ABOUT THE ARTISTS

FELICITY KEEFE
Felicity Keefe's contemporary landscape pieces are inspired by her experience of the British landscape as it changes and reacts to seasons, weather, and time.  She is inspired by states of flux, the change from day into night, summer into winter, calm into storm, outward into inward. The work can be soft and dreamy, painted in thin layers, misty and obscure, or deep and dense with heavy shadows and skies.  Her paintings are distinctive for their sense of atmosphere, often brooding, but also starkly beautiful.

KATE SHERMAN
Various themes run through Kate Sherman’s work - memory, longing, transience; and there are often recurring subjects – blossom, forests and woodland, dwellings, which are sometimes blurred as if seen from a moving vehicle. The imagery originates from photographs she has taken of her surrounding landscape. This photographic source is important because the paintings capture a reflective notion of memory, of the emotional distance between a real landscape and a photograph, between experience and longing. There is a quiet melancholy in Kate's work, that is expressed both by the portrayal of sparse unpopulated landscapes containing elemental traces of man, and by the restrained palette suffused in a reserved northern European light.

GINA PARR
The image of the sea and the artist’s thoughts about memory and identity are ever present in Gina Parr's work. Parr’s Devon childhood, characterised by the time she spent outdoors, fishing with her father, and her experience of her mother’s hoarding and mental health issues, have defined the artist’s relationship to the sea and land, the uncertainty of the deep, the spirit and memory of the open space, evoking freedom and connectedness. When painting, Parr is completely immersed in the process, building a reverberating relationship with the canvas, a push and pull of spontaneity and controlled intention.

MIDGE NAYLOR
Midge Naylor's inspiration is drawn from her memories of the Scottish landscapes of her childhood and her abstracted landscapes are derived from fragments - of place, memory, experience, and imagination. Her work often hovers along that fascinating line between abstraction and figuration. Midge considers painting to be one of the richest and most complex ways in which aspects of the psyche can be externalised, and her works are psychological landscapes, painting using landscape as a state of being.