Ali Cockrean
Haddenham, Buckinghamshire
Biography
Ali Cockrean is a successful expressionist painter who exhibits her work throughout the country. Her paintings already appear in collections across Europe, the US and Canada. Reviewers have described her as ‘one to watch’ on the contemporary art scene. Her career has been boosted by significant commissions and a rising national profile following the success of shows in London (including Cork Street, The Mall, Mayfair, The Strand and Notting Hill) and regional galleries (including venues in Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Surrey, Staffordshire, West Midlands, Bristol, Cornwall and Wales) with enthusiastic reactions to her collections. Ali has also featured on BBC TV, made several appearances on radio and had significant magazine/newspaper coverage.
Ali Cockrean’s work is in acrylic on large and small scale canvases. She has studied at the Central St Martins College of Art and Design and Slade School of Fine Art but considers her skills to have been largely self-taught.
Born in 1962 Ali is now a full-time professional working from her studio in Buckinghamshire.
Ali’s painting career started in her childhood and by the age of thirteen she was taking commissions and exhibiting her work at local art shows. She graduated from London University with a BA (Hons) degree in English Literature and Dramatic Art, before joining educational publishers, Oxford University Press. For many years she balanced a career in marketing and business with her passion for art, before turning professional in 2006, emerging in recent years as a highly collectable artist. Known for her large, colourful and textural abstracts, her first collections proved particularly popular with buyers in London and New York. Following a divorce in 2010 and a brief pause in her painting, Ali has now returned with a new body of work, which is more impressionistic in style,more subtle and reflective in nature, but thankfully proving just as popular. She doesn’t consider herself to have a definitive style, preferring to let her art follow its natural course.
“Making art requires creativity, inspiration and technique. You have to be prepared to work outside your comfort zone all the time. That way you continue to grow and develop as an artist and constantly produce new and innovative work.”
Besides devoting most of her time to her own painting, Ali is also passionate about working with aspiring artists: giving talks and running workshops for Art Societies around the South East of England; tutoring adults and children; as well as writing articles for national art publications including The Society for All Artists and Artist and Illustrator magazine.
As Ali specialises in acrylics, she is also one of the professional painters who is invited to give feedback on paints and mediums by manufacturers such as Chroma and Winsor and Newton.
More information is available from www.alicockrean.com.
Works Exhibited
- The Williamson Art Gallery & Museum, 2011:
- Cat No 19: "Summer Peaks" 62.5x72.5cms
- Cat No 20: "Headland Mist" 68x78cms
- Cat No 21: "Plums" 72.5x72.5cms