Penelope Timmis: Bold and beautiful paintings

About

From her chapel-top studio in Shropshire artist Penny Timmis creates large energetic paintings of both her immediate rural landscape and that of Pembrokeshire. She favours beach, cliff and coastline, river and waterfalls, farmland and wild open spaces. In between she paints flowers - daisies the size of a hand, a forest of foxgloves – and occasionally her work is influenced by her latest travels abroad.

The White Lion Street Gallery will host her newest exhibition of 40 paintings to show in Tenby for the month of September.  The gallery gave Penny her first exhibition some 12 years ago,  since when Penny has won awards, become an elected member of the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists and of the Society of Woman Artists, been represented at the Affordable Art Fairs of London and Bristol and is exhibited in many prestigious galleries across the UK. Her large exuberant flower paintings have shown at the Hampton Court Flower Show and the Ideal Home Show in the last couple of years and some similar will be exhibited in this latest exhibition.

Penny’s work is characterised by: colour – rich and full value, often with one hue predominating; movement – of waves crashing onto rocks, of tides sweeping into a bay, of wind disturbing trees and flowers;  impasto paint – thick paint applied to the surface in lines and squiggles to delineate fronds of greenery, the outline of a flower or rock; confident compositions, reducing complex subjects to a few relevant strokes; and over all, a sense of joie de vivre about being here in this view, hearing the waves and feeling the sun, watching the clouds.  The calmest works are those of quiet watersides, further hills and longer views.  Here more subtle hues define distance and atmospheric conditions.  Rarely are figures represented in the work, though farm animals do appear, both in the context of a landscape and singly as characters.

Penny’s paintings are enhanced by simple deep mounts and frames, many white, with no distraction from the impressionist work they surround.  Though ‘impressionistic’ and having a wealth of surface texture, the paintings rely on observant drawing skills and the means to convey much information in an artistic shorthand that any viewer can understand, without being patronised by over- simplicity or struggling with incomprehensible complexity.

The exhibition opens on Tuesday 1st September and continues until the 28th.  The gallery in White Lion Street in Tenby is open from 10am -5pm every day except for Wednesdays.  For further information telephone 01834-843375 and see the whole exhibition on the website: www.artmatters.org.uk