Pettits House, a fine Tudor building, is an unusual venue for a group of unusual artists using a variety of media. In a converted barn in Oxfordshire Jane Hanson, a South African potter, brings light and bright colours from her homeland. Instead of the usual Chinese blues and whites she blends rich copper and red on sang de beouf and purples, blues and oranges, so bringing out the iron in her glazed stoneware brush strokes.
Working at the Oxford Printmakers Co-operative, Morna Rhys uses plates of copper etchings to create vibrant scenes like Castle Hill that took her fancy during building work at Oxford Castle. She is good at playing with light and shadow, as in the shadows in a hidden mysterious world in her Olive Grove.
Caroline Meynell also evokes a sense of peace with abstract landscapes that draw one to enter her own quiet world like her Trees in the Front of a Steep Bank, using water colour, charcoal and chalk while her lovely Poplar Wood in Winter evokes a scene viewed from her window. In her recent series of Bowls I, II and III she has been using molten beeswax.
All Eleanor Clutton-Brock’s witty and ironic anthropomorphic sculptures, made of paper and wire, give us pause for thought like the M.P. for Loamshire, a fine fox in a loud check suit standing proudly on his elegant soapbox, giving forth to all and sundry. The gentle pair of finches Two’s Company brings out a more gentle approach as they look lovingly at one another.
Managing director of Oxford Designers and Illustrators Peter Lawrence’s engravings are traditionally small, no bigger than 2ft x 9in inches, using the slow-growing boxwood cut across the grain, printed from the relief surface. Do study The Quay, with its lighthouse and boats, a tiny, exquisite piece of work. In order to make larger prints Lawrence engraves pictures on Resingrave, a synthetic material that gives the quality of boxwood as in his picture of The Gallery that which shows five engravings on its walls.
Claire Christie Sadler’s drawings evoke a fleeting moment. Using charcoal on home-made paper, They Go captures a spontaneous moment while Bathers has the young men and women poised, their bodies caught against the light as they anticipate that precarious moment before they dive.
Until Sunday, 11am-6pm daily, The Green, Great Milton.
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