Wilderness: Group Show

 “We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.” – Henry David Thoreau

Holly Zandbergen’s paintings of New Zealand’s contours and edges are firmly rooted in the figurative tradition. And yet her confident mark-making, through impasto layering of oil paint, reveals the multiple workings of a human response. As unexpected veins of bright hues intermingle with a more organic palette, each mark on the canvas reveals a different momentum in Zandbergen's application. Her record of the physical world around her is a highly personalised vision – one that is changeable and multifaceted.

The Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery’s December exhibition explores different personal responses to landscape. Joining Zandbergen’s reflections on the wild, Laurence Jones will be represented by his studies of edgelands where man has left a distinct imprint. His focus on hyper-modern buildings results in richly-layered images combining elements of both artifice and reality.

Esther Nienhuis’ Saudade series draws upon direct emotional response to setting. Painting soft horizons through rain-drop covered windows, each work is suffused with a sense of longing and nostalgia for the occluded road ahead.  Dr. Phil Shaw will be represented by his new Truth in Black and White with Some Grey Areas, featuring titles such as ‘The Mountain of Truth’, ‘The Ocean of Truth’ and ‘The Truth About Global Warming’, all representing our appropriation of the natural world and desire to understand it.

More figurative appreciations of the natural world will be reflected in Roy Wright’s charcoal drawings of London parkland, joined by Sheila Clarkson’s pastel works of forest pools, where working in white on black, she picks out the light’s scintillations. Both revel in nature’s intricacy, the delicate balance of its structures.