George Rowlett at 80

20 May-17 Jun 2022

Self Portrait at 80., 2021, oil on board. Credit: Art Space Gallery and the Artist

Overview

George Rowlett at 80 : New Paintings

20 May – 17 June 2022

View the exhibition catalogue HERE

Having represented George Rowlett for almost 30 years we are delighted to be celebrating his 80th birthday with an exhibition of new paintings that declare that age is not diminishing his output or the virtuosity of his practice. 

Watching George work was like watching a cat hunting: complete stillness and concentration, an arrested pose, followed by fast, fluid, movements. Every day he would disappear to the lake shore where he would stand in the teeth of the weather under a great oak tree … The resulting work was not just evocative, but more moving and passionate than I could have imagined! *

And herein lies the essence of George Rowlett’s art: an art that is made by confronting his subject out in the open or in his studio in front of seasonal blooms, an art that has established his reputation as a supreme interpreter of light and colour and of landscape as sensation and emotion.

They are paintings that yet again testify to his rare gift of being able to mix and apply paint, often in large quantities, with a particular dexterity and quality of draughtsmanship which achieve a likeness of things almost by command: a gift that puts him at the furthest remove from the figurative painter straining to solve the appearance of things and leaves him free to respond intuitively and eloquently to the mass, colour, movement, light, and mood, especially mood, of what confronts him.

Using only blue, yellow, red and white paint that comes in 5 and 10 litre tins he achieves an extraordinary range and subtlety of colour and when he goes out into the landscape to paint, he loads everything he needs, including 25 litres of paint, onto a bicycle and cycles off to his chosen location. A process that he re-enacts in reverse after a day’s work with boards, oozing wet paint, sandwiched tightly together with their surfaces held apart with rows of nails hammered into the surface. This is what he has done day after day after day for all the years I have known him interrupted only to paint in his garden or on a studio still-life. 

Born in Troon George Rowlett attended Camberwell School of Art and the Royal Academy Schools and has work in private and public collections worldwide. During his representation by Art Space Gallery there have been eighteen solo and numerous group shows and public gallery exhibitions. There have also been painting residencies in the Alps and Coniston in the footsteps of Ruskin, at Wast Water in the Lake District, the Outer Hebrides, Humber Estuary and the garden of the award-winning landscape designer Sarah Price in Abergavenny which are available on film and can be viewed on YouTube.

 A 46 page catalogue marks the occasion with 23 colour plates and birthday tributes from 
Frank Auerbach, Howard Hull, John Lahr and Andrew Lambirth.  

For a hard copy please contact the Gallery.

*  Howard Hull, ‘George Rowlett at Brantwood’, Ruskin Revisited: George Rowlett at Chamonix and Coniston,  Art Space Gallery Exhibition Catalogue, 2007

View the exhibition catalogue HERE

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George Rowlett at 80 | Press Release
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