Cezanne’s Atom
Tuesday 3 - Saturday 14 March 2015 Mondays- Saturdays, 9.30am - 4pm in the Upper Gallery and the Dr VF Squires Room
Our 2015 art exhibition programme opens with the latest show by artist Paul Kessling. Cezanne’s Atom features a small selection of Paul’s dynamic work and highlights its evolution over the past 15 years.
After training at the Royal College of Art, Paul began painting the landscape when he moved to the Vale’s beautiful countryside in the late 1990′s. In 2000, the museum hosted one of Paul’s first painting exhibitions, displaying a series of ink paintings from the Ridgeway. Nowadays, Paul’s work is exhibited all over the world. Within the last year alone, Paul’s paintings have been exhibited in Hong Kong, Taipei, Singapore, New York, London, Edinburgh, Milan, Berlin and Hamburg.
Awarded a painting residency in 2011 at the Cill Rialaig Project in southern Ireland, Paul spent winter months in a converted ‘famine house’, perched on top of a cliff, painting the sea. This experience marked a turning point in his work: ” I went to paint seascapes and Atlantic storms, yet nothing seemed to come right. I was reading Cuts by Carl André, (renowned for the ‘Bricks‘ in the Tate) who wrote that “Cezanne’s brushstroke is the atom of which his paintings are composed”. Cezanne constructed form from colour and said “A painter is revealing something which no one has ever seen before and translates it into something other than reality.” I then abandoned direct painting to use abstract colour and tone: in that moment I felt that I captured some truth about those winter colours and the washed-out Atlantic light”.
Paul’s new paintings are large, abstract, painted in oil on board but still very much rooted in the changing seasons; the colour and light of the landscape.
The exhibition continues, during museum opening hours, until Saturday 14 March.
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