MAKE A MARK Barry Bliss: Author and photographer featuring 10 female London painters

It takes a little revolutionary zeal to stay the course in the critically unfashionable discipline of painting in high cost, studio-starved London. The more so as a woman, when most of your historically famous predecessors – and the highest priced contemporary painters, too – are male.

That’s something that Barry Bliss picked up on when he chose to photograph thirty London-based female painters. His portraits were shot with the same model of 1932 Leica camera as Gerda Taro used to document her experiences of the Spanish Civil War,  in which she tragically died at 26. Taro’s story relates directly to the matter of female self-presentation in the arts:  born Gerta Pohorylle, she initially worked with Endre Friedmann under the name Robert Capa, before leaving that name for him to use, and switching to her own more glamorous movie-star-like pseudonym.

Bliss’s images are pared back to just a white backdrop and the painter ready to paint, brush in hand. They capture the determined start of the creative process, before a mark is made. The ArthouSE1 show adds a painting and an actual favourite object – not necessarily a brush –, which ten of Bliss’s subjects see as reflecting themselves as artists. The rebellious streak is, of course, only one aspect of their characters. The statements they’ve made also show plenty of wry humour and self-mockery – often regarding how to present themselves rather than just their work – as well as obvious dedication to their medium. All that feeds into what is shown, so that Mark Makers is an exploration of common spirit as well as a striking and varied anthology of current painting practice.

As Katrina Blannin says: It’s actually a way of life, so you can’t ever give up…