Simon Carter: A Walk in the Park

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For the past four months, Simon Carter has been in residence at Art Exchange, making a response to John Constable's famous painting, Wivenhoe Park, 1816. Simon's challenge has been to see if the Essex parkland Constable depicted almost 200 years ago can still be found today. While the landscape has evolved, the sky, often full of the same blustery clouds that Constable painted, remains remarkably similar. Attempting the capture the essence of Wivenhoe Park is the focus of Simon Carter's newly commissioned exhibition. Simon Carter is an artist poised between representation and abstraction. For him, painting is a daily practice embedded in drawing and re-drawing the same motifs directly from daily life. Sketches are the starting point for a process of painting which reduces the seemingly chaotic patterns of nature to a series of orderly geometric lines, shapes and harmonising colours. Commissioned to celebrate the University of Essex's 50th anniversary, this exhibition creates a dialogue between the University's historic parkland and one of East Anglia most respected contemporary painters.