Keswick art gallery holds Dorothy T Ramsay’s first solo show of landscape mountain art at the Northern Lights Gallery.
Experimentation and a sense of fun infuse Dorothy Ramsay’s vibrant works, 15 of which are on display at Northern Lights Gallery in Keswick from this Friday, 24th September.
Dorothy’s many devotees have learned to expect the unexpected, revel in her powers of imagination, colours, her stylistic re-invention & interpretation.
Drawing inspiration from the fells around her home on the flanks of Blencathra, Dorothy uses a distinctive colour palette to capture the forms, light and volatile weather of the Lake District.
Her bold and varied use of colour is sometimes electrifying in its intensity, witness Klee & Chagall’s influence in her “Souther Fell and Derelict Barn”, sometimes subtly muted in her pastel “The Walk into Buttermere” is all the more remarkable given that she once restricted her palette to black and white for a decade.
This year, says Dorothy, she is working full-time in acrylics and mixed media, playing between abstract and romantic landscape yet at times allowing realism to distort.
The Northern Lights exhibition is Dorothy’s first solo show at the gallery and includes recently completed works. These paintings are predominantly acrylic on board two oil on canvas, three large pastels behind glass & two collages also feature.
Dorothy started taking drawing lessons at Shipley Art Gallery when she was aged eight. After studying at Sunderland art college, where her focus was on printmaking, Dorothy gained a degree in etching at Camberwell College of Arts and went on to complete a Masters degrees in art and in systemic family therapy.
She used skills acquired at the Highlands and Islands School for Crofters, and with her friends she started a weaving shed at the Findhorn Foundation in the east of Scotland, studied tapestry with the head of Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh later running a weaving shed at the former Wetheriggs Pottery, near Penrith.
Key influences on Dorothy’s art include Gobelins tapestry, the Cumbrian artist Winifred Nicholson and the Swiss-German artist Paul Klee.
Dorothy been represented by Northern Lights Gallery since April this year and her works on display there have included some of the aforementioned landscapes and several townscapes.
Dorothy T Ramsay, one of a series of exhibitions focusing on the northern fells of the Lake District, showing 09:30 - 17:00hrs daily in the third floor Blencathra Gallery, Northern Lights Gallery, 22 St John’s Street, Keswick ’til Sunday October 24, 2021.
