Fragments of Time

Having painted alongside one another for fourteen years from Shetland to the Isles of Scilly, sharing a need to be in wild places and out in wild elemental weather, Margaret Deans, Christine Linfield and Anne Scarratt are preparing for their fourth group exhibition at Harbour House.

Each artist follows a personal creative path in response to landscape and memory, and their paintings, when hung together at exhibition, show many connections and common threads.

Margaret Deans' work in oils and mixed media comes from a primary response to landscape and to the weather that illuminates or obscures its features: the line of a hill, a fall of light, the juxtaposition of striking colours. Working out of doors in the elements is important to Margaret, before moving into her Cornish beach studio to develop a more multi-layered response to wild landscape and seascape involving memory, poetry and music.

Christine Linfield lives and works on Dartmoor, her inspiration coming from the land and the sea, and their constantly shifting weather patterns. Walking and being in the landscape in fair or foul weather is an integral part of her painting process. Much of Christine's work is concerned with an embodied response to the elements: slowing things down, capturing moments, glimpses of landscape – fleeting clouds, light across the moor, the rawness of the weather. Christine's smaller landscapes are painted on panels outdoors, 'fragments of time' in themselves. Working intuitively on larger studio landscapes, the painting integrates the fragments recalled through sketches as well as memory and gathered finds.

Anne Scarratt lives in the South Hams, in a gentle landscape far removed from the wild places of Dartmoor and the rugged coasts of Cornwall. The concept of 'fragments of time' is leading her to re-evaluate what and how she paints. Memories of landscape, sketched in some detail, can acquire a dreamlike quality when brought to the present to be painted, transmuting the colour to monochrome at times. Elusive recollections felt when attempting to portray some image in order to convince others of particular atmospheres, are with difficulty forced to the surface. It becomes a jigsaw where Anne is the only person who can hope to place the pieces together, however imperfectly, to create the original.

www.margaretdeans.co.uk
www.christinelinfield.com

For more information visit http://www.harbourhouse.org.uk/gallery-fragmentsoftime14.html