26th MARCH - 17th APRIL 2010

PAINTINGS  &  PRINTS

Carry Akroyd SWLA

Andrew Haslen SWLA

Nik Pollard SWLA

Sue Shields

Anna Sweeten

CARRY AKROYD

Painter and printmaker Carry Akroyd has lived most of her life in rural East Northamptonshire. Her interest in the landscape draws on many levels of fascination; mainly history, but also geology, botany and wildlife. She is drawn to the nature of the unlabelled countryside trying to survive alongside agribusiness.

Carry explores whichever area is of current interest to her, accumulating sketches and visual notes which later, in the studio, are distilled into the final image.

Carry enjoys working in different media. A subject will sometimes demand to be treated in a certain way or go through many processes. Her use of colour is instinctive.

Over the last eight years Carry has produced a series of images relating to the work of the ‘Peasant Poet', John Clare. Recently she was commissioned by the John Clare Society to illustrate a new paperback selection of his poems, ‘The Wood is Sweet', for which she made over fifty linocuts.

ANDREW HASLEN

Andrew Haslen was born 1953 and elected member of the Society of Wildlife Artists in 1988.

He won the R.S.N.C. 'Natural World' Art Award in 1992 and 1997, and the R.S.P.B. Art Award 1996 and 1999.

Andrew has been selected three times to exhibit at the Leigh Yawkey Art Museum in Wisconsin, USA.

NIK POLLARD

Nik Pollard graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1998, where he gained a post graduate degree in Natural History Illustration. Since then he has become an established painter and printmaker of the natural world and has received awards for his work. As a result he has been invited on national and international expeditions and projects; where it has been the role of the artist to record and interpret the landscape and nature of areas that are under threat, to communicate their importance both locally and globally.

The subtle interrelation of landscape and nature is the focus of Nik's work. Composing paintings with a selective eye, he hopes to portray a sense of place by exploring the rhythms of the subject.

Nik's work has been included in a number of publications and he has written and illustrated children's picture books. He is currently Artist in Residence at Marlborough College.

SUE SHIELDS

Sue Shields is a painter and print maker, captivated by the landscape, it's history and folklore. Her work often depicts more than one view with an emphasis on shape and pattern.

"The layers and stories of our countryside, are an inspiration for me and sometimes narrative creeps it's way in too. I want to help preserve our tradition of story telling which is an integral part of our social history but ultimately the tales are foils to the line and pattern within the landscape."

- Sue Shields

Sue currently lives in Peterborough with her husband and children.

ANNA SWEETEN

Anna is a realist landscape painter working primarily in egg tempera. Living in her native eastern England, Anna maintains her studio at her home near Cambridge. Attending two art schools in the 1960s, her talent for realist painting was actively discouraged. Abstraction was the orthodoxy of the time, and the fundamental skills of drawing and painting were not valued. Therefore, she describes herself as self-taught.

The greater part of Anna's work features vernacular buildings in their landscape. After working in the United States, principally in New England and the northern Midwest, her work has been influenced by a particular American tradition of austere landscapes painted with a restricted palette. This vision informs her landscapes of eastern England and the northern Scottish Isles.

Anna works with painting techniques dating back to the 14th century; mixing her own paints with egg yolk, ground pigments and distilled water. Occasional works in oils and acrylics show a freer expression, but the same subtlety of palette and clarity of composition that distinguish all Anna Sweeten's paintings.