3000 miles of Colour Exhibition

Landscapes real and imagined from my winter travels

In January and February of this year I embarked on a road trip with my best friend of over thirty years to celebrate my 60th birthday and ten years of running a successful business.

I took my paints not with the intention of painting, but to give me the option if I decided that was what I wanted to do.

My trip began at Coventry Cathedral, somewhere I have been meaning to visit for some time to see works from the likes of Graham Sutherland, Elizabeth Frink and John Piper. They didn’t disappoint. I wandered round that immense space in awe of the scale, colour, skill etc. That visit set the tone of the trip and filled me with a hunger for more.

Other visits along the road were equally inspiring, with Charleston Farmhouse, the one time home of painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, which is in east Sussex, This was followed by the beautiful pebble beach garden in Kent, created by Film director Derek Jarman, which faces Dungeness nuclear power station.

The Watts artist village and chapel near Compton in Surrey is sensational. If you love the arts and crafts movement as I do, then its a hidden gem.

Stanley Spencer is another of my favourites and I was able to visit his gallery as well as the very moving Sandham Memorial Chapel, which he adorned with murals about his experience in the first world war. Add to that the the Leach pottery, Tate St Ives and Barbara Hepworth’s studio and Garden…..well I just felt as though my soul had been well and truly nourished.

Aside from all of those monuments to artists and creativity there was the landscape. The splendour and differences of the new forest, the chalk downs and cliffs of Sussex before adding Wiltshire, Dorset, Devon, Cornwall, Somerset, the Gower Peninsula and it made painting a must.

So far I have created 34 new works on and from the inspiring trip, with still more to come.

Twenty of those new works form the exhibition, which I hope you can visit. There will also be a short film of the of the places that inspired the works on our gallery screen

Gail Curry