Click image to view gallery
ALL PAINTINGS ARE IN OIL ON PREPARED FINEST PAPERS: THE LARGER ON CANVAS LAID ONTO A PANEL. OFTEN AN UNDERPAINTING IN WATER COLOUR OR MIXED MEDIA, WHICH IS THEN SIZED, IS OVERLAID WITH OIL THUS GIVING A GREATER LUMINOSITY TO THE FINISHED WORK.
PASTORAL and PANTHEISM
GRAHAM OVENDEN : ANATOMIES OF INNOCENCE
by
Jerrold Northrop Moore
PARTLY BASED ON CONVERSATIONS WITH THE ARTIST
Volume 1
(To read the full essay click on the icon right)
Graham Ovenden's memories reach back more than sixty years now; and he celebrates memory as a creative resource. He recently observed to me: 'Once the mind can track onto a memory, you can actually make it concrete and very vivid. Time-scale is not something which has a great deal of relevance to it.'
His first home was on the edge of the little Hampshire town of Alresford - 'still one of the most beautiful English county towns,' he reckons. The house itself was a two-down-two-up end of terrace cottage, already too small for the growing family. Graham had arrived as a second child in 1943, after an elder sister. The small spaces inside the cottage encouraged outdoor adventure from the earliest:
If you went down to the bottom of Dene Road, where we lived, it comes to a dead end at the shallows of the little River Aire. I can remember as a child being most intrigued by the beautiful clarity of the water flowing through that chalk country: every morning with the water weeds - very very beautiful forms continually ebbing and flowing. There's a physical freshness about it.
Now I am an insomniac and suffer from headaches. When I look into those crystal clear streams, I return to a state where my head wasn't like that - when one was unfettered, unburdened, and could simply accept.
An additional article on Landscape paintings by Peter Nahum.