Anthony Garratt

Ways of Seeing Landscape

Paintings by Anthony Garratt (ground floor gallery) with Anne Davies, Jo Fox and Martyn Brewster. Furniture by Petter Southall.

Saturday 27 January to Sunday 4 March 2018

Please scroll down the page to view Anthony Garratt’s paintings.

Anthony Garratt is an experimental painter of landscape. His first show at Sladers Yard includes his first paintings of Dartmoor and the Devon coast since he and his family moved there. Anthony’s excited engagement with this wild landscape and its long history speaks in these dynamic paintings. Rushing water, dramatic skies over earth often built up with composites of rusting filings and other materials to give textured weight and authentic colour.

‘I have to feel energetic and excited to paint, otherwise it just doesn’t work,’ Garratt explains. Now in his thirties, he studied design at Chelsea School of Art and at Falmouth and worked as a designer until his painting took over. His exciting installations attract visitor and press attention. Ambitious projects have included four large outdoor canvases painted and fixed in position for a year on Tresco in the Isles of Scilly in 2014. Four on Anglesey followed in 2015. In 2016, Anthony Garratt painted two giant outdoor paintings, one high on the flanks of Mt Snowdon and one hung deep beneath the mountain in an abandoned slate cavern. The project was called High and Low. All the materials, panel and floating apparatus for the high painting were carried by hand up the mountain on the old miners’ road in reference to the history of the area. The painting was floated on a boat and left to weather in the elements.

Moorland Pool Evening 120 x 100 cm acrylic, oil, rust on canvas

In addition to these projects, Garratt paints for exhibition. In London he is represented by the Thackeray Gallery. Working outdoors, he is at the mercy of the elements which are liable to wash away his paint and radically change his painting, however this is part of the story of the piece of work for him. As Mary Myers put it in Country Life, ‘Anthony Garratt has taken en plein air painting to a new extreme. Happiest when the weather is wild, he regards the unpredictable effects of the elements as central to his work.’ Increasingly he is exploring the human, both political and emotional, within the landscapes he paints, alongside the nature of the paint itself. In Dartmoor, as on Snowdon, there is much evidence of abandoned human efforts and these draw Garratt’s fascination. He is interested in landscapes that emphasise the vulnerability of man. ‘Perhaps I regard adversity as a form of beauty, there is beauty in the knowledge that humans are not all powerful and in control of the planet. We are at the mercy of it. If my paintings are able to communicate that beauty, perhaps that is what I am striving for.’

Anthony Garratt’s paintings can be seen below. Please click on an image to expand and view with captions and prices. To enquire about a painting please contact us on t: 01308 459511 or email gallery@sladersyard.co.uk