Frances Hatch ARWS

Showing now in Group Show of leading Dorset artists

18 May – 14 July 2024

Frances Hatch is acclaimed for her radical and innovative approach to landscape painting. Each of her pictures is a moment of time in a particular place. Materials from that place will be included in the picture, which is made there and then, every element reflecting what she found when she was there.

A selection of Frances Hatch’s work is showing now. Work not in the current show can be viewed by appointment or bought online. Please phone us on 44 (0)1308 459511 or email gallery@sladersyard.co.uk with any enquiries. All paintings are presented framed and are available to buy now.

AVAILABLE PAINTINGS

SHOWING NOW

Frances Hatch ARWS grew up on Fenland at the edge of The Wash. Its black earth and Siberian winds shaped the fundamentals of her practice. Her introduction to the tradition of plein air painting was via a tin box of watercolours dating from the 1940s unearthed from a cupboard at home.Ungenerous and reluctant to yield, they offered a means to respond to experiences that were marvellous to her in her solitary meanderings. Marvels like a willow flaring orange against a storm sky or Jack Frost turning up in wet paint – mundane miracles that stopped her in her tracks, literally, and still do.

She continues to seek out time ‘in nature’, preferring to work under the bowl of sky rather than the confinement of a roof. Nowadays, her way of being with the land is multi-sensory and whole-bodied – hands-on and messy. Her paintings emerge as teamworks and containers of shared experience.

surrender attachment to outcome
relinquish control
& then the magic can begin…

The Jurassic Coast lies within easy reach of Frances’ Portland studio. Its varied geology provides earths that become her pigments. The paintings weave together earths indigenous to each place, with traces of weather, season, and tide as they present with gouache, acrylic, or watercolour paint. Elected Associate of The Royal Watercolour Society in 2022.

Training:
C.C.A.T. (Cambridge) Foundation Course 1973-74
Aberystwyth University College of Wales – Hons degree in French and Visual Art 1974-78
Auditrice Libre, Ecole des Beaux Arts, Nantes 1976
Goldsmiths’ College, A.T.C. 1978-79
Wimbledon College of Art: Postgraduate- MA Printmaking 1986-89

Frances was a senior tutor at West Dean College from 1995 – 2022. In 2005 a Research Bursary from DVA/ExLab supported her study of the history and craft of making and consolidating pigments. She has published a number of books about her projects and has also contributed to a number of other books both as an illustrator and practitioner.

Frances has exhibited widely throughout the UK including repeatedly in highly regarded competitive London group exhibitions including the Lynn Painter-Stainers Prize, the Works on Paper Fair, The Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours (RI), the Ing Discerning Eye Exhibition at the Mall Galleries, and the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.

In 2016, Frances was awarded the Shenzhen International Watercolour Biennial Prize at the RI exhibition at the Mall Galleries. This is ‘an award to encourage innovation and experimentation in contemporary watermedia.’

In 2020 she curated a show of her paintings with ceramics by world-class potters entitled The Common Ground at the Crafts Study Centre, University College for the Arts, Farnham. She was elected Associate to the Royal Watercolour Society in 2022 (ARWS). Frances has shown regularly at Sladers Yard since 2015.