Sladers Yard WINTER SHOW

An all-star rolling exhibition of real and imagined landscapes by a fascinating group of highly regarded West Country painters including:

David Atkins, Julian Bailey, Angela Charles, Tim Cumming,

Simon Garden RWA, Janette Kerr PRWA Hon RA,

Alfred Stockham ARCA RWA

Furniture by PETTER SOUTHALL

Craft, sculpture and accessories by leading artist designers

Saturday 23 November 2013 – Sunday 23 February 2014

DAVID ATKINS

David Atkins was born in Greenwich in 1964. He studied at both St Martin’s School of Art, London and later at Winchester School of Art.

He says of his work, “The tradition of landscape painting has always been at the heart of my drawing and painting. I work directly from the environment often revisiting places many times and in ever changing weather and seasons. My paintings are concerned with capturing light, wind, rain and colour and I always try to encapsulate in them an essence of what is experienced and discovered. They are produced with vigour and intuitiveness, allowing the process of working and reworking to consolidate a truthful response to the subject.” Click to view David Atkins’ paintings.

Art critic Brian Sewell: “Today David Atkins has established himself as an evocative painter of landscapes and urban scenes. His use of broad brush and colour creates bold and clear vistas of the city and landscape. He is particularly drawn to scenes of dawn and sunset and is an honest observer of the world around us. David is an artist who excels at capturing the magic and majesty of the British countryside. His strong and confident brushwork successfully records the essence of his subjects be they landscape or urban cityscapes”.

JULIAN BAILEY paints joyful landscapes celebrating the earth colours of cloud and rock alongside his signature fresh bright palette. His paintings seem effortless, their simplicity underpinned with strong composition. He reaches for the anatomy of his landscapes just as he paints figures, and gives a sense of having been there just when all the elements came together to make something remarkable.

Born in 1963, Julian Bailey studied art at the Ruskin School while attending New College, Oxford and then went on to the Royal Academy Schools where he was awarded the Turner Gold Medal and later the Landseer Scholarship. He had his first one-man show in London in 1991 and has exhibited regularly since, joining Browse & Darby in Cork Street in 1999 as their youngest artist. He and his family moved to Dorset in 1998. In 2011 he was elected to the New English Art Club who awarded him the David Messum Prize. His work is in many eminent collections throughout the UK.

Yachts on the River Dart J Bailey oil on board 25.5 x 28cm SOLD

Dinghies off Ringstead gouache 14.5 x 12.5cm £525

“Good figurative art lights corners of our experience that we are only dimly conscious of, and the corner Bailey’s art illuminates is the place where our personal spaces overlap. He observes the sequences in life’s unchoreographed ballet performed wherever human beings gather. With his eye and arm, Bailey translates these familiar movements into bold configurations of brushstrokes and colour that, when they connect, make us see life anew. “The difficulty,” he says, “is trying to do it with simplicity”. The reward is our recognition when he does.” Laura Gascoigne, visual arts critic, The Spectator magazine

Click here to see more on Julian Bailey.

ANGELA CHARLES shows for the second time at Sladers Yard this Winter. Curator at the Thelma Hubert Gallery in Honiton, Angela has a strong record of solo exhibitions at Sherborne House, Alpha House, Sherborne and the Porthminster Gallery, St Ives. She studied Fine Art Textiles at Goldsmiths College, London and has been painting seriously since her move West in 2001.

Angela Charles’ paintings are inspired predominantly by the land and sea between her home in South Somerset and the Dorset coast. Working on aluminium panels or smaller wooden boards, she builds up layers of sanded down paint before subjecting the painting to her incisive mark making, reflecting her memory of the place and her feelings whilst there, rather than a direct representation of the landscape. Click here to view Angela’s paintings.

SIMON GARDEN RWA. Simon’s large works in oil and acrylic on board have an intense dreamlike quality, often showing lone travellers on roads through wide imaginary landscapes of haunting beauty or vast structures approached only by spindly ladders. His work has a sense of story that describes the human condition in touching, humorous and profound ways. They contemplate the mysteries that rear unacknowledged out of the clipped normality of every day. He has an exceptional sense of colour, and his unusual use of both oil and acrylic produces vibrant glowing paintings which lead the eye on contemplative journeys through his pictures.

Born in 1960 Simon graduated from Exeter College of Art and Design in 1982 with a first class honours degree in art. Since then he has gone from strength to strength exhibiting widely throughout the UK. He has been a regular exhibitor at The Royal Academy and The Royal West of England Academy where he was one of the youngest artists to be elected an academician. His work features in private collections throughout the world and he shows with the Thompsons gallery in London. He first exhibited with Sladers Yard in 2010 and has shown regularly here since. Click here for more on Simon Garden.

JANETTE KERR PRWA Hon RA. Janette Kerr’s contemporary and experimental paintings of the sea and sky off Shetland are the result of a passionate and elemental study of wave formation both through drawing and painting from the rocks right on the edge of the ocean, and through her research project, Extreme Wave Theory, in association with Norwegian Oceanographers. Her paint splattered canvasses evoke their subject so powerfully that the viewer becomes an active participant not only in the turbulent seascapes but in the artistic process itself. With a nod towards the Romantic tradition in landscape painting, her practice remains contemporary and elemental. ”It is the periphery of the land that I am drawn to – the far edges of a place – margins between land and sea which blur with the ebb and flow of the tide; areas which feel remote and uninhabited, which seem touched more by the erosion of the land – the action of the wind and rain – than human occupation.”

Janette Kerr is President of the Royal West of England Academy, Bristol, and a Visiting Research Fellow in Fine Art at the University of the West of England. She exhibits regularly in the UK and has work in private and public collections, both nationally and internationally. She has received Art Council funding for her research and development project, and has won several awards. Kerr has recently been a visiting artist at the Meteorological Institute in Bergen and on the Shetland Islands. So great is her fascination, that she now has a croft on Shetland where she can go to paint and draw and get really close to the sea in wind and weather. More on Janette Kerr.

ALFRED STOCKHAM’s intensely poetic compositions exude quietude. Painted against the odds of his now severe physical impairment with Parkinsons disease, which necessitates long contemplation between brushstrokes, his paintings take us out of ourselves.

Alfred has had a distinguished career. Born in London, he loved painting from his earliest years but he followed the family tradition and spent seven years in the Royal Navy before studying for three years at Camberwell School of Art followed by three more at the Royal College of Art where he was awarded a Silver Medal. He was a Rome Scholar and Grenada Arts Fellow at the University of York before he arrived in Bristol in 1968 to take up a post as lecturer at Bristol Polytechnic (now the University of the West of England) where he became Head of Fine Art. He left to devote himself to painting full-time. Alfred was elected a full member of the Royal West of England Academy in 1993 and was appointed Honorary Curator of the permanent collection of the RWA in 2001. His work is in public collections throughout Britain and Ireland. Alfred’s work is poetic and intensely Romantic. It is informed by a strong intellect and knowledge of art history combined with a lifetime study of colour and form. Economical with words and hilariously witty, Alfred lets his work speaks for itself. Images of new works by Alfred are below and on his page.

TIM CUMMING shows his paintings here at Sladers Yard for the first time. Tim was born in Father Hudson’s Children’s Home in Solihull in the West Midlands in 1963 and was brought up in rural Dorset. He has lived in London since 1982 and between 1987 and 1990 he worked at The Karsten Schubert Gallery with many of the figures who were part of the Frieze generation of BritArtists.

Tim received his training in painting and drawing from his father, Peter Cumming, who was Head of Department at Bournemouth and Poole College of Art, and his mother Mary, a professional embroiderer. His one solo show was in Shaftesbury, Dorset, when he was eighteen. He has since become a widely published poet and arts and music journalist as well as a filmmaker. His paintings are in numerous private collections and have been exhibited at the 63a Gallery in Kingston, South West London and at the Rowley Gallery, Kensington. His pamphlet, Etruscan Miniatures, comprising twelve poems and six paintings of the landscape around Orvieto in Umbria, was published by the Sidney based press Pitt Street Poetry in May 2012. More about Tim Cumming and more paintings. Tim will perform his poetry accompanied by the brilliant Three Cane Whale on Saturday 18 January at 7pm.