Finding Paradise

in the footsteps of the Camden Town Group

The beautiful, mysterious Blackdown Hills called to the artists of the Camden Town Group in the years before and after the First World War. Robert Bevan, Spencer Gore, Charles Ginner and Stanislawa de Karlowska all visited and stayed to paint the landscape, the farms and the way of life around Clayhidon.

Their paintings now evoke a powerful sense, not only of that ancient landscape but also of an unspoiled countryside that has vanished in much of Britain, and a farming way of life that has gone altogether.

Their work is revisited and their subjects reexamined in a major exhibition, Paradise Found: New Visions of the Blackdown Hills, at the Thelma Hulbert Gallery in Honiton until 3rd June.

The Camden Towners were Post-Impressionists, and their paintings seek to marry the ancient English landscape with the progressive French influence of painters such as Cezanne and Gauguin.

Today’s artists, invited to take part by cocurators Fiona McIntyre, Tim Craven and Sandra Higgins, represent a broad canvas of 21st century landscape artists, working in many different media and in styles from representational and photorealist to abstract.

The commission was to respond to the Blackdown Hills and the work of the Camden group through the changes to the architecture, ecology, agriculture and land management of what is now a designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

The artists include Belinda Crozier, Paul Newman, Abi Kremer, Alan Rankle, Mark Dunford, Ruth Piper, Blaze Cyan, Frank Creber, Narbi Price, Ferha Farooqui, Day Bowman, and Tim Craven and Fiona McIntyre.

Excitingly, several of Robert Bevan’s splendid paintings are in the show, including the magnificent 1916 oil, The Hay Harvest. We may not see these paintings as revolutionary now, after more than a century of upheavals in the art world, they convey a depth of feeling and a sense of place that stands up to comparisons with Cezanne.

This is an exhibition to revisit—you won’t take it all in on first sight. It is exciting to see the Bevans, and to explore through the eyes of contemporary artists how this timeless landscape has evolved—but also to celebrate what we find in the Blackdowns, the trees, the old long-houses, the prehistoric earthworks and the footprints of humans. It is a living landscape not a rural idyll in aspic and that is what the 2023 artists are showing us.

From the stark abstracts of Day Bowman to the joyful colours of Abi Kremer, from the photorealism of Tim Craven’s watercolours and Paul Newman’s graphite drawings to the explosive colour of Alan Rankle or the stormy mysticism of John Ball, this exhibition will undoubtedly, in the words of co-curator Sandra Higgins, “add to the legacy of this area.”

Fanny Charles