A community of painters, sculptors, writers, composers and thinkers united by a belief in beauty, truth and the sacramental quality of great art.
Painting as a way of meditation...
Charlotte Harmer began painting as a way of meditation informed by her Catholic faith and she aims to work in a way that reflects that. Her work points beyond itself to the transcendent — outwardly the subject may be a humble household object, but her paintings reveal narratives articulated through composition, colour, light and shade.
Her paintings become places where the inner light of reality — the thumbprint of the divine creator — can shine through and touch the viewer. In that familiar phrase, they are "thin places", where the essence of things as they truly are is revealed.
France, and the joy of colour and light...
A London-based painter trained in classical technique, Gatteaux works exclusively in oil on canvas. His landscapes are saturated with light — sun-warmed colour, strong Mediterranean shadows, and confident, open brushwork.
His compositions, while often simple at first glance, are built on a firm understanding of structure and tone and exude joy and celebrate the landscapes he paints.
Painting what's just beyond sight...
Katherine Leckie's atmospheric abstract landscapes are part imagination, part memory. Her work captures those intangible and fleeting feelings we can have when out in nature — and how they draw you out of yourself into something bigger, more mysterious, even transcendent.
Exploring themes such as memory, the elements, light and horizon lines, Katherine's work has been described as wistful, sensitive and deeply evocative.
Creating bespoke, beautiful paintings...
Nonie Clayton Bennett is one of the hidden gems of the interior design world. She specialises in creating bespoke paintings tailored to perfectly fit a space — works that feel as though they were always meant to be there.
Every canvas she produces carries a distinctive quality of originality and quiet authority, born of an instinct for colour, scale and atmosphere that is entirely her own.
nonieclaytonbennett.com ↗
Portraits of children, adults, animals and houses...
Based in Norwich, Norfolk, Charlotte Ashenden is a portrait artist whose work arose from a natural artistic ability and a deep love of faces — both human and furry. She has a gift for translating characteristic features, delicate skin tones, and the particular quality of a smile into a treasured, lasting work of art.
Charlotte works in three mediums, each with its own beauty. Conté pencil produces a soft monochrome range on warm taupe paper — a sensitive tradition stretching back to the eighteenth century. Watercolour brings luminosity and translucent light to skin and eyes. Oil paint, rich and layered, carries a gravitas particularly suited to adult portraiture.
She works from photographs and sittings, travelling regularly across the UK and worldwide to meet clients. Whether the subject is a beloved child, an animal, an adult, or a family home, Charlotte's aim is always the same: to let the subject be entirely themselves.
charlotteashenden.com ↗
Poet, priest, and founder of The Cambridge Salon...
Helen Orr is a poet, priest and singer — vicar of two rural parishes and "college mother" of The Moorings, Cambridge. She is the founder of The Cambridge Salon, a community built on the conviction that beauty, truth and human connection are not luxuries but necessities.
Her poetry moves between the sacred and the everyday, finding the luminous hidden in ordinary life. As a priest, she tends to souls; as a poet, she tends to words — and regards both as forms of the same vocation.
A seanchaí, an interloper from the medieval...
Martin Shaw is a New York Times bestselling author, mythographer and one of the most singular thinkers writing in English today. A Visiting Scholar at the Divinity Faculty of Cambridge University and a Fellow of the Temenos Academy, he is the author of seventeen books, director of the Westcountry School of Myth, and founder of the Oral Tradition and Mythic Life courses at Stanford University. Robert Bly called him "a true master, one of the very greatest storytellers we have."
His path to myth was an unusual one. Born in 1971 and raised in Devon in a house without television, telephone or car, he grew up walking the moors with his father and reading voraciously. He left school without qualifications, toured for a decade as a musician with various punk rock bands, and was retired by tinnitus at twenty-six. What followed was a four-year period living in a black tent on a succession of English hills — a stretch of intense introversion that began with a shattering fast on a Welsh hilltop and led him into eight years of training in wilderness rites of passage.
From the tent came a doctorate on patterns of metaphor within rites of passage, drawing on Irish and Siberian folklore — and, in his final year there, three men arriving to ask what he was up to. Twenty-one years on, his school has gone from strength to strength. His books — among them A Branch From The Lightning Tree (winner of the Nautilus Book Award), Scatterlings, Courting the Wild Twin, Smoke Hole and Bardskull — weave what he calls "the myth of a landscape, and the landscape of a myth." Bardskull was named Book of the Day in The Guardian and described as "rich and transgressive" in The Sunday Times.
His more recent work he describes as a developing "Christian mythopoetics" — a reminder of the depth and mysticism latent in this middle-eastern mystery religion. Shaw converted to Eastern Orthodoxy after a 101-day vigil in a Dartmoor forest, where he still lives, writing and teaching. Charles Foster has put it simply: "there's Shaw and there's everyone else."
Martin is a Fellow of The Cambridge Salon.
Writing about girls and young women in the modern world...
Freya India is the author of GIRLS, one of Substack's most widely read newsletters, where she writes with clarity and courage about the challenges facing girls and young women today. She is also a staff writer for Jonathan Haidt's newsletter After Babel.
Her essays have appeared in The New Statesman, The Spectator and UnHerd. She writes at the intersection of culture, psychology and the question of what it means to grow up female in an age of screens and social media — and what might yet be recovered.
Writing on faith, beauty and the recovery of meaning...
Rod Dreher is one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary American letters — a writer who has spent two decades arguing that beauty, tradition and spiritual seriousness are not relics of a vanished age but resources for navigating our own. Born in Louisiana, he is the author of How Dante Can Save Your Life, The Benedict Option, and Live Not by Lies — books that have shaped wide conversations about faith, culture and the search for meaning in modern life.
For twelve years he wrote a daily column at The American Conservative, where he remains editor-at-large. His essays and criticism have appeared in National Review, The Weekly Standard, The Wall Street Journal and many other publications, ranging across religion, politics, film and the texture of contemporary culture. Earlier in his career he served as chief film critic for the New York Post and as a film reviewer for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel; his commentaries have been broadcast on NPR's All Things Considered, and he has appeared on CNN, Fox News and MSNBC.
Rod is a Fellow of The Cambridge Salon.
A bard for the 21st century...
Sarah De Nordwall is a poet, performer and creative guide who helps people with a hunger for goodness, truth and beauty find their poetic voice — so that, acting from a place of authenticity, they can take the action in the world they feel is needed. She works through live performances, Write in the Light courses, and community projects.
Her calling announced itself the moment she opened The Way of the Story Teller and read about the Bards of 8th-century Ireland — poets at the very centre of society, keepers of memory and meaning. It was, she says, a "You're a wizard, Harry" moment: sudden, clarifying, and entirely convincing.
The payscale was undefined. The adventure had begun. If the old world needed bards, she reasoned, so does this one — and 21st-century Manchester, London and Transylvania are no exception.
Bringing beauty into the world through harp music...
Sophia is a music therapist and harpist whose journey began with a prayer — and was answered when a woman appeared at her door and placed a harp in her hands. Growing up by the ocean in West Cork, Ireland, she had been captivated by the instrument's ancient resonance since childhood. She went on to complete a degree in Music specialising in old Irish harping styles, and a Masters in Music Therapy, performing and teaching across the world.
She founded Wisdom Harps to make this most storied of instruments more widely accessible. The harp, she believes, carries a double heritage: it is both a biblical instrument of worship and an Irish one, woven into centuries of prayer, psalm and song — the voice of a land of saints and scholars.
Through her Substack Strings and Scrolls, Sophia extends this vocation into writing: reflections on Scripture, culture, beauty and the quiet movements of the Spirit. Words, she says, like melodies, can stir the innermost being.
