Common Ground: David Brayne & Ruth Stage

hiltonfine art

Common GroundDavid Brayne RWS & Ruth Stage NEAC

9 - 30 March 2013

hiltonfine artHilton Fine Art, 5 Margaret’s Buildings, Bath BA1 2LP

01225 311311 info@hiltonfineart.com www.hiltonfineart.com

Contents

David Brayne pages 4 - 27

Ruth Stage pages 28 - 45

This show brings together two artists linked by the fact that they both make their own paints (David Brayne collects his own pigments which he uses with acrylic binders and Ruth Stage mixes the pigments with egg yolks) and use them to make landscapes in the lyrical tradition.

David Brayne’s subject matter comes from a repertoire of favourite motifs and things seen in the landscape and home. Land and sea appear blended together in a gentle linear exchange where there are no shadows – all as if in a dream. He tenderly portrays women and men as they hold their fishing lines and nets, making improbable but graceful shapes. These are paintings that have a strong abstract sense of design and are poetically and formally beautiful.

Ruth Stage has worked exclusively in the classical egg tempera tradition since leaving the Royal Academy in 1995. She has become a master at using its special qualities to produce paintings that have a strong sense of design and pattern and also a slightly otherworldly quality in the tradition of the English Romantic painters.

There is a constant interplay between conventional perspectival depth and the pattern and handling flattening out the picture plane which gives the work a tension and decorative beauty.

Price range - £750 - £5,000

front cover image: (detail) Ruth Stage Dissolving Forms on Flooded Farmlandegg tempera on gesso board52 x 62cm

back cover image:(detail) David Brayne Leaping Fishwatercolour and pigment on paper37 x 38cm

3

David Brayne RWS

Born in 1954

Studied at Nottingham School of Art, Gloucestershire College of Art and Exeter University.

He was elected as a member of the Royal Watercolour Society in 2001 and has exhibited widely and been awarded a number of prizes, including first prize in the National Open Art Competition, 2004 and The Benton Prize at the ING Discerning Eye Exhibition at the Mall Galleries, London.

‘A childhood growing up in Lincolnshire in that strange and unique landscape of the Wash where land, water and sky seem, and indeed often are, virtually indistinguishable, would appear to have left a profound mark on David Brayne’s visual imagination. For, long since living in a comparatively landlocked part of rural Somerset and having followed a complex artistic path that has taken him via art school Minimalism, this is still essentially the landscape that has come to preoccupy him. Not topographically or descriptively of course, but in his poetic memory of the place and the way in which its characteristic indeterminacy of light and form has come to coincide with his own inward painterly concerns. Out of these elements he has found an artistic voice of quiet and subtle tenderness which, while it bears an affinity with that English tradition of humanistic landscape to be found in recent years in such artists as Richard Eurich and Sonia Lawson, also incorporates into itself more purely formal, even abstract, elements. These not only place his work within a more contemporary idiom but give it its simplicity and variety of form as well.

Thus the shifting, ambiguous perspectives of his viewpoint and the warm harmonies of his colour often seem to be making us look up through the still surfaces of the water itself in what amounts, almost, to a mermaid’s eye view of a world above, no less diaphanous and watery.

Nicholas Usherwood

4

Leaping Fishwatercolour and pigment on paper37 x 38cm

5

The Quaywatercolour and pigment on paper42 x 54cm

6

7

8

The River and the Seawatercolour and pigment on paper65 x 90cm

9

10

Gold Fishwatercolour and pigment on paper90 x 65cm

11

12

The Red Roomwatercolour and pigment on paper56 x 46cm

13

14

The Mill Sluice Gatewatercolour and pigment on paper46 x 60cm

15

Sailing Boatswatercolour and pigment on paper83 x 103cm

16

17

Shallow Draughtwatercolour and pigment on paper63 x 75cm

18

19

Coast Pathwatercolour and pigment on paper25 x 38cm

20

21

Plate of Lemonswatercolour and pigment on paper50 x 46cm

22

23

The Orchidwatercolour and pigment on paper34 x 47cm

24

25

West Prospectwatercolour and pigment on paper32 x 30cm

26

27

28

Ruth Stage NEAC

1987 - 88 Cleveland College of Art and Design 1988 - 92 Newcastle University 1992 - 95 Royal Academy Schools

Awards:2013 1st Prize, Lynn Painter-Stainers Prize; 2003 Winner, Villiers David Prize 2001 Runner-up, Villiers David Prize 2000 Runner-up, Villiers David Prize 1996 Prize from M&G for best painter under 35, Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 1995 Nat-West Art Prize 1995 David Murray Scholarship 1994 British Institute Fund 1994 Tony Smith Landscape AwardMemberships:1999 Elected Member of the New English Art Club

Selected Solo Exhibitions:2003, 01, 99, 97 New Grafton Gallery 2002 “Light and the Landscape”, John Davies Gallery, Stow 2002 J.H.W. Fine Art at the Air Gallery 1999 Hiscox Art Cafe 1998 “Creative Exchange” A.T.Kearney, London with Leonard Rosoman, OBE, RA 1998 Samling Foundation, Windermere

Selected Mixed Exhibitions:2013 ‘Common Ground’ – David Brayne and Ruth Stage, 2012 New English Art Club, Hilton Fine Art, 2004 John Davies Gallery, Stow ‘99-’03, ‘93-’96 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 1994 - date New Grafton Gallery 2002 Royal Academy Friends’ Room, NEAC Members 2002 RAASA, Centro d’Art Modigliani, Florence 2002 2002 New Grafton at Art London ‘99-’02, ‘97 NEAC Annual Open Exhibition 1996 - 97 Cadogan Contemporary 1997 Royal Overseas League 1996 The Mall Galleries, 1996, 1995, 1998 Hunting Art Prize Exhibition

29

Dissolving Forms on Flooded Farmlandegg tempera on gesso board52 x 62cm

30

Figure on Cornish Beachegg tempera on gesso board61 x 76cm

31

32

Hedgerow, Charlburyegg tempera on gesso board36 x 43cm

33

34

Treesegg tempera on gesso board36 x 43cm

35

36

Isabella Plantation, Richmond Parkegg tempera on gesso board76 x 101cm

37

38

Evening Lightegg tempera on gesso board31 x 36cm

39

40

Isabella Plantation, Richmond Park IIegg tempera on gesso board24 x 34cm

41

42

Mountain Pool, Franceegg tempera on gesso board36 x 44cm

43

44

Woodland Pathwayegg tempera on gesso board36 x 43cm

45

hiltonfine artHilton Fine Art, 5 Margaret’s Buildings, Bath BA1 2LP

01225 311311 info@hiltonfineart.com www.hiltonfineart.com