Exhibitions

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LIZ SOMERVILLE

Place

23 March - 20 April 2024

We always look forward to a new group of linocuts and watercolours by Liz Somerville, and this exhibition is about ‘Place’, following a move by Liz and an exploration of her new environment.  There are people in the new work, for the first time, in ‘places’ of reflection, discussion, contemplation, or argument, under trees, having a picnic, in a glade or up a mountain. 

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HENRIETTA HOYER MILLAR

Dorset Landscapes

23 March - 20 April

I am lucky to spend part of the year in the Bride Valley and it is here, in the lanes and down the tracks that crisscross the fields around my studio, that I take time to walk, look and listen to the landscape. At certain times of year, I repeat these daily routes again and again, which makes me acutely alert to the constant shifts of colour and pattern and I become very sensitive to the smallest changes of light - things in which I delight. This solitary time spent in the landscape feeds my practice and equips me when I return to the studio to paint.

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BRIAN RICE

In the Beginning

10 February - 9 March 2024

At 87 Brian Rice is recognised as one of the most important British abstract painters with work in close to 70 museum and corporate collections, mainly in the U.K. and U.S.A.  Anyone who is familiar with his distinctive abstract paintings and prints is, however, in for an unexpected experience at The Art Stable in Child Okeford this February. 'In the Beginning' presents a fascinating archive of works made by Brian in the 1950s whilst at Yeovil School of Art and Goldsmiths College, London.

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DAVID MARL

And Suddenly I Saw

10 February - 9 March 2024

There are times, there are places, when we seem to get a glimpse of something other - a sudden sense of something beyond our material world.  In Celtic Christianity there were places referred to as ‘thin places’, where heaven seemed close by.  In a sense many of my paintings are attempts to capture moments like these, places like these - fleeting snatches of something beyond.  I have found guides - artists like William Blake, Samuel Palmer or Cecil Collins - they push me in a certain direction but the journey is mine.  But all journeys need those moments of rest, and still-life painting produces this - and I love its focussed meditation on here and now, where the margins of the world are reduced to the space between myself and the objects painted.  

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CHRISTMAS EXHIBITION

Paintings, Prints, Ceramics and Sulpture

by Gallery and C20th Artists

25 November - 16 December 2023

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TOBIT ROCHE

Magic Mountains

28 October - 18 November 2023

We are delighted to be presenting the sixth solo exhibition of paintings by Tobit Roche at The Art Stable.  It is always wonderful to have Tobit’s romantic paintings covering the gallery walls, conveying so well his passion for nature and beauty.  In this exhibition, the colours are heightened, and the focus will be on the mountains of India, as well as our own smaller, but much loved, Hambledon Hill.

As a teenager growing up in India, I was often exposed to magical mountainscapes, particularly when journeying to the Himalaya, and its foothills or travelling by train through the Aravalli Range in Rajasthan. These memories have stayed with me, inspiring many subsequent visits, and not least turning India for me into a kind of spiritual home.

In these recent paintings, I’ve tried to reconnect with this landscape of memories, and it is within the hills and mountains of India, that I find a compelling vehicle for self expression. 

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JOHN RIDGEWELL (1937-2004)

The Still Point

28 October - 18 November

John Ridgewell was an Essex native, who studied alongside David Hockney and R.B. Kitaj at the Royal College of Art, before leaving to become a professional artist and occasional tutor. From an early, successful show at the New Arts Centre in 1962 (from which the Government Collection bought Deserted Harbour) Ridgewell exhibited widely during his lifetime. He and his family moved around England, from Yorkshire to Suffolk, via Dorset, his surroundings creeping into and influencing his paintings. From the gestural, heavier treatment of paint in his student days, inspired by the solid clay cliffs of the Yorkshire coast, his works became lighter in terms of colour, but more intensely intricate in their subject matter. Their delicacy was built up with brushes and a palette knife, and one can see the marks of his working in the paint itself.

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DOROTHY AND ROBERT BRADBURY

Spanish Landscapes

9 - 29 September 2023

The Art Stable is delighted to be presenting a third exhibition of work by Robert (1912-2011) and Dorothy (1913-80) Bradbury, the last one being in 2020, paintings that are full of energy, colour, and the warmth of the Spanish Sun.  They moved to Deia in Mallorca from the United States in 1950, and their work portrays that wonderful landscape of olive trees, rugged mountains and the beautiful sea.  Some winters were spent in Alicante, and paintings of that town also feature in this exhibiton.

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TERESA LAWTON

Wessex Trails

9 - 29 September 2023

Teresa Lawton grew up in Dorset, roaming freely with dogs and ponies, so that the landscape is rooted deep in her imagination.  Living now between Dorchester and the sea, that same landscape, largely unchanged continues to inspire her.  And although her paintings are an abstracted and imagined version of the landscape, the stories of Thomas Hardy continue to inspire, even in the abstract.

‘Living in the heart of Thomas Hardy country, his stories feel very familiar to me, his wonderful, beautifully detailed descriptions of the heath and woodlands touch and inspire me.  Some of the descriptions are so vivid I feel his presence as I walk the age-old time-trodden paths. So it’s not surprising that my paintings, rooted in the Dorset Landscape, are also entwined somehow with the Wessex landscape described by Hardy.’

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CHARLIE BAIRD

The Sea and other Stories

10 June - 8 July 2023

Much of this latest collection of work by Charlie Baird is inspired by visits to some of the furthest points of the British Isles - the Outer Hebrides, Cornwall, Pembrokeshire, as well as the more familiar landmarks of Dorset.  Taken from distilled memories of place and time, they aim to capture certain atmospheres and moods of a landscape, revealed with both figurative and more abstracted images.
 
Although sketches are often made in situ, the bulk of work is gestated in the studio, allowing tangents in colour and composition to occur, whilst working to retain the initial response to a landscape at a particular moment.