Gallery

Amanda Vesey is an artist for whom the creative process demands the destruction of a good deal of her own work. Fortunately, enough has survived for this show, which amply demonstrates Vesey’s remarkable qualities of observation and imaginative empathy, as well as her outstanding abilities as draughtsman and colourist. In Park, for example, she records the almost supernatural radiance of tree trunks catching the low evening sun - the light will be gone in moments, but while it lasts it is magical. Vesey has a famously sharp eye for the surly lassitude of disenchanted youth - and for dogs, lonely walkers, the sea, landscapes - industrial and rural - cities and suburbia. Her colours (gardens against gun-metal sky in Back Gardens for instance) are sumptuous, and she conveys, without anecdote or whimsy, as few painters today do, something real about the ambiguities of life. Jane Rye Amanda Vesey trained at Salisbury School of Art and Chelsea College of Art. At Chelsea she was taught by Shelia Fell, Julian Trevelyan and Jack Smith and given great encouragement by Prunella Clough, also teaching there. After leaving college Vesey taught for some years at Salisbury Art College and various schools. Later she continued painting and wrote and illustrated several successful and award winning children’s books. She returned to full time painting in 1990 and has had one man London shows at East West Gallery and Art First and been included in mixed exhibitions at Connaught Brown and Flowers Cork Street. Vesey’s work has been bought by private and corporate collectors.