View the Exhibition

December sees the opening of Art Space Gallery’s exhibition of winter landscape paintings that is based on "Winterreise"**
the song cycle by Schubert which describes an emotional, rather than a literal, journey. Each of the artists selected deal with the landscape in a different way, but all of them mirror the central preoccupation of the "Winterreise" - that is the idea of wandering and of the time - in the way that the landscape is used to explore their experiences and emotions.

Craigie Aitchison and Andrzej Jackowski have an evident love of landscape but their work is not concerned with topography. Here the paintings deal with imaginary landscapes that allow them to explore an inner emotional life.

Peter Archer paints the coastline and the gentle rolling countryside of the Tamar valley in Cornwall, but his apparently pastoral images also remind us that the land has been staked out and exploited. Farm buildings, deserted machinery, tin-mine chimneys and railway embankments all describe the rather uneasy co-existence between nature and man. David Tress’s highly physical paintings are the result of a process that brings memory, knowledge and imagination together to recreate the sensation of remembered places of Pembrokeshire.

Julian Cooper , Derek Hyatt, and George Rowlett go out into the countryside to work and each has that rare ability to look at landscape and see both its material reality and its spiritual potential. Cooper is a painter of mountains, ice and rock. Hyatt’s interest is the ancient terrain of the Yorkshire Moors where aspects of topography, weather and geology are fused with symbols inspired by the regions mythologies and archaeology to evoke the spirit of the place. Rowlett offers an expressionist handling of the idiosyncratic nuances of light across the Kentish Downs.

The paintings selected for this exhibition serve to remind us that the serious contemporary painter, like the hero of the "Winterreise", is on a journey that can be painful and enlightening, and through these landscapes we catch a glimpse of how each artist is examining the nature of the world in which he lives and his relationship to it.

** Schubert composed this cycle of 24 songs, [based on Wilhelm Müller's cycle of poems: "Poems from the posthumous papers of an itenerant horn player"] during 1827-8 shortly before his death. The cycle begins with a song of wandering: "Gute Nacht" , the third sun grows pale in the penultimate song "Die Nebensonnen" , and the "Winterreise" ends in the despair and emptiness of the "Leiermann" .

Titles of the songs, translated:

1. Good Night 2. The Weather Vane 3. Frozen Tears 4. Congealing 5. The Lime Tree 6. Water Torrents 7. On the River 8. Looking Back 9. Will-o'-the Wisp 10. Rest 11. Dream of Spring 12. Loneliness

13. The Post 14. The Old Head 15. The Crow 16. Last Hope 17. In the Village 18. Stormy Morning 19. Deception 20. The Signpost 21. The Inn 22. Courage 23. The Other Suns 24. The Organ Grinder