Studio 106 Open
8- 23 October 2009
Open entry exibition
Studio 106 Arts Gallery first open exhibition. Displaying the work of six artists working in the UK, the exhibition brought together a range of contemporary approaches to painting. Having collectively exhibited in many of the UK’s major art centers, these artists share a fascination with the natural world and its depiction in the painterly surface. Presenting images of varying degrees of abstraction, the exhibition offered a series of works that are alive with colour and vivacity, providing insights into the relationship between nature, memory and process.
Caroline Cary
Caroline Cary’s work draws on a ‘vast mental archive of images’ generated from years of landscape painting. Although such work is the starting point for her current painting, her primary concern is to create images that inspire in viewers a heightened awareness of the visual world. Concerned with the relationship between art and music, Cary manipulates colour to create abstract paintings that communicate with often disarming immediacy.
Mary Crenshaw
Drawing inspiration from the natural world, Mary Crenshaw creates paintings that sparkle with vivacious energy. ‘My imagery comes from memory’ she says, and ‘letting the paint take over’. Researching plants from her immediate surroundings, close observation is transformed by a dynamic gestural style to evoke enticing visions of the world around us.
Dawn Latham
Dawn Latham is a local artist who makes landscape paintings with an evocative, nostalgic atmosphere. Reminiscent of scenes from childhood holidays, their palette muted by the passing of time, the images are dream-like. Hovering uncertainly in real space, they act as catalysts for memory and imaginative reflection.
Rhonda Whitehead
Nature is the primary source for Rhonda Whitehead’s paintings. Whether depicting organic form on a microcosmic scale, or the actions of nature on the built environment, her collected works represents a kind of visual biography of continuous landscapes. Revealing patterns and surfaces that are ‘as marked and ambiguous as nature’s chaotic, yet quietly integrative and biotic processes’, these colourful and seductive paintings remind us of the primacy of nature, seeking to capture the universal, ‘the mind that exists in all matter’.
Thomas Williams
Thomas Williams creates what he calls ‘deformed paintings’. These abstract images are created through a complex process in which gestural brush strokes are transformed into biomorphic swathes of glistening colour.
Claire Wiltsher
Working from what she describes as a ‘rich catalogue of ephemera’ gathered from her journeys around the world, Claire Wiltshire seeks to evoke the energy and atmosphere of places she visits. Concerned with the relationship between abstracted image and the imagination, Claire Wiltshire describes her work as the ‘culmination of thoughts, feelings and the tangible objects that accompany living in unknown fields’.