George Rowlett, born in Troon on the West Coast of Scotland in 1941, attended Camberwell School of Art and the Royal Academy Schools. For over a decade now his powerfullandscape images with their energetic brushwork and expressive colour have made frequent and welcome appearances in one-man and mixed exhibitions at Art Space Gallery.

Working directly from the subject, the surface of his canvases are built up often with extraordinary speed to a rich and succulent impasto where colour and surface combine to convey atmosphere, light and mass. Rowlett delights in the properties of thick paint and has developed his own very personal visual language to observe and to record the two places where he lives and works: the Thames at Rotherhithe and the coastal area of East Kent. Also included in the exhibition will be paintings from two totally new subjects; the ancient Walmer Yew which stands in the churchyard adjacent to his studio, and Chatham Historic Dockyards, where a commission to paint the view looking over the Medway from Strood yielded an additional five paintings.

In his essay for the catalogue that accompanies the exhibition Mark Glazebrook writes:

… Above all … George Rowlett has created a great series of landscapes. He has carved out his own modest but distinct place in the evolution of landscape painting. Viewed from very close, the images in Rowlett's landscapes dissolve into swirling abstractions. His landscapes make their presence felt not only as lively, original and imaginative renderings of the busy Thames or the quiet cornfields, cliffs and churchyards of Kent, but also as weighty, tactile physical objects.

To mark the occasion of this exhibition Art Space Gallery has published a 24 page catalogue that contains 12 colour plates and an essay by Mark Glazebrook.
To order a copy please go to our publications page or E-mail us.