Seizing the Moment

Margaret Deans, Christine Linfield and Anne Scarratt present their third joint exhibition at Harbour House. Sharing a love of wild, less-frequented places, they have painted together for twelve years in Devon, Cornwall and Scilly, and have just returned from their second visit to Shetland.

Seizing the Moment includes paintings produced in response to these varied landscapes, unified by an ongoing three-way artistic dialogue and a sheer love of paint.

Margaret Deans lives and paints on the the Cornish coast, with its unpredictable weather and changeable light, 'enjoying the sudden shifts of light that illuminate the land, the dark sky which enhances the colours of land and sea, the clarity of an early morning frosty sun and the rarity value of days when I can work outside.'
Margaret's work begins on site, in direct response to the landscape and with the elements playing their part, and is completed on site or is revisited in the studio. She works primarily in mixed media, focusing on abstract shapes and colour.

Christine Linfield lives and works on Dartmoor, her inspiration coming from the land, the sea and constantly shifting weather patterns.
'Whenever possible I work on site, and walking in the landscape is an integral part of the process of making paintings. Increasingly I sense the need and the power of the process of returning to familiar places. Much of my work is concerned with an embodied response to the elements, looking, remembering - the wind in the face, the soft bogginess of the moor - captured moments distilled and put down in paint, seizing the fleeting moments, capturing lines of light, a break in the cloud that is there one minute and gone the next.'
Christine's smaller landscapes are painted on panels outdoors, and the larger ones on canvas or board in the studio, using the smaller paintings, the sketches, and the memory as reference.

For Anne Scarratt, Seizing the Moment means taking whatever the weather has to offer and using it to transmit her feelings into paint. A large section of the paintings is inspired by a period of exceptionally damp and gloomy winter weather.
'I took a small sketchbook around the deserted lanes of our village, trying to look anew at the familiar landscapes and vistas. Trees, gateways and fields were scarcely visible at times, and new colours, mostly mixed on the canvas, were required to render the feeling of enclosure created by the damp atmosphere. From this beginning I continued in the clearing weather: it became something of a quest to seek out more overlooked places which offered an opportunity of depicting these unspoilt Devon lanes.'

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

For more information visit http://www.harbourhouse.org.uk/gallery-ascarrattclinfieldmdeans13.html