Artist Arabella Yapp, whose first solo show brightened up the walls of Brixton library during the month of March, was no stranger to showing her work there. She’s been a runner-up in the last two Blog & Bugle summer shows, where winners are voted for by the public. On both occasions she exhibited different, dazzling paintings of Brockwell Lido, although her prizewinning entry last year was for an additional work, The Euphoria of Dancing With Your Friends (pictured), an imaginary party she painted during lockdown in front of the Sunlight Laundry building in Acre Lane.
Arabella has lived in a mixed British/Jamaican extended family in Brixton and Lambeth most of her adult life, although she started out in Wiltshire. “My family was very into art. My parents had artist friends and art was valued in our house. It was quite a bohemian upbringing and all I ever wanted to be was an artist. One of my earliest memories – I was about three – is at nursery, where one day they bust out the metallic powder paint. I just couldn’t get over it.”
She’s been painting ever since, with a lull in the 1990s and noughties when she was working all hours in education and bringing up her children. Her love of metallic colours still prevails. “I ordered this from Brazil,” she says, flashing a fat wad of gold leaf squares in all the colours of the rainbow. “They use them for nail art.” In her paintings of metallic concentric circles (video below), you can see the attraction of the spangly medium, the light playing on it in wonderful ways.
“I was always making things,” Arabella says of her childhood, which became troubled at the age of nine when her dad left. Her mum, struggling with barely controlled diabetes, moved the four children to Somerset, where they drew on support from grandparents and friends.“We went through a phase when were just really poor. Me and my sister, who’s a year older, got scholarships to posh schools where we didn’t fit in. We were the only single parent family and we were outcasts, just total weirdos. The one thing I liked at school was art, and the art teachers were the most human. They were a bit hippyish, and they’d talk to us. Art was a big refuge at school as it was a hostile environment.”
Another refuge was Forest School Camps (FSC), an alternative, voluntary, wild camping organisation for kids from the age of six to seventeen. Her mum couldn’t afford holidays, so these camps were an invaluable resource that served to build Arabella’s confidence and independence. “I went about three times a year throughout my childhood and back then it was my whole life.” She gained lifelong friends and skills from the experience. “When you were 18 you could be trained as staff. They promoted me and I was a leader at 19.” The FSC, it turned out, would lay the foundations for her later career as an educator, especially working with marginalised and disadvantaged kids.
Arabella moved to London in 1983 when she got accepted on the foundation course at Goldsmith’s. “It was a big deal as that was the top place to get into,” she says. She lived in Elephant & Castle and loved her time at college. Many of the Young British Artists (YBAs) including Damien Hirst, attended Goldsmiths around the same time; and set a trend towards conceptual and installation art that dominated the next few decades of British art.
But Arabella felt strongly that visual art should be exactly that: visual. “I know it’s an unfashionable view, but I do feel you should be able to access it visually. I want people to be able to look at it and feel it without having to read about it. If you want to find out more about it, then you can go on and read about it; but it shouldn’t rely on intellectualism. I feel like a lot of stuff I look at does, and that doesn’t really work for me. That’s why I love the Bugle’s summer art show, because the winner is voted for by kids and old people and homeless people. They’re not art critics, they’re just ordinary people reacting to the work.
“When I left Goldsmith’s I was still painting but I thought I’d make jewellery and sell it in Camden Market. I did it for about a year but realised it was barely paying me the minimum wage. Then I sold more things, like batik silk, in shops – but the pieces that were hot sellers meant I was making the same things over and over again. It wasn’t even creative by then. So I went to the careers office and found out about this four-year course at Middlesex Uni that combined fine art with a degree in education. I knew I could definitely be a primary school teacher from my experience at FSC. If you’re an artist you need to be able to fall back on something like that. So I did the course, and in my last placement I got offered a job at a primary school in Islington in 1990.”
The problem was, being a schoolteacher left Arabella very little painting time, which only shrank further when she was bringing up her kids, Jesse and Maya, in the 1990s and noughties. After several years teaching at primary level she worked in a series of senior roles in education, Lambeth school improvement and Black drug misuse services; and most recently, as consultant deputy head and then inclusion manager at Julian’s Primary in Streatham. After working flat out for decades, she went part time a few years ago and recently retired from education completely.
Struck by how much her painting has improved since she gave up full-time work, she’s delighted now to be able to devote most of her time to it. After a friend convinced her in 2022 to mount a joint show at Furzedown’s Sprout Gallery, she has been selling her paintings to the public and collectors. She now sells work privately and through Saatchi’s art website, where artists can set up their own shop online, although the host site takes a hefty commission.
The paintings Arabella showed at Brixton Library were mostly up for sale. But for Arabella, the real incentive for exhibiting her visual art is for people to look at it, feel it and react to it.
Instagram: @arabellayapppaintings
Entry is open now for the 2025 Blog & Bugle summer art show. Closing date is Monday 12 May.
