A daily walk to a gate in a quiet Cumbrian valley will be the focus of a new art exhibition in Grasmere.
The Heaton Cooper Studio will host the work of Alan Stones in an exhibition titled To the Gate – My Daily Walk. It features a collection of paintings which form a very personal, and delightful, response to the landscape around Blencarn, a hamlet in the Eden Valley at the foot of Cross Fell, the highest point on the Pennines.
Alan Stones has been living and working there since 1982, and walks through the surrounding landscape each day: he knows it intimately.
Born in Manchester, he studied Fine Art at St Martin’s School of Art in London, then after a decade living in Norfolk he moved to Blencarn and has been there ever since. He’s now regarded as one of Cumbria’s leading established artists and his work – paintings and lithographs – have been widely exhibited.
He says: “This body of paintings is a response to this wonderful landscape and to one of my walks in particular. My return walk to the gate takes me about 50 minutes. In less than an hour I can be back at work. It’s a little over three miles and takes me from the studio through the most glorious undulating countryside of woodland and fields of grazing sheep up to a gate above the village of Kirkland.
At the gate I usually turn back to the studio but beyond the gate the landscape opens out and it becomes much wilder and, for me, it’s where wilderness begins.
“Looking down to the left as I’m approaching the gate there is a winding beck, some dead ash trees, gorse bushes and an array of gnarled and beautiful hawthorns each clinging to the bank. I love it here and this small area, about three hundred yards in length, has become the heart of my work for nearly two years.”
He says that his paintings are put together in the studio, away from the subject. “Each is reflected on over time and is built-up layer upon layer. We know things only by their differences and, as much as I can, I want to introduce opposing elements . . . to play-off one thing against another. I am not conscious of having a style. In these paintings, more than in any others I have made, I am trying to create a broader image and texture which can be interrupted with quiet and delicate passages.”
He adds: “The Archive Gallery at the Heaton Cooper Studio in the centre of the English Lake District has evolved into a focal point for painters exploring the importance of landscape painting within our psyche and how the painted landscape often acts as a metaphor for states of mind. It’s brilliant for me to be exhibiting here and to be a part of the discussion.
Alan Stones’ work previously featured in an exhibition at the Heaton Cooper Studio along with other artists under the label Unpicturesque.
Julian Cooper, who is curating this show, says: “We are delighted to be welcoming Alan back here with his own show. I’ve known him for over forty years, and particularly admire the great landscapes he did in the 1990s and early 2000s. In these paintings he somehow transformed the ordinary into the epic. I knew about his daily walk to Kirkland and back, and suggested that it might be a good starting point for the new paintings, as the things we see every day can sometimes assume an intensity all of their own.”
To the gate – my daily walk runs from June 12 to July 30 at the Heaton Cooper Studio archive gallery. Open daily from 9am.
