CURRENT

RWS Gallery

SMALL WORKS by members of The Royal Watercolour Society

8^th – 23^rd May, Tuesday – Saturday, 11 – 5pm.

3 – 5 Whitcomb Street, London WC2H 7HA (just off Trafalgar Square)

THE BANKSIDE GALLERY

Work always in stock as well as view online. Framed and unframed.

Thames Riverside 48 Hopton Street London SE1 9JH

CURRENT WORK

A collection of current works available to view here: a gathering of paintings made along the Jurassic Coast in Dorset and around Coniston in Cumbria. I think of them as praise poems. They are conversational. Bundles of narrative. Containers of experience.

ONLINE COURSE

INSTAGRAM is a platform I regularly engage with…rather as I do a visual journal. So if you would like to follow the ebbs and flows of a creative life then follow me there.

YOUTUBE CHANNEL reflections on art practice.

Frances grew up walking Fenland droves and fields around Littleport at the edge of The Wash. Its black earth shaped the fundamentals of her practice. Ice-edged Siberian winds marked childhood winters and sharpened an appetite for outdoor practice. Her way of being with the land is dirtier nowadays whilst remaining a praise poet at heart. Less attention is accorded to outcome- the appetite is for relationship and reciprocity. Water is the vehicle with which precipitation, humidity, temperature and air play with the evolving and dissolving of works.

Studio: Isle of Portland, Dorset

Elected to The Royal Watercolour Society in 2022

BEACH CANVAS for Frances Hatch

She is open to the open air -

a painter kneeling

on bonfire-blackened shingle

mixed with debris the sea has tossed up.

Rain won’t deter her.

Quite the contrary:

it too will be something to hand,

softening surfaces, seeping in.

She works with stuff

that is all a meeting and a mixing:

greensand, gault, lias

this present moment

with geological ages

on the Jurassic coast.

Paint encounters earth

fallen from cliffs,

plant life, flotsam, all

the material makings of place.

As she anchors her canvas

with a rock and light flashes

where the cliff torn with a fall

catches the sun, I want to tell her

what her art means to me.

I could put it simply

and it would be true.

What she brings me into,

quickened with imagination,

is the living world.

But is that enough?

We need words that glow with inner light:

Words that come with a touch

of life that makes them what they are –

life of flesh and spirit,

and not with colour daubed on,

but with the inner glow

that is energy,

the vibrant flower

and the mud it grows in.

What she reveals,

what I seek to speak of,

is place renewed,

broken shore and wave breaking

here, at this moment, all the instability

of the land we live on and love.

Jeremy Hooker. June 2023

included in PRELUDES poems by Jeremy Hooker. Shearsman Books 2024