Common Ground
David Brayne RWS
9 - 30 March 2013
&
Ruth Stage NEAC
hiltonfine art
Contents David Brayne
pages 4 - 27
Ruth Stage
pages 28 - 45
hiltonfine art
Hilton Fine Art, 5 Margaret’s Buildings, Bath BA1 2LP 01225 311311 info@hiltonfineart.com www.hiltonfineart.com
This show brings together two artists linked by the fact that they both make their own paints (David Brayne collects his own pigments which he uses with acrylic binders and Ruth Stage mixes the pigments with egg yolks) and use them to make landscapes in the lyrical tradition. David Brayne’s subject matter comes from a repertoire of favourite motifs and things seen in the landscape and home. Land and sea appear blended together in a gentle linear exchange where there are no shadows – all as if in a dream. He tenderly portrays women and men as they hold their fishing lines and nets, making improbable but graceful shapes. These are paintings that have a strong abstract sense of design and are poetically and formally beautiful. Ruth Stage has worked exclusively in the classical egg tempera tradition since leaving the Royal Academy in 1995. She has become a master at using its special qualities to produce paintings that have a strong sense of design and pattern and also a slightly otherworldly quality in the tradition of the English Romantic painters. There is a constant interplay between conventional perspectival depth and the pattern and handling flattening out the picture plane which gives the work a tension and decorative beauty.
Price range - £750 - £5,000 front cover image: (detail) Ruth Stage Dissolving Forms on Flooded Farmland egg tempera on gesso board 52 x 62cm back cover image: (detail) David Brayne Leaping Fish watercolour and pigment on paper 37 x 38cm
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David Brayne RWS Born in 1954 Studied at Nottingham School of Art, Gloucestershire College of Art and Exeter University. He was elected as a member of the Royal Watercolour Society in 2001 and has exhibited widely and been awarded a number of prizes, including first prize in the National Open Art Competition, 2004 and The Benton Prize at the ING Discerning Eye Exhibition at the Mall Galleries, London. ‘A childhood growing up in Lincolnshire in that strange and unique landscape of the Wash where land, water and sky seem, and indeed often are, virtually indistinguishable, would appear to have left a profound mark on David Brayne’s visual imagination. For, long since living in a comparatively landlocked part of rural Somerset and having followed a complex artistic path that has taken him via art school Minimalism, this is still essentially the landscape that has come to preoccupy him. Not topographically or descriptively of course, but in his poetic memory of the place and the way in which its characteristic indeterminacy of light and form has come to coincide with his own inward painterly concerns. Out of these elements he has found an artistic voice of quiet and subtle tenderness which, while it bears an affinity with that English tradition of humanistic landscape to be found in recent years in such artists as Richard Eurich and Sonia Lawson, also incorporates into itself more purely formal, even abstract, elements. These not only place his work within a more contemporary idiom but give it its simplicity and variety of form as well. Thus the shifting, ambiguous perspectives of his viewpoint and the warm harmonies of his colour often seem to be making us look up through the still surfaces of the water itself in what amounts, almost, to a mermaid’s eye view of a world above, no less diaphanous and watery. Nicholas Usherwood 4
Leaping Fish watercolour and pigment on paper 37 x 38cm 5
The Quay watercolour and pigment on paper 42 x 54cm
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The River and the Sea watercolour and pigment on paper 65 x 90cm
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Gold Fish watercolour and pigment on paper 90 x 65cm
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The Red Room watercolour and pigment on paper 56 x 46cm
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The Mill Sluice Gate watercolour and pigment on paper 46 x 60cm
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Sailing Boats watercolour and pigment on paper 83 x 103cm
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Shallow Draught watercolour and pigment on paper 63 x 75cm
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Coast Path watercolour and pigment on paper 25 x 38cm
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Plate of Lemons watercolour and pigment on paper 50 x 46cm
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The Orchid watercolour and pigment on paper 34 x 47cm
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West Prospect watercolour and pigment on paper 32 x 30cm
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Ruth Stage NEAC 1987 - 88 Cleveland College of Art and Design 1988 - 92 Newcastle University 1992 - 95 Royal Academy Schools Awards: 2013 1st Prize, Lynn Painter-Stainers Prize; 2003 Winner, Villiers David Prize 2001 Runner-up, Villiers David Prize 2000 Runner-up, Villiers David Prize 1996 Prize from M&G for best painter under 35, Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 1995 Nat-West Art Prize 1995 David Murray Scholarship 1994 British Institute Fund 1994 Tony Smith Landscape Award Memberships: 1999 Elected Member of the New English Art Club Selected Solo Exhibitions: 2003, 01, 99, 97 New Grafton Gallery 2002 “Light and the Landscape”, John Davies Gallery, Stow 2002 J.H.W. Fine Art at the Air Gallery 1999 Hiscox Art Cafe 1998 “Creative Exchange” A.T.Kearney, London with Leonard Rosoman, OBE, RA 1998 Samling Foundation, Windermere Selected Mixed Exhibitions: 2013 ‘Common Ground’ – David Brayne and Ruth Stage, 2012 New English Art Club, Hilton Fine Art, 2004 John Davies Gallery, Stow ‘99-’03, ‘93-’96 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 1994 - date New Grafton Gallery 2002 Royal Academy Friends’ Room, NEAC Members 2002 RAASA, Centro d’Art Modigliani, Florence 2002 2002 New Grafton at Art London ‘99-’02, ‘97 NEAC Annual Open Exhibition 1996 - 97 Cadogan Contemporary 1997 Royal Overseas League 1996 The Mall Galleries, 1996, 1995, 1998 Hunting Art Prize Exhibition
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Dissolving Forms on Flooded Farmland egg tempera on gesso board 52 x 62cm
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Figure on Cornish Beach egg tempera on gesso board 61 x 76cm
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Hedgerow, Charlbury egg tempera on gesso board 36 x 43cm
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Trees egg tempera on gesso board 36 x 43cm
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Isabella Plantation, Richmond Park egg tempera on gesso board 76 x 101cm
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Evening Light egg tempera on gesso board 31 x 36cm
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Isabella Plantation, Richmond Park II egg tempera on gesso board 24 x 34cm
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Mountain Pool, France egg tempera on gesso board 36 x 44cm
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Woodland Pathway egg tempera on gesso board 36 x 43cm
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hiltonfine art
Hilton Fine Art, 5 Margaret’s Buildings, Bath BA1 2LP 01225 311311 info@hiltonfineart.com www.hiltonfineart.com