Anthony Garratt from 26 January 2019

Anthony Garratt

Tidal

Paintings by Anthony Garratt. Gilded wood carvings by David West. Furniture by Petter Southall.

Saturday 26 January to Sunday 10 March 2019

If you would like to be notified when Anthony Garratt’s new paintings are available to view online, let us know on gallery@sladersyard.co.uk

Light and Flood by Anthony Garratt 90 x 90 cm

Anthony Garratt

Anthony Garratt is an experimental painter of landscape. His paintings of Dartmoor and the Devon coast in this exhibition show his love of running and tidal water with the landscape. Since he and his young family moved to Dartmoor, Anthony’s engagement with this wild landscape and its long history speaks in these dynamic paintings.  

‘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 floating on a lake 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. More projects are planned for the coming year.

However, Garratt mainly paints for exhibition and this is his second show at Sladers Yard. 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.’

If you would like a notification when Anthony Garratt’s paintings become available to view online please contact us on t: 01308 459511 or email gallery@sladersyard.co.uk