CURRENT

CUMBRIA: OF TRUTH OF WATER: catalogue available here

The Blue Gallery, Brantwood, Coniston Water, Cumbria. LA218AD. 15 March- 13 July Open every day 10.30-5pm

exhibition included in admission to Brantwood

LONDON: THE BANKSIDE GALLERY work always in stock

VIEW online and unframed The Bankside Gallery London.

COMING SOON

DORSET ART WEEKS 25 May- 9 June delighted to be showing in 3 venues:

MY STUDIO: Venue 118 details directions and opening times HERE paintings, cards, books for sale

SLADERS YARD: Venue 59 details HERE

STINSFORD STUDIOS: Venue 162 details HERE

STUDIO PIECES

PETWORTH: 10 – 27 July 2024

KEVIS HOUSE GALLERY

RHYTHM AND BLUES Artists explore the nature of blue.

Part of Petworth Festival‘s celebration of the 100th anniversary of Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue’

work always in stock- new work just delivered

DORCHESTER: 25 July- 30 September 2024

MUNDANE MIRACLES Summer Exhibition

ARTS IN HOSPITAL at Dorset County Hospital

LONDON: 9-20 October 2024

COMMON GROUND: Frances Hatch- Caroline Mc Adam Clark- Robin Richmond- Linda Saul

RWS Galleries, 3-5 Whitcomb St, WC2H 7HA

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.

Landscape painter, lecturer, Associate of The Royal Watercolour Society. Studio base on the Isle of Portland, Dorset.

I grew up walking Fenland droves and fields around Littleport at the edge of The Wash. Its black earth shaped the fundamentals of my practice. Ice-edged Siberian winds marked childhood winters and sharpened an appetite for outdoor practice. My parents each had a box of watercolours they were too busy to use. The pans were ungenerous and reluctant I remember, yet they provided me with a vehicle to respond to experiences that were marvellous to me in my meanderings. Marvels like a willow flaring orange against a storm sky or ice forming in the colour. That sort of marvel stopped me in my tracks - and still does.

My way of being with the land is dirtier nowadays. I literally work with the whatever stuff surrounds me. I'm less self conscious. Less attached to outcome. With an appetite for relationship and reciprocity. I remain a praise poet at heart.

I still choose to work with water-based media- integrating colour (gouache, acrylic or watercolour) with what is available in the landscape (earth pigment foraged on site or contemporary human-generated debris).

With water as the vehicle, precipitation, humidity, temperature, gale and breeze all play with the evolving and dissolving of works.

My pieces are team-work in which weather and personality of place participate. Each site offers a palette, inviting something particular of me. Paintings become containers of experience.

When control is relinquished, then the magic can begin.

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