Finding Beauty - Mark Spray

About

Mark Spray has earned a reputation for being one of the finest landscape artists in Britain today.

Opening on 1st October ‘Finding Beauty’ will be his first exhibition of works at McAllister Thomas.

Spray explores the world carrying with him his sketchbook. 

“Captured in the oil paint and mineral grit of Spray’s mixed media work is the shifting beauty of this landscape and its unique exchange with both author and artist: the vivid purple heather and white sanded paths of Dunwich heath glow brightly under ominous skies; low, brooding cloud lines skim the damp, sea level land and sandbars break the grey reflective waters of sea and broad in two; strange, silent circles of concrete scar the requisitioned and ultimately abandoned shingle of a once unspoiled Orford Ness; bare and brittle trees reach from wet earth up towards wetter skies; the bruised clouds of an emerging storm intensify the grassy green of fields along the roman road and will soon replenish puddles which soak colours from the rolling, humid atmosphere.

Drawing together elements of experience, thought, perception and prose, this collection of oil sketch and large scale studio paintings, which are in part both documentary and autobiographical works, evidence the physically exhausting yet psychologically restorative nature of time spent in the landscape and seek, in their way, to locate beauty in the midst of melancholy.”

Mercedes Smith