Contemporary Impressionism Continues

A SARAH WIMPERIS PREVIEW...
With a lively exhibition featuring John Raynes, Simon Stooks and Alasdair Lindsay.  Three contemporary impressionists, very different styles but all three locked into the tradition of Impressionism, they take the world around them and make it their own, offering up a personal vision of what is there.
Simon Stooks paintings, with their energetic and painterly personality being calmed down by a soft and gentle palette.  They sit on the walls like very excited children bursting to tell you something very, very important.

There are fields, baking dry underneath a Provencal sun, of twisted vines, or overblown sunflowers, with earth colours that have grabbed the sky and kissed it into the ground.  Wonderfully calm beach scenes, the hubbub of summer holiday makers lost amongst the bleached out colours of midday. John Raynes brings us back to Cornwall with his masterful handling of line and colour, he is the best artist I know for capturing the shadows of boats in water. 

His boats float, the water in the harbours is barely contained by the pictures frame.  Light floods in and out of his paintings, waves crash and spume and with each painting you can smell the iodine fresh scent of the sea.

Alasdair Lindsay bursts into the back of the gallery with his paintings shouting "I was there and this is what I saw"  The colours are vibrant and funny and glorious.  He seems to be able to look and look and pull out of a landscape all of the elements that were important.  A post here a rooftop there, a colour reflected in a stone and the hint of a well known landmark.

As well as the colourful smaller paintings there is a truly magnificent painting of Falmouth at night, it is beautiful, the colours are calm and stunning and the little flicks of light on the boats chink like the song of rigging lines against masts that is part of Falmouth's soundtrack.

 The exhibition is a good one, go and have a look for yourself, it officially opens on Saturday 9th July and continues until Wednesday 20th.  There are catalogue paintings available to purchase now and further exhibition paintings should be on line by today.