The Season’s Ebb
19 January - 17 March 2019
Design House, New Art Centre
Roche Court, East Winterslow, Salisbury, Wiltshire SP5 1BG
“The tangle of dark shoots in ‘My Nest’ is not some approximation. This is a faithful and careful rendition of its appearance, painted slowly, the line following the line of growth, accumulating into this entangled cluster placed centrally on the canvas. A wall, once painted, has been washed out, though its trace remains. Other features in view have either been removed or were never included to begin with. No more is needed and the painting is done.”
My Nest
oil on canvas 2016-17
88 x 110 cm
Billow
oil on canvas 2018
90 x 120 cm
“‘Billow’ represents a view out, through the studio window, towards a large rosebush in bloom. The season for its flowering is short so the time for capturing it is compressed, speed and economy are required (these are not paintings that can be carried out in the absence of the subject). And yet despite this pressure the painting achieves a state of near infinite complexity whilst remaining entirely articulate and coherent.”
Extracts from, Charlotte Verity: The Garden Paintings, Paul Winstanley, 2019
Seed Time
oil on canvas, 2018
110 x 86 cm
These paintings are about looking again.
John Clare looks at his landscape, the fields and woods of Northamptonshire, with longing. He looks at what was present in his childhood and what exists now. He charts minutes and hours and seasons and years, the birds and trees and flowers, a hedge, a copse.
In these paintings by Charlotte Verity the seasons’ ebb is marked. They are a calendar, a series of poems tracing one full moment and then another.
Charlotte Verity, Edmund de Waal, 2016
Ordering within the rectangle of the canvas is a meditative act, and although the geometry that sustains these paintings is unobtrusive it is deeply considered; the lean of a stem, the arc of a leaf, the play of inclination is poignant. As in the work of Piero della Francesca, an artist Verity loves, the light-filled spaces are as fully realised, as present, as the forms themselves. There are no enlargements, no tricks of scale to suggest anthropomorphic analogies, no imposing of the artist’s ego; and yet, notwithstanding the patient observation and selfless refusal to intrude, this is not botanical painting. Flowers for Charlotte Verity are what jugs and bottles are for Giorgio Morandi – vessels of light, markers of feeling.
Verity’s Sky, Paul Hills, 2016
January Colour
oil on canvas, 2018
120 x 90 cm
Summer Growth
oil on canvas, 2017
90 x 120 cm
The dailiness of things never ceases to be a miracle under her eyes. The roses that grow in her garden; the round table in her studio, whose surface is as changeable and as profound as that river surface she used to watch from her window in Chiswick. She is minutely interested in the tiniest elements of her subjects and certain things recur in her work over and over again. These are not used to make patterns or as symbols; they are imagery after nature.
Polly Devlin, 2002
Tulips
oil on canvas, 2018
120 x 90 cm