Cafe de Ville will have a collection of Graham Tovey’s work to browse through for the week of the Hatherleigh Festival.
About Graham Tovey:
I like to think of myself as an English landscape painter, this sounds obvious, and somewhat old fashioned in these times. I draw on the traditions of landscape painting, but my style and technique belong very much in the modern world. Having grown up on the south coast of England, it is the marshes of Kent, and Sussex that have stayed with me, and provide me with material from which to work. “The landscape of open spaces” Working entirely with oil paint and a palette knife I try to show the importance of gesture, bordering on Abstract Expressionism. Capturing something of the landscape is an English preoccupation, be it in paint, music, or poetry. It is a fascination with the paintings of Turner, with his free use of paint and dissolving textures, that has inspired my recent work. I will often avoid the picturesque in search of the profound toughness of landscape. I prefer stormy or dramatic skies, infusing the painting with rhythmic movement. I have always
lived close to the sea, and it is the coastal landscape which I now concentrate on – the horizon, where the sea finishes and the sky begins. After spending some years in southern France, I have now settled in Jersey in the Channel Islands, where I paint full time.