WORK by a Bradford art lecturer is set to go on display in southern France as part of a partnership linked to one of the city’s most famous artists.

Paintings, screenprints and drawings by Brian Hindmarch, a lecturer at Bradford School of Art at Bradford College, will be the focus of an exhibition in the Côte d’Azur next month.

The show is being staged by Nereus Arts, an organisation based in a seaside village on the French Riviera called Beaulieu-Sur-Mer.

Nereus Arts is run by Luke and Natalie Stevens, the son and daughter-in-law of the late Norman Stevens, a renowned painter and printmaker and one of the so-called ‘Bradford Mafia’ along with his close friend David Hockney, with whom he studied at Bradford College of Art in the 1950s.

The group were considered some of the leading artists in the UK at the time.

When the College held a major exhibition of Stevens’ work in 2014, to mark the relaunch of its Dye House Gallery, Luke and Natalie attended to represent the illustrious alumnus, who died of cancer in 1988 aged 51.

The exhibition was such a success that the Art School and the Stevens agreed to work together on future projects.

Through Nereus Art, the couple work to raise awareness of the constant threat to the environment on protected sites around Beaulieu-sur-Mer.

The exceptionally beautiful region attracts many wealthy tourists who strengthen the local economy, but at the same time their presence threatens the very environment they love to visit.

The first cross Channel collaboration has seen college lecturer Mr Hindmarch spend several months focussing his artistic talent on the beautiful bay of Beaulieu Sur Mer. After a working visit to the area to sketch and photograph the bay he produced an array of original drawings, paintings, dry points and screen prints of the beautiful bay and its sea life.

Mr Hindmarch, best known for his depictions of Yorkshire’s and Scotland’s outstanding landscape, said: “I am really honoured to be asked to respond to the ambitions of Nereus Arts for art to serve nature.

“The beauty in this region of the Cote D’Azure is tangible and well established, although it also has ‘elusive’ qualities both on and offshore.

“The initial sensory pleasure of colour, light, air and watery places, distinguishes this coastline as a place to be protected and fully understood. The collaboration with Bradford School of Art and Nereus Arts, has allowed me to engage in producing artworks which attempt to illustrate and represent the nature and fragility of the bay of Beaulieu-Sur-Mer.”

The exhibition ‘Inspired by the Bay, artworks of nature in Beaulieu-Sur-Mer’ opens on October 21 in the Chapelle Sancta Maria De Olivo; and will be the first of a series of exhibitions that this partnership will stage.

In the spring of 2018 Nerus Arts will sponsor a student placement in Beaulieu-Sur-Mer who will realise their own creative outcomes to the theme.

Stevens was born in Bradford in 1937 – the same year as Hockney – and studied painting at Bradford Regional College of Art from 1952 to 1957.

In 1957 he moved to London to study at the Royal College of Art and after graduating, taught at art schools in Hornsey, Maidstone and Manchester.