Three local artists will offer three very different views of the landscape at a Kingsbridge gallery later this month.
New Work, an exhibition featuring paintings by Christine Dack and Mick Cartwright, and photocollage by Pete Kirby, opens at Harbour House in Kingsbridge on Tuesday 29 April.
Mick will give an informal gallery talk at 12.30pm on Friday 2 May. Everybody is welcome to this event, there's no need to book, and admission is free.
Christine travels widely, taking direct inspiration from each voyage, and allowing the essence of her surroundings to dictate the approach to each new body of oil paintings.
On-the-spot sketches preserve her initial impressions of colour and distance, and paintings produced in the studio on her return explore those visual memories in more depth.
Outer Mongolia left Chris with an enduring impression of vast distances, which she expresses through bands of horizontal colour, giving a feeling that she describes as "a desert sea, with faraway sand dunes, and mountains corrugating the horizon".
Venice offered a strikingly atmospheric contrast for this artist, and she describes "the crumbling textures of the backstreets and muted, earth colours, washed-out ochres, yellows, oranges and pinks... quiet lanes and squares, a stillness of time and history, and shimmering canals reflecting colours, buildings and boats".
In contrast, Mick's paintings are not concerned with telling stories or revisiting past experiences. Each is made in response to the immediate moment, spontaneously and intuitively, and with direct reference to the work of artists such as Bridget Riley and Agnes Martin.
"Until I start working on the image," explains Mick. "I have little idea as to what the outcome will be. It's the journey of discovery that's exciting in its unpredictability. The inspiration is art, and the making of art."
For Mick, what's important in the making of paintings are the formal elements of composition, colour, tone, pattern and surface.
Pete's inventive photocollage panels suggest an episode rather than an instant, not one 'decisive moment', but a combination of moments which describe not only the view, but movement, changes of light and the passing of time.
He spends time in the parts of the Westcountry and Brittany where nature has the greatest influence on shaping the landscape and coast.
Pete takes a series of photographs and carefully combines them into an intriguing collaged panel which reads at first glance as a coherent picture, but proves, on closer inspection, to contain far more interest and dynamic.
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