Lewes exhibition celebrates Traveller's Joy

Gallery director Neeta Pedersen said: “This show includes paintings celebrating the natural world across the seasons. At its heart is a large painting of traveller's joy, the wild clematis that drapes itself across hedgerows and woodland edges in late summer and autumn, its feathery seed heads turning the countryside silver as the year draws in. It is the largest work in the show and the image that gives the exhibition its name.

“Traveller's joy has qualities that make it a particularly rewarding subject. It is modest and easy to overlook for much of the year, and then suddenly, as the light changes and the hedgerows begin to thin, it reveals itself. There is something quietly joyful about it as there is about so much of the natural world when you slow down and look carefully.

“Alongside this are paintings of bluebell woods and blossom which arrives so briefly and brilliantly each year. Blossom carries with it a sense of abundance and transience that make it one of nature's most compelling subjects, here for a week or two and then gone.

“The exhibition also includes a series of tree portraits, with particular attention given to ancient yew trees. These remarkable living monuments have a presence unlike almost any other subject in the landscape. Some of these trees have been standing for thousands of years, quietly outlasting everything around them, and these paintings attempt to honour that, the twisted trunks, the deep shadow beneath the canopy, the sense of something enduring.

“Completing the show is a new large painting made at Hope Gap on the Sussex coast. This work brings a different energy to the exhibition – open sky, sea air and the clear light of the chalk landscape. It is a painting about a specific place at a specific moment which is true of all the work here.

“All of the paintings are in oils, and the medium is central to how they feel. Oil paint has a richness and physical presence that suits these subjects well – the texture of bark, the depth of shadow in a woodland, the luminosity of blossom against a blue sky.”