Catching the Light at Wetland Reflections 

Newport Wetlands

Woodcuts Catch the Light

Monmouth based painter-printmaker, Richard Corbett, will be showcasing a new series of woodcuts alongside his oil paintings at his inaugural London solo exhibition, ‘Wetland Reflections’, this November.

The exhibition at The Smithfield Gallery, has come about through an association with the RSPB and their work at the Newport Wetlands Reserve in South Wales.
Newport has proved to be the prefect place to inspire his "beautiful and evocative" prints and paintings. His new prints, entitled ‘Catching the Light’, are an attempt to capture the varying light and the feeling of space that the reed beds and the Severn Estuary beyond evoke.

Since graduating in printmaking from the Norfolk Institute of Art and Design in 1994, Richard has specialised in relief prints that have been created using innovative techniques or unusual found objects. His degree show was a series of very large woodcuts using wood sourced from his local timber mill.
Teaching full time brought a gap in his production, but in 2002 he started making collagraphs at Ipswich college. These were soon followed by his Dust series of 2004, his first monoprints on canvas, made in response to the novels of Philip Pullman. They caused a stir at the Peter Pears Gallery in Aldeburgh. They now hang in Birmingham.
These were soon followed by his extensive and large-scale Cleddon series of 2005, a response to a local waterfall made soon after he moved from Suffolk into a studio in Monmouth equipped with a large Tefko Press. The print blocks were made using caustic soda on MDF, a technique that Richard found very hard to stabilise, but when it worked they made prints rich with texture. Shown across the South East and now in France they have been responsible for the steady rise in Richard’s reputation in the last two years.
More recent work has included his monochromatic Slate Prints, the texture of the slate perfectly depicting the Welsh landscape.

‘Catching the Light’, returns to a method Richard hasn’t used for over 15 years, using woodcutting tools on plywood. As Richard says of his work, ‘ I felt the grain of the plywood perfectly evoked the movement of light and air. By using traditional woodcutting tools in a very intuitive way I felt I could create a series that was delicate, but also raw. As with recent works, I have worked in series and so each woodcut is unique, but related to others in the set. The colours are very much of Newport, but the imagery is very much an abstract interpretation.’

Richard's work has been seen at the Hay Festival, the Aldeburgh Festival and at the Ludlow Summer Exhibition, as well as solo shows in galleries around the UK. His work is held in a number of prestigious private collections.

‘Wetland Reflections’ runs from 24-28 November, 10- 6, at The Smithfield Gallery, EC1A 9HR. The complete catalogue can be seen online from 31st October on www.richardcorbett.biz
http://www.richardcorbett.biz