Be still and know that I am here : Louise Sturgis

The Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery presents Be still and know that I am here, an exhibition of paintings by Louise Sturgis.

’The paintings in this show are about my return to a landscape that I have felt rooted in and inspired by all my life. They are an attempt to distill the physical, emotional and spiritual experience of being in a landscape that I have loved and carried in me as I have lived and worked and painted elsewhere... It was this landscape that inspired me to be an artist.’

The landscape to which Sturgis has returned is the Kentmere valley in the Lake District. It is still a remote place, of dry-stone walls, of rugged fells, of working hill-farmers and white-washed farmhouses. It is a landscape which Sturgis has known, and been part of, all her life.

’This is the place where I first experienced the numinous beauty of the world and recognised that this beauty comes to us as much through the crackling roughness of the lichen on a stone, the damp smell of a wooden gate or the mournful sound of the ewes bleating for their lambs at dusk, as from the golden light and the majestic fells.’

Sturgis, in her deep engagement with the land and its life, combined her art-studies with learning how to tend the sheep that - over the centuries - have done so much to create and mould this landscape. She learnt the skills of shepherding here; and went on to work as a shepherd in Iceland, Scotland, and west Cumbria.