Many well-known contemporary artists have found their way out into the world through the windows of a gallery in Gillygate, York, as JO HUGHES discovers.

FOR YEARS Bohemia Galleries has been discovering new talent and nurturing developing artists bringing them to recognition on an international level, selling to art lovers in London, Europe and America and around the world.

Sheana Eccles, who owns and runs the gallery with her husband, Steven, introduced Frank Paul’s work to the art world, only to discover later what a find she had made: he was the son of British painter, Lucian Freud, but he didn’t want to use his famous father to get his work seen.

Sheana just thought she had spotted a new artist when her eyes fell on one of his drawings on show in a joint exhibition in London.

The former Barclays Bank manager, who has been in the gallery in York for seven years, fell in love with the drawing she had seen while on one of her hunts for new art treasures she and her husband collect and sell.

“The drawing was unique and I felt it had something. It touched my heart,” she says. “I asked if I could buy it and was told it wasn’t really for sale.”

She arranged to meet the artist. Expecting someone much older, she was surprised when a young, tall man turned up to meet her on the steps of the British Museum, and then took her over to his mother’s house, directly opposite. She discovered that Frank Paul was the son of the artist Celia Paul, who was a muse of British painter Freud. Frank Paul doesn’t like to mention his family connections, but, says Sheana: “We knew he was Lucian Freud’s son when his father came up to Steve at an art fair, he held out his hand and they shook hands.”

“I hear you’re selling my son’s work,” Lucian Freud said.

But that was not why Sheana had decided to try to sell Frank’s work, it was because she had seen something of another world in his drawing.

“When I first encountered one of his drawings it stopped me in my tracks and I knew I wanted to own it. That feeling of being transported into another place is something you can readily experience, especially in Frank’s work. His figures are very intimate, provocative, revealing… they are also on closer inspection, sinister and challenging, they draw you in inviting you to make up stories about them.

“He is an accomplished linguist, he speaks Russian and Arabic, but when we asked him, ‘Frank what do you want to do?’ he said, ‘I want to be an artist’ and I said, ‘I can see why it’s incredibly difficult for you’.”

Through their gallery the couple launched Frank Paul’s surrealistic drawings in London and recently his Anatomists Handbook at their gallery in York. Many of his drawings are on sale through Bohemia Galleries.

“Frank deserves it so much because he’s special. You don’t come across people like that very often in your life,” says Sheana.

It is the sort of support and confidence the couple invest in the artists they discover. This is the a happy marriage of the abilities of the bank manager who went into interior design and the son of a Hull fisherman who, says Sheana, “had a tough upbringing”.

“We are from completely different sides of the tracks. Steven did a fine art degree and wanted to be a painter, but coming from where he did in Hull he had to get a trade, so he went into engineering. But he has always had the eye, and he’s just interested in the art.

“As a former bank manager, I have to keep an eye on the money side, and that’s why it works. We love what we do. Originally we decided to collect British Art Pottery and we went to auctions, and started out buying and selling at antique fairs.

“We ended up with so much stuff we had to buy somewhere to put it all in between the fairs, and then we bought the little shop in Beverley. Then of course we noticed we had nothing to put on the walls and that was it, really.

“Steve will just put on the walls what he loves, never go for anything commercial, whereas I’d be thinking what would look nice, and I’m the money,” says Sheana.

Thanks to Steven’s ability to seek out art the gallery has recently become the only gallery in Europe to represent Latvian artist Agita Keiri, who has since been selected as a finalist for the BP Portrait Award 2011, and for the Chianciano Biennale.

It also represents Noel Bensted, another finalist at the BP Portrait Awards, Danielle O’Connor Akiyama, a Canadian artist whose acrylics on canvas were given residents’ First Choice at the Florence Biennale. Other works include paintings by Milt Kobayashi, Moche Kohen and Cliff Blakey.

The couple are also proud to have found and to be the only gallery in the world to represent Artiom, a young painter from Moldova whose works they have sold since he was twelve.

They are now planning a large exhibition of paintings by Chris Gollon, who they describe as one of the 21st century’s most important and charismatic artists.

He has exhibited with Yoko Ono, David Bowie and Gavin Turk, has been made artist in residence at Durham University, inspired novelist Sara Maitland’s Stations Of The Cross after his paintings for a Grade One listed church in East London, which were commissioned by the Church of England.

Recently, Gollon sold a painting to the makers of the Twilight movies who intend to use his work in their latest film.

“We have close personal relationships with our artists, especially those we have brought to light. We feel it is our role to be innovators, people buy what they see and it is up to us to introduce them to new artists”.

• Chris Gollon opens on March 16. For more information on this and all the artists for sale through the gallery, visit bohemia-galleries.com or visit the gallery at 7 Gillygate, York. For more information, phone 01904 466488.