Image above: Ella Clocksin, DARK FLEURS, watercolour, 2023.
• ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
Exhibiting ONLINE ONLY during Artweeks 2024, I'm showing contemplative and colourful contemporary watercolour abstracts related to natural forms.
The virtual exhibition and online catalogue 'open' on my website at the start of Artweeks on Saturday 4 May,12 noon: https://www.ellaclocksin.com/artweeks-exhibition-2024
Contact me by email through my website for studio visits, to collect purchases or view works before buying: https://www.ellaclocksin.com/contact
• ABOUT THE WORK
Abstracting from the colours, patterns and sounds of woodlands, gardens and flowers, my paintings explore the grounding and restorative effects of the natural world, and their cycles of growth, decline and renewal that we are intertwined with.
Exploiting the allusive, fluid and atmospheric qualities of watercolour, the works convey inner experience more than outer appearance. The work is about perceptions located neurologically in the body, but not in the grip of words. Because despite my love of words, some experiences of beauty, nature, emotion and relationships are not readily put into language.
• ABOUT THE ARTIST
Ella grew up by the sea in Lincolnshire with no gallery or art scene for miles, just postcards in the local art shop and bric-a-brac on the school still life table. She first intended to follow Great Aunt Muriel, a fashion designer in Paris. Art college came later, after a cross-disciplinary background in literature and psychotherapy. But she's been a professional artist for longer than anything else.
She received an Arts Council England grant through Jelly, Reading (2020), to research sound in painting, and continued this in on-site residencies at Jelly and The Old Lock Up Gallery, Cromford in 2022.
Recent exhibitions include Royal Watercolour Society and No Format Gallery, London, the Irving Gallery, Oxford Art Society and ronapainting gallery in Oxford, Darle and the Bear, Woodstock, The Old Lock Up Gallery, Cromford, the Old Fire Engine House Gallery, Ely, and Art_House_Life, Ventnor.
Ella taught Life Drawing at Winchester School of Art after an MA Fine Art (Distinction) and BA hons Textile Art (1st) there, and was formerly Visual Arts Therapist at the School of Life, London. She now runs independent programmes of innovative and experimental workshops in painting and abstraction in Oxford and online: https://www.ellaclocksin.com/workshops