8 Jan - 12 March 2022

The series of paintings and drawings is the result of work carried out on location and in the studio during recent restrictions. Everything begins with drawing, and remembering. They begin as an immediate response to a particular landscape but may transform with continual reworking and re-examining to the extent that topographical concerns become secondary, and a more personal visceral response is allowed to develop.

Texture and surface are important to me, the physical aspect of paint, how it handles and continues to surprise with its ability to conjure the vast from the smallest of marks and gestures.

It can express the unsayable. 

Magritte said of his Empire of Light series of paintings that ‘The landscape suggests night and the skyscape day. This evocation of night and day seems to me to have the power to surprise and delight us. I call this power: poetry’

I think this notion of ‘poetry’ has underpinned my recent approach to painting, the notion that the intangible can be suggested through the juxtaposition of form, colour and line. An idea of landscape, reimagined and remembered to convey feeling and a sense of a psychological space.

You can view the work featured in the exhibition here.

Listen to Gareth in conversation with Sally Moss, discussing his varied career and exhibition Tir Cof at Oriel Myrddin Gallery.

Featured Maker: Helena Emmans

Helena’s work offers up a maker’s interpretation on the concept of landscape art and the way we choose to depict it. The aim of Helena’s work is to portray the feeling of Skye through an intuitive response to the changing landscape and its colours, watching the changing days and seasons. Rhythms, tides, seasons and shorelines infuse her work. Being within the landscape, feeling the elements while seeing the surroundings change, produces the sense of that moment in all her work.