New paintings by Stewart Edmondson
STEWART EDMONDSON
New Paintings
Opening Saturday 24 February 6-8 p.m.
Come and join us at the gallery on Saturday evening for our first opening of 2024.
Stewart Edmondson and ceramicist Adam Buick will be in attendance from 6 – 8 p.m.
Images of work in the show can be viewed online (please click on the image above) and are now available to buy. To purchase please call the gallery.
Stewart, like the ceramicist Adam Buick who he is showing alongside, is someone with a great sense of place in his work. Where most people would be tempted to seek warmth in the face of a Dartmoor winter, Stewart Edmondson welcomes the wild weather that sweeps over the moors, tors and river valleys that surround his Devon home. He is a ‘wild swimmer’ (even in winter – words that chill the bones!!). The majority of his work is done in situ, at the mercy of the elements, with only the occasional use of a makeshift tent for protection.
‘It’s usually pretty fast and dynamic – a way of responding to the often rapidly changing light and conditions of painting outside. Using as much paint as I do the wind and rain may move it around when you throw it on to the paper. It can be harsh out there, but I love it. My studio is just a place for considering finished work and tidying it up. It is fantastic working outside – you’re not totally in control because of the weather and the raw inspiration of the place.
I cannot help but think of this poem of place, especially as Tony and Brenda, fellow natives (to Coleridge) of Ottery St.Mary, visted the gallery yesterday purely by coincidence.
Sonnet: To the River Otter by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
‘Dear native Brook! wild Streamlet of the West!
How many various-fated years have past,
What happy and what mournful hours, since last
I skimm’d the smooth thin stone along thy breast,
Numbering its light leaps! yet so deep imprest
Sink the sweet scenes of childhood, that mine eyes
I never shut amid the sunny ray,
But straight with all their tints thy waters rise,
Thy crossing plank, thy marge with willows grey,
And bedded sand that vein’d with various dyes
Gleam’d through thy bright transparence! On my way,
Visions of Childhood! oft have ye beguil’d
Lone manhood’s cares, yet waking fondest sighs:
Ah! that once more I were a careless Child!’
From ‘What the Thunder Said’ by T. S. Eliot (Wasteland)
‘What is that sound high in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal’
And finally….I wanted to quote more of this wonderful poem which can be found in the collection ‘The Human Chain’. It is long so this is a snippet, but it encapsulates the sense that artists, like Adam or Stewart (or Seamus), are offering the part of the world they are intimate with through their work…..
From ‘A Herbal’ by Seamus heaney (After Guillevic’s “Herbier de Bretagne”)
Please click on the images above to view all of Stewart’s work, now on display in the gallery.
Any questions, queries, or for further information please phone or email.
We can take payment by phone and we ship worldwide.
We are open 10-5 Monday to Saturday. Join us tomorrow evening 6-8 p.m. to meet the artists.
Thank you for reading.
Aidan.