This exhibition is largely based on expression of landscape, both naturalistic and abstracted, which have not been exhibited before. Many have been done in the Corona period, based on local views taken from daily walks.This year I will be exhibiting with Sandy Hoeft. We are both landscape painters and our work approaches landscape from different perspectives and hopefully will make for some lively discussion amongst our visitors. We are at St Ethelwold’s in Abingdon which is a peaceful and harmonious environment for a landscape exhibition.
My exhibition will be dominated by the work I have made during lockdown – Each day I go walking at the river, and while we couldn’t sketch outside, I could take photos, draw them up and visit the sites again the next day, until I knew what I wanted to paint! So the Abingdon walk along the Thames features strongly! I love the stillness of early morning walks, and have seen them through the seasons, the snow and the floods. I wanted to capture the freshness of nature in so many forms in such a small area, and hope that you will be able to agree!
Other paintings are those which have not been shown before – taking scenes from various parts of my travels and again trying to capture their uniqueness, their mood, their essence. You will notice that while they may be abstracted, very few are abstract - I want to try to convey the “specialness” of the chosen scenes – as I have done with the largely Abingdon ones.
While I come from a painting family, I did not start to paint until 15 years ago – largely in reaction to a very left-brain job I was doing! I grew up in Southern Africa, and got to love Big Skies and open country, and studied geography as a result. I have both lived in four counties and travelled very widely, doing international market research. I continued everywhere to seek quiet open spaces, and now want to capture the pictures in my head on canvas!
I use colour, line and form in that order of importance! The love of colour comes I am sure from the tropical light of my childhood, and has drawn me to certain artists over the years – the Fauves, David Hockney, the Impressionists, and the Abstract Impressionists. However, my paintings do not always have bright colours but they are, hopefully, carefully chosen tones whose mixture conveys expression and “Spirit of Place”.
My special love in studying geography was geomorphology, the formation of landscape… and this remains with me. I paint mostly open territory, with interesting shapes and natural history, and these are my focus - rather than human engagement with the land. While I have been fortunate to visit a number of spectacular places over the years, I still have a bucket list of where I would like to go… and later paint!
I have a studio at home, which led to me using mainly acrylics (for pragmatic reasons: no smell, little mess!) although continue to dabble in different media. My paintings are on the naturalistic side, but I cannot leave abstraction alone somehow, and expect this to increase rather than decrease!
Painting, together with Art History, which I started studying when I retired, form an integral part of my life now – I cannot imagine living without it, and consider myself blessed to have found such an occupation at this stage in life.