Distant Views is a group exhibition featuring gallery artists Susan Laughton, David Mankin, Anke Roder and Anna Somerville. Influenced by their natural surroundings the exhibition brings together work inspired by their home countries England, Holland and Scotland. Their gestural response to the landscape and their interpretation of elements of the natural world conveys memories of places, ideas of flows and changes in the earth and water.
Susan Laughton’s long standing interest in landscape and architecture has always inspired her painting and drawing. Vernacular buildings, both rural and urban, domestic and functional are a source of geometric, architectural forms. A reductive approach to these sources is used to select and refine the intentional placement of linear and spatial elements. These are set against the more random physicality of different surfaces whether they are hand applied plaster or the grain of plywood that connect back to the built environment.
David Mankin lives and works in the southwest of Cornwall. His dynamic and vivid abstract paintings not only draw inspiration from the dramatic Cornish coastline; the wild, empty moors; the big skies; but also, the raw, physical elements of the landscape including the rocky outcrops; beach boulders; storm debris; winding farm tracks; surging seas and the ancient fields bordered with stone hedges. He enjoys getting out into the landscape and the elements that shape it – wind, sea, rain and man-made. These are the experiences that manifest themselves in his paintings.
Dutch based painter Anke Roder lives and works on the coastal plains, near Groningen, in northern Holland. The landscape paired back to an austere simplicity, has inspired her with two rich seams to mine – seascapes and plants. Her encaustic seascapes, sensuous satin slabs anchored along a welded horizon, ooze light. The ancient beeswax and pigment technique, applied in molten layers, conveys a contained elemental energy, loading the northern colours within a saturated interior. Rendering down sea and sky to a semi-abstract geometry, Roder’s work, anchored in observation, convinces, rewards and delights the patient eye. Seasons, light and weather are all here, distilled through a northern romantic sensibility into beautiful paintings, crafted from simple materials transformed.
Passionate about paint, mark making and colour, Anna Somerville works intuitively imagining expressive, painterly scrapes that conjure up hazy memories of places that she has visited. Layers of thick impasto paint, fine detail glazes, scratched, worked back, scrubbed out and scribbled over canvas, linen and paper, she creates open expanses of space and light in her compositions, allowing the viewer to delve between the layers of paint and reflect on their own memories.
