Celia de Serra
Born in 1973 Celia de Serra spent her childhood in rural Kent and West Dorset graduating from Exeter University in 1995 with a Fine Art and English degree. In the Nineties her art practice was predominately concerned with abstraction but she retained an obsession and attachment to her rural roots and went on to produce a body of work investigating and responding to rural environments, from the West Country to Shropshire and Wales.
These densely worked, exquisite landscapes are characterised by an obsession with light and mood. Through the discipline of drawing and painting figuratively, Celia is engaged intensely in the act of looking, and concentrates on a kind of visual scrutiny to which the viewer is drawn, generating a particular viewer involvement and a visceral sense of ‘being there’. Notable for their absence of humans and buildings, her landscapes are nevertheless perhaps reminiscent of Caspar David Friedrich's. Even without Friedrich's solitary figures these landscapes seem to have a human presence. There is also an implicit allusion to the notion of narrative; the track or pathway being seen as a metaphor for this. This implied narrative provides no answers, only suggestions, producing a sense of desire or promise and subsequently an emotional charge. Although Celia's work may hark back to romantic artists it also maintains close sympathies with the new generation of obsessively observational artists.
Celia has completed commissions for both Somerset and Dorset NHS Trusts where a collection of her paintings now remain on permanent display. She has been granted an award for her drawings from the Oppenheim-John Downes Memorial Trust. Her work is in private collections in the UK and Europe.
Understories/Overstories (with Celia de Serra) 2 - 28 March 2013
After a successful solo show in the gallery in 2010, Celia de Serra is back for a joint show with artist and curator Tim Craven who is new to the Art Stable. The lure of the tree as primary subject possesses multiple strands for both artists including their strong attraction to potential abstract qualities. Random botanic growth generates an infinitesimal variety of juxtaposing shape and tone. The pattern making aesthetic, a human attribute often exploited by the Post-Impressionists, is particularly strong in Craven’s work and this is qualified by an early interest in Photorealism. He is drawn to the impersonal and flattened photo-mechanical shapes produced by John Salt and others. De Serra, though, professes more painterly concerns; her work inhabiting the boundary between Romantic expectations of pastoral landscape and the visceral real-worldliness of the forest understory.
Equally important in their work is the action of sunlight and how their subjects are animated by it. Often transient, it has to be captured by camera. A dull view of trees on an overcast day can be lit-up and thus transformed dramatically and emotionally by a sudden burst of directional sunlight. This for Craven’s and de Serra’s trees amounts to a sort of figurative Op-Art or dazzle camouflage. The physical structures are dissolved and the organic tree shapes of branch and foliage are fractured into multitudinous and amorphous elements of chiaroscuro.
Both artists share allegiance to the English pastoral landscape tradition, a thread that runs from the Picturesque of the 18th century through Samuel Palmer and the Ancients to the Neo-Romantics of the 1940s. However while the latter transformed their compositions with emotive qualities, Craven’s work in particular avoids sentiment. Both artists’ feelings are perhaps more covertly conveyed through their obsessive approach to the source imagery. Their deliberately long-winded and forensic investigation of nature seems to suggest that they fear its imminent disappearance.
While de Serra explores the woodland floor in search of deserted tracks made by animals and people, Craven tends to look upwards. His precise and analytical approach resonating against de Serra’s more lyrical sensibility and soft, haunting light serves to enhance our emotional response to both when seen in tandem.
 Advance on Monty |
 Gatley Retreat |
 Kong |
 Juncture |
 River Way, 2011 |
 Sound of Silence No.3 |
 Shadowline 2 |
 Echo Park |
 Turning Point |
 Sound of Silence 2 |
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