Gina Southgate

An English painter and visual artist, Gina Southgate is well-known in the London free music and jazz scene, where she has painted and/or performed live at concerts for 30 years. She held her first solo exhibition of concert paintings at the Jazz Café in London in 1988. She works with the thrill of music, observing the relationship between the musician and the instrument. She strives to capture the energy and essence of the concert in real time.

Her work has appeared on “Vortex Live” on space.org. She has worked as a professional artist for three decades. She has had numerous exhibitions as a metal artist, won design competitions, worked for architects, taught jewelry and metalwork in adult education and at the primary level. She was an artist in residence at the Arts Council of Wales, researching cast aluminum. She grew up in Essex and completed a two-year program at Southend College of Technology just after the emergence of punk.

In London, she graduated in goldsmithing/metalwork from the Camberwell School of Art and Crafts and then completed a year of postgraduate studies in tin casting. Influential artists for her include Picasso, Miró, Hepworth, Sickert, Hitchens, and Rauschenberg.

Her musical paintings have appeared on CD covers and in music magazines; she has created stage and outdoor decorations, participated in group and solo exhibitions, taught screen printing in schools and community groups, led painting workshops with music, performed using audiovisual materials, and painted live internationally with prominent musicians. Her works are held in public and private collections worldwide. Many of her concert paintings are now available in limited edition prints. Three of these prints and two original landscapes were purchased by the BBC and can be seen in the current series of Holby City. With the growing interest in music and the aesthetics of musical instruments, she began painting at concerts, coinciding with her desire to work in a faster medium than metal.

Sometimes she works solely with sound, ignoring visual content, creating abstract paintings. In performance situations, she uses her materials and sound surfaces. The area of her work, in which representative paintings of live concerts are created, has flourished again since she had a permanent exhibition at the new Vortex in Dalston. It has become a long-term home for her work and enables her to create changing exhibitions of current concert paintings. She was an artist in residence at their festivals and had her live painting displayed at Gillett Square in Vortex 25, as well as again when she performed with The People Band.

She was an artist in residence at the improvised music festival “On the Outside” at the international jazz festival The Sage Gateshead in 2010 and 2011. At the same time, she established collaborations with Somethin’ Else, producers of Jazz on 3. She exhibited in their offices and painted at Ronnie Scott’s and at various events during the London Jazz Festival as their guest on several occasions. Her works can be seen on the Jazz on 3 and Late Junction websites. Since 2012, she has been an artist in residence in the monthly Jazz In the Round series led by Jez Nelson at The Cockpit theatre, which is currently entering its sixth year. This year, she traveled with them and painted at the Love Supreme Festival.