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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Singer and poet in the tradition of the sacred...
As well as a poet and priest, Helen Orr is a singer — someone for whom music and word are inseparable. Her voice carries the same quality as her poetry: an attentiveness to what lies beneath the surface of things, and a desire to draw it into the light.
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.
