Photograph: Antony Crolla
Rose Hilton: A Talent to Celebrate
A new exhibition by Rose Hilton is always cause for pleasurable interest, but in this latest body of work she has excelled herself in variety and invention. I have written elsewhere of how artists entering a Late Period Style encounter new freedoms in their psyches and their art, and Rose is a marvellous example of this: experimenting with panache and putting together ideas and themes, patterns and colours with unflagging exuberance and aplomb. Certain key and familiar subjects – the nude in an interior, the harbour scene, the landscape – have received new and rejuvenating treatment and been invested with unexpected properties. Although Rose’s chief subjects remain figures and landscape (still-life seems to have taken a less prominent role recently), there is no sense of tired repetition here. Instead, like a highly skilled musician, she improvises new and
memorable variations, and delves deeper than ever into her chosen territory. Looking through her new work, the presence of her late husband Roger Hilton is never overt, although the fundamental lessons he taught her remain a lasting inspiration behind everything she does. Her principal visible debts are to the big names of European Modernism: to Matisse and Bonnard, Braque and Miró, Calder and Dufy. But her work also finds its place among the more avant-garde artists of Cornwall in the 20th century, and for the first time I seem to detect a reference to the open structures of late Patrick Heron in her most recent pictures. I am thinking here of the bright linear pattern-making on a white ground, evident in Heron’s late garden paintings, which is echoed by Rose
4. Conservatory Painting I
oil on canvas 76 x 76 cms 297⁄8 x 297⁄8 ins
12. Conservatory Figures IV, 2014
oil on board 25 x 31 cms 10 x 12 ins
13. Conservatory Figures V, 2014
oil on board 25 x 31 cms 10 x 12 ins
45. Newlyn Harbour III, 2014
oil on canvas 51 x 61 cms 20 x 24 ins
CCCLXXX
ISBN 978-1-908486-72-1 Publication No: CCCLXXX Published by David Messum Fine Art Š David Messum Fine Art
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without the prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Studio, Lords Wood, Marlow, Buckinghamshire. Tel: 01628 486565 www.messums.com Photography: Steve Russell Printed by Connekt Colour
Front cover detail:
The Gardener (no. 14.) Inside back cover detail: Summer Repast (no. 36.)