Autumn - A collection of new paintings by John Lendis

Gallery Opening: Saturday 19th October 2024, 3pm

Please join us for a glass of sparkling wine with John to celebrate the unveiling of this new collection, and to enjoy his other worldly interpretaion of our local landscape. 

Here, a small group of paintings and drawings worked on over the last year, reflecting the Cotswolds landscape. The landscape I have been immersed in for the last 10 years or so.

Thematically the works portray this unique landscape although they are driven largely by an emotional response rather than a simple copy.  It is emotion and intuition that transforms the initial image during the process of painting, allowing the image to emerge naturally out of the painting rather than being imposed from without.

I naturally paint and draw in whatever ‘style’ happens to occur to me at the time.  I spent many years studying painting techniques but I have found that when I combine the looseness and immediacy of mark making with a more controlled, restrictive method of working I come closest to achieving my goals.

The works reflect my interest in setting up multiple visual spaces on a single canvas in order to blur and divide time and space, to collapse and collide different perspectives. Elements in the paintings are allowed to exist side by side in different time and space, a space where pictorial combinations such as the use of perspective along side a more‘medieval’ flat pictorial space can occur.  Such juxtapositions can deny the viewpoint of the observer in contrast to a more classical perspective which, while being effective in rendering landscape, somehow tends to ‘freeze’ a viewer to a single point in time and space .

The 2 drawings in the exhibition are of the panther, now a proven resident of this area. They're part of a series of works concerning this elusive and fascinating creature. Simple drawings, in ink and acrylic, they give me the opportunity of using those beautiful blacks whilst succeeding in achieving an emotional impact that is sometimes more than my paintings can achieve.  This was something I did unconsciously , often not really knowing why except that I found it pleasing.

To account for an experience of looking, a painting should deeply involve an observer.

John Lendis, October 2024