March-April

Lucy Atherton - 'I Waited Till Winter' - Solo Exhibition | 22 MARCH - 29 APRIL

‘These new paintings have been forming and gathering momentum in the pages of a sketchbook started during the summer. Now they have been eked out in my freezing cold studio beneath Eagle cragg in Lydgate over the winter months.The colours are often the weather I see in the plug hole that is the bottom and sides of the Calder valley during winter.

They are emotionally charged and form a kind of narrative. I guess you could call them emotional landscapes. They are made up of nostalgia and memory and nature absorbed, and a deep routed yearning for other worlds or the worlds that exist within me, as well as the personal things going on in this reality day to day.

Sometimes they feel like a safe place filled with horror.’

Lucy Atherton attended the Royal college of Art, London, studying Illustration M.A.

Paul Finn - In the footsteps of Constable | 22 MARCH - 29 APRIL

By Dr Anna Maria Barry

" There's nothing there!" says Paul Finn when asked about the Suffolk landscape that has inspired his latest exhibition......"......
"There is nothing there!" In this context, is indeed a surprising assessment of the landscape that has inspired and nurtured so many of our leading artists. But taken in the context of Paul's work, this sentiment reveals itself to be one which strikes at the heart of this exhibition. This is because the exhibition focuses not on the landscape bit depicts, but instead on the way in which this landscape is experienced. Rather than simply assimilating and recording a scene, Paul places himself, his impressions and his artistic process in the foreground. In doing so he says important things about the relationship between art and the environment, man and nature, seeing and sensing, viewer and artist..........
" You really have to look", he says explaining how he has composed his vision of Suffolk, how do you decide what to depict?.