Derek Eland is Britain’s last official war artist, having been based in Afghanistan in 2011. He has experienced the world, both the light and the dark, and has carried on that experience into his raw paintings of the fells. This exhibition shows hi interrogation of the Lake District landscape, its colours and patterns, its dry stone walls, executed in oils and on paper.
“From a family of Cumbrian farmers, I’ve always been interested in the impact we make on the landscape, good and bad. In the Lake District it’s most obviously seen in the copses, hedgerows and dry stone walls as well as the hamlets, villages and farms. Wordsworth put it well when he wrote, ‘Once again I see these hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms, green to the very door’.” - Derek Eland
Before going to art college Derek painted & exhibited in North Wales for many years, little surprise then that the influence of those great North Welsh painters stay with him, Sir Kyffin Williams & Peter Prendergast in particular taught Derek the importance of contrast, structure and pattern in the landscape we see.
There's also a nod to local luminaries such as Percy Kelly & Sheila Fell, yet if you look closely at Derek's art, a fused line of beauty also stretches back to the Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) group, to early Kandinsky & Münter in Murnau circa 1909, the ornamental configuration of colour in the spirit of Matisse, strong angular lines associated with French Cubism & Les Nabis & the cloisonnism of Gauguin.
These new paintings are a direct response to the local Lake District landscape, & in recent years his work has been exhibited widely "yet it’s always a thrill to show work in my native county, Cumbria."
Exhibition Paintings:
