Louise Hardy graduated from the Ruskin School at Oxford University with a BA in Fine Art. After a post-graduate diploma in Film and Television Design, Hardy worked in the film industry, at the international design agency Pentagram and at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, before returning to painting full-time. She was subsequently awarded an international travel scholarship, resulting in a sell-out London show on her return. Regular exhibitions have followed since, of work inspired by the riverscape of London and the Docklands, the depiction of the bleak Welsh landscapes of the Brecon Beacons, and a body of dynamic figure-based ink paintings.

Her latest work uses oil paint, a relatively new medium to her practice, and one which perfectly suits her expressive mark-making, love of texture and multiple layering, applied with great effect to create atmospheric, colour-saturated pictures that have a luminosity and dream-like quality.

Here, again, she returns to the River Thames as her main source of inspiration. She has lived and worked beside the Thames and always feels drawn back to it. Watching Canary Wharf being built from her second-floor studio in Peckham, she charted the rise of London’s new monument and its emerging and evolving skyline. The graphic, structural quality of the urban landscape and its aerial topography are the starting point for this new work.

She has previously been selected for the Singer/Friedlander Competition, Discerning Eye, the Society of Women Artists Open and represented at Battersea’s Affordable Art Fair. Her work is held in private collections, both nationally and internationally, including major purchases by Reuters and the Financial Services Authority based at Canary Wharf. She lives in London and paints in the studio at the bottom of her garden.