An Exhibition of Recent Paintings

The Brecon Beacons, Hampshire, The Peak District, Pembrokeshire, Powys, Shropshire, Somerset, Surrey and Sussex.

PRIVATE VIEW
6-8pm THURSDAY 15th MAY

The exhibition continues until 7th June

All works will be published online to coincide with the start of the exhibition.

There is nothing like the thrill of painting en plein air – or painting en voiture if the weather is bad, as it often is because I particularly like the colours, bare branches and brooding skies of autumn and winter. I use my car as a studio and tether it, as Monet did his boat, wherever I find something I want to paint, hoping it won’t get stuck in the mud.

I’ve been painting in Pembrokeshire for a long time and then gradually explored other places – the Brecon Beacons, Cotswolds, Herefordshire, the Peak District, Teesdale and North Yorkshire moors, Cornwall, Wiltshire, Somerset and Hampshire, Sussex, Surrey and Kent. I gravitate towards open, unspoilt countryside and it will be a combination of things that makes me want to stop and paint – maybe something odd, a strange shape and a combination of colours. Lately, hedges have particularly hooked me – the shapes they get into, the result of the interaction of man and nature, the way you can see through them to something beyond – or can’t. The light is one of the most important things for me – it is usually beautiful because I start in the early morning. I try to capture even an element of what I see, with the light changing every second, while tides advance and retreat, rain threatens and probably falls, and insects wade up the painted sky and die halfway up looking like birds. The paintings are about my pleasure at being there in that particular place at that particular time.

Paint itself is exciting too: you never know what will happen, the painting makes itself and although it will only represent a fraction of what is there, I hope the picture will be a thing of its own.

Georgina Allen, 2025.