Spring Exhibition : Landscapes

Rebecca Collins' practice is and has been for many years, one of solitude. Even her small green studio – so crookedly positioned on its own, seems to be itself a lonely outpost on the edge of our island, surrounded completely and utterly by the majesty of the environs.
Her deep familiarity with this part of Scotland serves her well, having been a hardy witness to the extremity of change, not just of the seasons but of the light, the atmospheric conditions and the colours. She understands and indeed uses the versatility this realm can afford a painter. What she produces in her work is a distillation, a reduction – something removed, heightened and relocated in the picture plane of her canvas. Her formal concerns are key to how the artist wants us to view her images; the compositions are often sections of the landscape – a mountainside, a top, clouds, perhaps just a natural surface. Removed of their whole, these almost abstracted forms have a disjointed loneliness, perhaps echoing the artist’s equivalent for the distant memory of the experience.

Daniel Crawshaw, through the medium of oil paint, aims to articulate lost moments common to us of feeling overwhelmed in nature. He enjoys the possibility of transforming empty scenes into settings for others to occupy, suggesting that paintings can be inert objects on the precipice of flux or metaphysical arenas that draw the viewer in. Daniel says of his work, 'Frequently I pursue the epic that hides in plain sight and my studio is littered with 7x5 snapshots that appear to have missed the point. For me a single chanced detail spawned a host of works. Sometimes I see my works as pinnacles of experience retrieved from a chaos of memory'.

Jenny is a graduate of the Royal Academy Schools. Her paintings, where monumental cloud formations gather and diffuse, often in vast mountain-scapes, amid minimal light and soft shadows, describe the sublime; the Ethereal. Thin layers of oil paint glow on a superfine white surface giving a luminous quality that enhance the glow of light. The paintings verge on the abstract as the viewer becomes enchanted by the subtle play of colour.