In Search of the Perfect Hill - Exhibition
An Artistic Journeythrough the Marches with new work by Helen Arthur, Adrienne Craddock, Richard Gilbert, Andy Johnson, Bridget MacDonald and Kathryn Moore.
Opening on the weekend of Saturday 28th & Sunday 29th October, 10.00 - 5.00pm.
CLOSED Monday 30th & Tuesday 31st October
Re-opening from Wednesday 1st November until Saturday 4th November inclusive, daily from 10.00 - 5.00pm
Please note there is a Record Fair being held on Sunday 5th November so the exhibition will close at 5.00pm on Saturday 4th November.
Here’s a little more about each artist:
Adrienne Craddock – About Hays’ Bluff (Penybegwn)
The Black Mountains were a familiar presence throughout my childhood. When my much older brother came back on home visits from university (in the 1970’s), it was a special treat to go for a trip out to the hills and walk to Hay Bluff and the surrounds. This wild place provided such an exciting experience, with the climb upwards and the reward at the top - the view of the land stretched out before you. In addition, there was always a chance to see the wild Welsh mountain ponies in varying colours, so much part of this landscape. Often, we would find scattered bones of ponies or sheep, a reminder that life on the hill was tough with cold and unforgiving weather to contend with.
It is only relatively recently that my work has been concerned with landscape. I am now a little obsessed by the view of Hay Bluff, which I realise is visible from all around the County. Its presence is a comfort, its height protecting and amplifying the low, level plain of Herefordshire. Its appearance changes constantly, with the light, the time of day, the weather, and the season.
Sometimes kind and sometimes brooding, it is a very ‘moody’ hill.
I have made many monochrome ink and wash sketches of the bluff, familiarising myself with its contours. These unique coloured monotypes have developed from the studies, using rollers, brushes and the printing press. I am trying to capture the essence of the hill, perhaps the fleeting glimpse of it we may have as we travel past or the way that the light, clouds and weather affect it as we stop and stare.
Biography
Adrienne was born and brought up in Herefordshire. Her creative path took her North to Manchester where she gained a Printmaking MA. She taught and ran workshops for many years around North West schools and colleges including Manchester Foundation course, University of Central Lancashire, and Stonyhurst College as well as being employed by Wigan Education Authority’s groundbreaking, Artists in Schools scheme. Her work is widely exhibited and included in several collections. She recently coordinated the Arts Council funded project Mappa Marches touring exhibition 2022/23
Andy Johnson – About Hergest Ridge, north-west Herefordshire
Hergest Ridge is a long whaleback of a hill that stands partly in England and partly in Wales, and along its spine runs Offa’s Dyke path (though the course of the dyke itself lies further east). It is a popular walking destination, its wide paths shrugging off the rain in wet seasons to provide a springy green turf throughout the year. Kington, with its pubs and cafes, at one end, and the pub at Gladestry at the other, welcome thirsty walkers.
Due to its length and relatively flat profile it is a difficult hill to see - and paint -in its entirety, but its many features provide ample subject matter. In all its variety it is a perfect hill to explore on foot or in the mind's eye. Depending on the season and the weather, you may find its paths and tracks raked by showers, dusted with snow, enveloped in mist or washed in sunlight.
Among the details I have enjoyed painting are individual trees near the crest of the ridge that manage to survive the weather’s battering; exotic trees sheltering in the arboretum at Hergest Croft; a group of Monkey Puzzles standing tall at the top of the ridge; shallow pools that form in the hollows of the hill; a pond in the rhododendron wood on its south-eastern flank; the surprising sweep of the Victorian racecourse. Then there is the Whetstone, a glacial erratic about which much folklore has been woven; rolls of bracken baled in late autumn; piles of boulders made when the ground was cleared in the distant past; and machinery left to rust gently amongst the vegetation.
Biography
Andy has only recently picked up his paint brushes again after a 40-year gap. In this interval he founded and ran Logaston Press, which published books about the history, art and culture of the the central Marches. Now re-establishing his link with oil paints, he has concentrated on works depicting his long distance walks and caminos in Europe together with the trees and countryside near where he lives in north-west Herefordshire. He has twice opened his studio as an exhibition space at h.Art.
Bridget MacDonald – About Worcester Beacon
My perfect hill is the Worcestershire Beacon, the highest point of the Malvern Hills and visible from all around. I have made drawings and paintings in which the Beacon is viewed at close quarters and sometimes glimpsed in the far distance. It is always present but is not always the focus of attention.
The large charcoal drawing ‘The Beautiful View’ is the Beacon as seen from the long hill, which climbs up from Ledbury to the British Camp. Long before I came to live in Malvern, I used sometimes to pass by on this road. I always looked out for this glimpse of an idyllic pastoral landscape, which I only saw from the car. For this project, I stopped and took my sketchbook across the road to a place where I could see the complete panoramic view spread out before me.
We have land and an orchard on the other side of the hill from where we live in Great Malvern. ‘Blue Spruce’ and ‘Elder’ are views from there towards the Western slopes of North Hill and the Beacon.
The small ink drawings are from various viewpoints, including the silhouette of the hills when coming home across the Severn from the M5.
Biography
Bridget Macdonald is based in Malvern and has had many solo exhibitions in private and public spaces, including Worcester City Art Gallery, Wolverhampton Art Gallery, Derby Art Gallery and Quay Arts on the Isle of Wight. Her work is featured in museum collections and at the House of Lords in London. Art First London represents Bridget.
Helen Arthur - About the Black Hill on the Welsh Border
You never see the Black Hill (Crib-y-Garth in Welsh) look the same on any two days. The hill is often lit up in a variety of colours, reflecting the season and weather – shifting clouds and light, rain, frost or a shroud of mist. On late summer evenings, Black Hill really does seem to turn a violet-blue-black. On the other hand, is that just my imagination?
Mostly, we view the hill from a distance: either as a brooding compact animal form, hence‘Cat’s Back’ as a byname, when driving north to south; or as a striking peak, when approached along the Olchon Valley towards Hay.
I doubt that I am alone in feeling a constant visual transformation in any hill. Nonetheless, you have an intensely intimate experience when trying to capture that mutability in paint.
So how to represent the ‘essence’ of the Black Hill?
My first approach was to create a seasonal mini-series of a single aerial view, noting how the exposed northerly ridge catches first light, which shifts with the sun.
One crisp winter morning, the bracken-covered hill appeared to pulsate a fiery orange-pink, while the valley below lay in blue shadow. This became a larger painting in my group and contrasting colours that characterized all my work for the Perfect Hill project.
Biography
Helen Arthur lives and works in Longtown, just over the border from Wales and teaches printmaking in a converted studio-annexe to her stone-built farmhouse home. She has been selected exhibitions at for the Royal Cambrian Open, the Oriel Cric Open and at Spring Gallery, Cheltenham. Helen has opened her studio as Herefordshire Art Week and often holds printmaking workshops at The Rodd. She is co-curator and digital producer of the Mappa Marches touring exhibition after a successful bid for Arts Council England funding granted in June 2020.
Kathryn Moore - About Hanter Hill
Like clothing, it is shaped by what lays beneath. The mantle of vegetation covering Hanter Hill appears in two distinct bands – bracken and gorse – demonstrating the differences in rock types below the soil’s surface. Hanter Hill is comprised of igneous rock dating to Pre-Cambrian period 720 million years old, making it one of the oldest hills within the southern basement of mainland Britain.
Hanter Hill possesses an extraordinary energy. Its iconic compact, conical form nestled secure in the crook of Hergest Ridge, stands independently, stoically looking upon the Radnorshire hills.
Working in collage is a tactile process of ‘building the structure’ of the landscape – the placement of pieces positioned to evoke form. Colour is emotive; temperature, tone and combinations represent times of day, seasons and sensations.
Lines in my paintings serve in four ways. Initial ‘directional’ lines are scored across the painting as an expression of weather direction. They conduct energy across the surface acting as a conduit of atmosphere experienced whilst walking through that space. ‘Structural’ lines are placed thus describing the framework of the land. ‘Connective’ lines link distances with foreground; the use of maps contributes to an understanding of the landscape. Finally, ‘descriptive’ lines enhance mark making set down in paint, emphasizing detail and defining focus.
Biography
Kathryn specialised in Fine Art painting at University of the South West of England following her time travelling abroad with her sketchbooks. Whilst living in East Anglia she was instrumental in founding the Peterborough Artists' Open Studios in 2000, and View 5 exhibitions group. Kathryn held two major solo shows 'Travelling Light - an Australian Experience' (2016) and 'Colour Ways - Journeys Across Continents' (2019) in Northamptonshire. Since moving to Herefordshire, Kathryn has continued to exhibit, most recently 'A celebration of our landscape and woodlands' at the The Found Gallery in Brecon. She also runs a successful studio, the ‘Kat and Fiddle’ in Kington High Street
Richard Gilbert – about Herefordshire Beacon
A lofty hill at 338m, the Beacon is the second highest of the Malvern Hills. It might conceivably be ‘the most English spot in all of England’ for it certainly offers ‘one of the goodliest vistas’. It is indeed a hill for all seasons and all manner of weathers, perhaps best appreciated as Cecil Day-Lewis wrote on the ‘meadowsweetness of high summer days’ which evokes the strains of Elgar’s ‘English Air’. However, it is also an irresistibly fine winter walk. The hill has an intriguing form as if it was designed to be walked around more than over. In its rude and monumental shape, the Beacon sometimes seems transfigured, more a vast work of Land Art than a hill, its massiveness as WH Auden intimated, truly ‘a fathom of earth, alive in air’. Whatever the season, the Beacon’s labyrinthine paths offer countless vistas where you can be a part of that conversation of the elements, the earth and the sky.
The tracks here go back to prehistory. If you want to walk with spirits, the Beacon on a foggy day in winter can seem a place removed in time populated by the ghosts of the Dobunni tribe who resisted the Romans hereabouts. Perhaps for Ancient Britons the hill was a threshold to the sky gods or deities of the underworld, who knows! Today it remains poised, a city hanging in the air between the plains of the Midlands and the Marchlands westward to Wales. From the citadel on a clear winter day, you can see nine counties. Here was relayed the news of the Armada and on the Queen's Platinum Jubilee in 2022 one could spot over sixty beacons.
This new work is a continuation of the project that started in 2022. Initially I was searching for an understanding of how to present the bare ‘hilliness’, Malvern means ‘bare hill’. It was not so much to locate ideal viewpoints but to consider how to represent the energies in the landscape, even with thawing snow, its patterns revealed entire new aspects. What is so special about this hill? Perhaps it comes down to headspace. When I am anywhere else, it is the kind of place where I would often like to be. And when I am there, I do not feel the need to be anywhere else. Here I can take a line for walk, the meandering path of the pencil line will happily follow the logic of the landscape, exploring the contours of the hill. I find that painting landscapes might almost be likened to slow walking; negotiating a way forward, repeatedly going over and over the same ground to the point where one is standing still so attempting to arrest an image of the beautiful little awkwardness of our landscape.
Biography
Richard studied at Falmouth and Wimbledon Art Schools and an MA at Chelsea School of Art and an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Based in Herefordshire, his paintings focus upon the depiction of landscape. Recent projects include ‘Common Ground’ about Hereford’s landscape and ‘Round the Year from Stonewall Hill’ responding to the work of Mary Rennell, have been exhibited at Hereford Museum and Art Gallery. He organised the exhibition ‘Six Artists in Search of a Perfect Hill’ based on the landscape of the Marches at Ludlow Assembly Rooms in 2022. In 2022, he was commissioned by Apples and People to create an online artwork about orchards in Herefordshire, which can be viewed at https://applesandpeople.org.uk/pissarro/ .
In 2023, he has had work at the Thelma Hubert Gallery in Honiton in a group exhibition entitled ‘Paradise Regained’ revisiting landscape depicted by the Camden Town School. He also held a joint show ‘Paths and Tracks’ at Spring Cheltenham celebrating the footpath. Richard has work in public and private collections in the UK and abroad.
