In The Mind’s Eye January – March 2021

In the mind’s eye, memory and imagination hold sway. We perceive the world through the cipher of our human senses, via the changing direction and nature of our attention, in minds that are influenced by moods, memories and sensations. Everything, you might deduce, is unreliable and individual. However, good artists are able to reach our minds’ eyes directly, startling us with a common perception, a common humanity. The three artists in this exhibition all paint landscape in very different ways, each reaching for different areas of perception.

David Atkins Mist and Rain Ringstead Bay oil on board 61 x 92 cm £4,250 framed.

David Atkins works entirely outdoors, looking at his subject matter and responding with paint, which he enjoys, and makes us enjoy, in its physicality as much as its representational value. He works in oil which may be thin and running or thick impasto. The more abstracted his work becomes, the freer it is. The works in this show are some of the finest paintings his career so far. They were painted during the summer lockdown, local to Dorset, and freed from the constraints of time and commitment. In painting the sea and sky David Atkins’s heroes are Turner and Constable whose ground-breaking works still seem astonishingly contemporary.

Rachel Fenner Dorset Moonlit River Valley 36 x 48 cm gouache on paper £900 framed.

Rachel Fenner also made her paintings during lockdown. Rachel was the first environmental sculptor in the seventies and eighties, working for councils all over Britain making public artworks that related to the natural world. She is and always has been deeply concerned with the environment. Many of the works in this show are concerned with ancient original woodland, of which very little remains in Britain, but which comes to us in these paintings as a powerful and precious resource. Rachel’s way of painting relates to the Modern British painters pre and post WWII, with elements of Paul Nash and Graham Sutherland coming through in a voice that is nevertheless absolutely her own.

Paul Jones Clear View 50 x 75 cm acrylic and mixed media on board £1,100 framed.

Paul Jones’s landscapes are abstracted, filtered by the eye and hand of the artist, transformed into something textured, simplified and quietly beautiful. He has built up a unique language of form, colour and texture to explore the complexities of coastline, geology and landscape. Paul’s technique of burning and stressing his paint creates exceptional textures which with the partially visible layers of colour give a strong sense of geology and history. Paul Jones was a scholarship student at Bath Academy of Art, Corsham, where Adrian Heath, Robyn Denny and Howard Hodgkin were his tutors. He has been painting professionally for forty years exploring the margins of sea and land, where geological time, memory and the moment conflate.

View each artist’s work by following the links on their name at the top of the page.

David Atkins

Rachel Fenner ARCA

Paul Jones

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