Light and shade: New paintings by Elizabeth Haines, Maggie Brown and Anthony Richards

About

Light and shade: a new exhibition of paintings

Three artists of long-standing and high repute combine their considerable talents to produce an exhibition entitled “Light and Shade” for the White Lion Street Gallery in Tenby in June.  The artists are Elizabeth Haines, Maggie Brown and Anthony Richards: the first two of Pembrokeshire and the latter from Carmarthenshire.

Elizabeth Haines has lived and worked in Pembrokeshire since the sixties and has exhibited widely.  Trained as an illustrator, her early work, much of it in pen and wash or watercolour, often depicted in detail the animals, farms and natural vegetation of the countryside around her.  Nowadays she works in a freer, more abstract way and uses all mediums.  The result is subtle and enigmatic – landscapes of dreams and imagination, poetic paintings of flowers and still life, harbours and homesteads in the hills – but all based on the real world, the artist’s close observation and her underlying drawing skills.

Elizabeth’s studio comprises several linked barns where she also runs workshops for small groups.

Maggie Brown’s training was originally in textile design.  Since moving to Pembrokeshire some 12 years ago she has exhibited her paintings in many galleries, both as a solo artist and as an invited member of group shows.  She won the Tenby Open Art Competition outright in 2004 and was selected as the People’s Choice in Fishguard’s Summer exhibition in 2015.

She teaches adults on creative holidays in her own successful business set up 10 years ago, introducing her students to the delights of the county and ways of showing them in paint. 
Using a variety of mediums she paints the landscape, not always selecting the obvious viewpoint but promoting the beauty of disregarded places, the areas less visited and known.  Her work contains the lightness and movement of spring winds through moorland grasses, the elemental drama of sudden stormy skies and clever aerial perspective in her long views over the hills and out to sea.

Since his graduation, Anthony Richards has shown his paintings in the area and in his own gallery for the last 30 years.  His land, sea and wildlife studies capture the difficult shifting nuances of light, colour and definition created by mist, dusk, dawn and distance.  In this exhibition he shows a diverse range of subjects – for example at random, Worm’s Head, a single feather and its shadow, a long view of Monkstone Pont with Tenby in the far distance and the Boathouse at Laugharne viewed through marsh reeds.

Together these three artists offer a show that demonstrates a love and knowledge of the subjects chosen, skilful mastery of different mediums and an experience for the viewer that is evocative of a particular place and time and atmosphere.

Starting on Thursday 2nd June and continuing until the 28th, the exhibition will be at The White Lion Street Gallery in Tenby, near the Premier Inn, open from 10am to 5pm every day except for Wednesdays.  For more information telephone 01834-843375 or see the website: www.artmatters.org.uk