drawing at the Royal Drawing School which culminated in an exhibition at Christies,  London. Her work has been acquired by the Royal Collection.

Akash Bhatt RWS | Artist

Akash Bhatt was born in Leicester and studied at Loughborough College of Art,  the University of Westminster and St Martin's School of Art. He has exhibited widely in many group exhibitions including The BP Portrait Award, The Sunday Times Watercolour exhibition and the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize.

He says of his practice, 'My interest lies in people and their habitats. I have often travelled extensively researching for new projects; however I am equally comfortable gathering inspiration from in and around where I live.'

Bhatt’s work and process are informed by his sketchbooks and notebooks filled with notes and drawings from observations and drawings of everyday imagery and objects.